The Dogs of Aldrovandus

When my father was writing The Complete Book of Dogs in the 1970s, he asked me to look into the histories of breeds of dogs. He felt that some breed associations were seeking an antiquity for a breed that the evidence did not support. Nevertheless, we agreed that the book would not contradict an association’s materials unless there was clear evidence that the association was insisting on a history against solid evidence to the contrary. In a table...

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Arson Dog Helps Send Couple to Prison, Saves Chubb Insurance Co. Millions

A home security company notified several fire departments that a smoke detector at a house in Alexandria Township, New Jersey, was signaling. Emergency personnel arrived to find an intense fire burning down the 6,000 square foot residence. The owners, the Kellers, were outside. They had no injuries and their clothes showed no sign of soot or fire damage. They explained that they had awakened by the fire alarm and the smell of gasoline and told a state trooper that there had been gasoline in the garage and on the front porch. They told the trooper...

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Support Your Local Bloodhound or Go to Jail: A Tax in the Time of King James

Bloodhounds, also called sleuthhounds and slough dogs (because they pursued offenders through the sloughs), have existed in English history and lore since the middle ages. The Oxford English Dictionary includes citations from 1350 (“blod-houndes”), 1440 (“bloode hownde”), 1483 (“blude hunde”), and 1548 (“good blood hunde”). The OED finds "sleuthhound" in use by 1375. The drawing is from the Thierbuch of Konrad Gessner, published in 1606 long after...

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Forepaw Mutilation in Medieval England: Did Robin Hood Help the Dogs?

Everyone who has seen a Robin Hood movie knows that hunting in royal forests was the exclusive right of the king and those nobles on whom the king bestowed the privilege. Anyone else caught poaching the king’s deer paid dearly. What is less well known is that dogs that did not belong to those with the privilege of hunting royal precincts suffered a painful mutilation if their masters lived in or near a royal forest, regardless of whether the dogs...

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Centers for Disease Control Gives Thumbs Up to DOJ Definition of Service Animal

I asked in a prior blog (July 6, 2010) whether a macaque could be a psychiatric service animal. I said that it could but noted that regulations proposed by the Department of Justice would exclude nonhuman primates from the definition of "service animal." Those regulations were soon made final. (See blog of September 15, 2010.) Now the Centers for Disease Control has proposed rules under which importation of nonhuman primates to be service animals would be prohibited. The proposed rules concern those circumstances under which primates may be...

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The Dogs of the Stasi

It is well known that the East German Ministry for State Security, usually just called the Stasi, spied on a significant proportion of the East German population. Police dogs were part of this repressive environment. Not all uses of police dogs by the Stasi were particularly unusual. Most of the Stasi’s dogs, about 534 by 1988, performed guard and border duty. The agency also had 26 scent and tracking dogs, 15 “smell differentiation” dogs, and...

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