The Seconde Order of Mylde & Tameable Beastes

Johannes Caius and his marvelous De Canibus Britannicis

We’ve loved categorising stuff ever since Aristotle decided it was a good idea, and although Caius’ 1570 epic catalogue of dogs was far from the pinnacle of peak categorising in the 1750s by Swedish Carl Linnaeus, Linnaeus was certainly standing on the shoulders of giants when it came to organising nature.

Caius, born plain old John Kays in 1510, was a physician and founder of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. He’d decided that plain old Kays was not for him, and so he latinised his name after a trip to Italy. Why not? Nothing like a bit of class, after all. Emilia Leone sounds so much better than my own poor-quality name. I’d do the same.

Anyway, bored of sweating sickness in Shrewsbury and being president of the College of Physicians, he became the Royal doctor for both Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I. Getting sacked by the latter for being Catholic, he decided to contribute to his Swiss friend’s natural history with exotic beasts from England. Coming across very few, he was thankfully able to write about the ‘mylde and tameable beastes’ who’d helped us eradicate most of the more exotic beasts from this green and pleasant land.

You can, by the way, access Caius’ “Of Englishe Dogges” here should you so wish.

It’s such a useful document because we have such a paucity of understanding about dogs over time. I’ve certainly seen in the last two weeks influential trainers say that dog breeds are a modern phenomenon. This is not true. Kennel clubs are a modern phenomenon. Paperwork is a modern phenomen. Ish, anyway.

Some dog breeds are modern phenomena.

But to look at dogs from pre-history in artwork or sculpture and ignore both the physical and behavioural similarities because nobody back then thought of writing down all your dog’s relatives in a list and saying they couldn’t do their job unless they were all related more than the average dog, that’s silly.

‘Closed books’ in Kennel Club speak are ways of ensuring interlopers (clutch your pearls, ladies, that interlopers may impregnate your pedigrees!) don’t enter by stealth. Enter in the literary sense, as in being written in the books, not enter in the Biblical sense. Well, maybe both.

France has a very rigorous closed book system. Your parents don’t simply have to have Kennel Club papers. They also have to have been confirmed by a judge. England doesn’t have this second layer of security to ensure interlopers do not have their way with our fair and pure dogs. Thus, if you wanted to do a bad thing and add in a bit of springer to the cocker line, you can do that. A few of my friends have been caught out by a DNA test (yes, we know they’re less than useful at times) which showed the deliberate or accidental introduction of something not-quite-pedigree into the lineage for working purposes, usually, but also to “create” things like so-called silver labradors. They’re grey. Call them blue if you want. Silver just makes people want them more.

Add in a bit of weimaraner over a few generations… Maybe… or in-breed some mutations even more¹…

Of course, “silver” labradors aren’t pedigree labradors that the UK Kennel Club recognises, so there’s that. But if you want to do weird things like make merle cockers², “pink” or “white” dobermann, then you can³.

Of course, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I love how the authors are very sensible on those articles. I think the author of the piece on merle spaniels has the nail on the head: “Trying to discuss merle Cocker Spaniels is the canine equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre. Panic starts, tempers flare, and chaos ensues.”

We’re still at the very beginning of our journey in understanding the link between body and behaviour or coat colour mutations and other health concerns that have hitched along for the ride.

I’m of two minds on the whole situation so I’ll refrain (for now) from sharing my thoughts. Anyhow, we know that there was closed breeding in the past. Geography made sure that happened. If you lived in some god-forsaken valley in Cumbria, you probably got your collie dog from a very genetically distinct population of collie dogs. The same if you were in Glamorgan or Ceredigion.

And dogs were selected and culled dependent on working behaviour over thousands of years. Even by the time of Pisanello’s The Vision of St Eustace 1438 image here, you can separate out your coursers (who seem to mostly have missed the hare, embarrassingly) and your very Britanny-spaniel-esque dog under the grey horse’s legs:

Also, painters back in the day weren’t that fussed about accuracy. He could have been trying to paint a Great Dane for all I know. Even so, the morphology of these dogs isn’t that different from dogs on huts today. And on walks. I swear I’ve just seen one of those ginger spaniels at the front walk past the house.

Caius’s text is from some 130 years later, and uses words instead of paint. This is not to say it is much more accurate but it’s useful simply for understanding what people were doing back then with dogs. It’s also interesting to see which dogs no longer have a function in our lives. His is not the first account of dogs - far from it. Xenophon’s 4th century BCE classic on hunting dogs was far narrower in scope, though.

Gaston Phoebus’s Livre de Chasse gives us some detail on hunting dogs in France around the same time as Pisanello’s image, but again, he only describes the activities of the landed gentry or those with leisure time.

Of course, England had a copyist in Edward of Norwich who pilfered wrote his English version in 1406-1413. These three texts are all worth exploring in their own right although truth be told, between the fourth century BCE and 1413 and now, there’s not that much that has changed. You could transplant some bloke and his pack of hounds back to Ancient Greece and he’d feel at home.

It’s one reason, no doubt, why we forget the role played by shepherd dogs and livestock guardians… the men who had scribes pre-Gutenberg were either landed or monastic, and they had no time for actual dogs belonging to peasants doing their thing. It was a long, long time before anybody realised shepherd dogs of all their roles were bloody good at doing stuff and decided to give them jobs rappelling from helicopters.

To give Caius his dues, he is diligent about including dogs of all types, across all communities and classes. He sets out his stall in capturing the diversities of dog breeds in England. Like any good and honest researcher, he says he didn’t write about Scottishe dogges because they might be different than Englishe dogges. Sensible man.

He divides Englishe dogges into three categories: A gentle kinde (serving the game), a homely kinde (apt for sundry necessary uses) and a currish kinde (meete for many toyes). I’m imagining ‘gentle’ because of ‘gentlemen’ rather than because they were gentle in nature, necessarily. I’m equally imagining ‘homely’ meant ‘of the home’ rather than the fact those poor dogges were cursed with ugliness - not only that and the ‘sundry necessary uses’… don’t sign that job description, dogges.

The ‘currish’ dogs interest me, not least because ‘curre’ had become very unsavoury by the time of Shakespeare - he deserves a post of his own, as do his dogs.

‘Meete’ simply means ‘fit for’ (unless you were suspecting they were for food use…) and ‘toyes’ is a weird one because we think of toys as something for children or amusement, so why would mutts be good for toys? Middle English has ‘toyes’ meaning fun or entertainment, in the same way as we do, but Middle Dutch has tuyg meaning something more akin to ‘tool’. Thankfully, Caius goes on to elucidate.

Caius says that the English are addicted to hunting - we remember one of the early posts on this stack about the eradication of the wolf and wild boar from the mainland of Great Britain, mostly long gone by the time Caius was writing. Already we see two specialisms for hunting dogs, though. Those who hunt ‘beasts’ and those who hunt ‘byrdes’. He even differentiated between ‘hunting’ and ‘fowleing’ - one that ‘rouseth’ the beast and ‘continueth’ the chase, and one that flushes and chases birds.

I don’t think it’s hard to see the same roles for any number of breeds today, especially in France, where ‘coursing’ dogs like the scenthounds and the dogs who bay - that would rouse any beast! - and the bird dogs that would become duck birds or ground-nesting birds.

He identifies five types of hunting & fowleing dogs: scenthounds, sighthounds, coursing dogs who are bred for distance pursuit, dogs who excel at ‘smelling and nymbleness’ - surely that has to be the precursor to small cockers? - and one who is good at ‘subtiltie and deceitfulnesse’. Pointers and setters, maybe? I mean I don’t know how a dog is subtle and deceitful, but I’ve seen a TikTok of a Golden who was very subtle and deceitful in taking a sandwich off a plate…

He describes the scenthounds and scent harriers for their ‘long, large, and bagging lippes, by their hanging eares, reachyng downe both sydes of their chappes, and by the indifferent and measurable proportion of their making’. Ears, important. Size, not so much. Caius notes that there were a lot of different specialisms even by 1570.

He says that they’d already specialised into:

The Hare
The Foxe 
The Wolfe
The Harte
The Bucke
The Badger
The Otter
The Polcat
The Lobster
The Weasell
The Conny, &c.

There’s a bunch there that Richard Drax (former MP) could have used in his ambition to rid the United Kingdom of wildlife, I’m sure. Most of those would be very familiar. I have no idea which dogs caught lobster. Some labrador people have claimed this as a job for labradors, obviously. I’m sure Newfies might fit that role if ever a dog were going to hunt lobster. I’m speaking as a person who has never hunted lobster though. Especially not with dogs. A Floridian said he trained his dog to catch lobsters. Hate to tell you this, bud, but it seems like you’re late to the lobster party. Spoiler alert: they’re labradors.

Caius also includes terriers in this category, but only insofar as they do the same job as a ferret, with foxes, badgers and rabbit named as their target rather than animals like rats considered vermin. Pretty sure this is still the job of Jack Russells: ‘that eyther they teare them in peeces with theyr teeth beyng in the bosome of the earth, or else hayle and pull them perforce out of their lurking angles, darke dongeons, and close caves’. The dark dungeons of the badger, indeed.

He has A LOT to say about the bloodhound: these ‘desperate purloyners’ capable of tracking trails through ‘through long lanes, crooked reaches, and weary wayes’.

Is it me or did people care more about words in those days? I promise to write my stacks in this style henceforth, through the crooked reaches of canine archives and the weary ways of doggy chronicles.

It would be only two decades before people of Columbus’s party would use bloodhounds in ‘ethnic cleansing’ (read: exterminating people) in the Caribbean, and Spanish forces had no doubt already used them for the same purpose in the Canary Islands. Caius doesn’t mention them for their people-hungry talents although he does mention they were used to hunt down ‘varlots’ and ‘fellons’.

He describes how they were kept (although I’m hoping for some poetic licence here) ‘in close and darke channells in the day time, and let them lose at liberty in the night season, to th’intent that they myght with more courage and boldnesse practise to follow the fellon in the euening and solitarie houres of darkenesse, when such yll disposed varlots are principally purposed to play theyr impudent pageants, & imprudent pranckes’

Oh, there we go. They might ‘follow the fellon’ in the evening. Using dogs to hunt down ‘yll disposed varlots’: not just Spanish conquistadors and Italian mercenaries, then.

Oh, how times have changed! Or not…

These are French gendarmerie dogs from Gramat.

Caius says that bloodhounds were used in the Scottish borders to catch cattle rustlers.

He says that some of these dogs are sometimes called ‘brach’ - a word we’ll find in Shakespeare - and a word you’ll perhaps know from French, as the French pointers are ‘braques’ which is odd because in French, the bloodhound is not a braque at all, but a St Hubert. And THAT’s odd because people say that the Pisanello painting is not of St Eustace, whoever he was, but St Hubert. St Hubert was a well-known hunter, so we can forgive Pisanello his confusion. He is now the patron saint of hunting, dogs, opticians, mathematicians and metalworkers.

I think he would be a bit cross about this, since his vision of Jesus when he was hunting stopped him in his tracks. Fancy being the patron saint of something you renounced!

This 1617 Brueghel and Rubens image captures St Hubert being lectured by a stag. The stag looks very cross. One of those dogs looks like they don’t even give a stuff and has gone to sleep in a way that only greyhounds regularly sleep.

None of those dogs look like St Huberts, though.

A not insignificant number of GCSE students in their ‘write a story about a human meeting an animal’ wrote almost the exact same story, by the way. Being regretful because you’re just about to kill Bambi’s mother is clearly in the human psyche.

PS if you ever fell foul of a Jägerbomb, you can thank St Hubert too.

After this, Caius writes about the ‘gasehound’… no, not a dog with bad wind, but a ‘gazehound’ or greyhound as we might think of them. A sighthound by any other name. They hunted fox and hare, excelling, as Caius tells us, in visual acuity.

Also, they seemed to be particularly good at separating out a fat and healthy animal from a flock or herd, wearying the animal to death. A gazehound because, as he continues, ‘ the beames of his sight are so stedfastly setled and unmoveably fastened’.

Indeed.

One interesting thing of note - these were dogs of the north - I wonder to the working man’s whippet. Since he separates gasehounds out from grehoundes, we can already see the difference. The way he talks about the greyhound differently from the gazehound, though, makes me think whatever he considered to be a gazehound was much chunkier, since he describes the grehounde as a more delicate dog, a ‘spare and bare’ kind of dog. Caius also points out differences in sumptuary law: greyhounds were often prohibited from ownership by anyone but a handful of nobles, especially in France. Thus, the podencos and galgos and greyhounds that populate modern rescues in Spain, Portugal and the UK are not so frequent in France simply because the King decided that it was very un-sportsmanlike for anyone to own a greyhound other than himself. Caius says that Richard II (not the one with the bad rep) had a greyhound who was the second being to wear his crown and carry the sceptre of the realm. Not sure Charles III let his mother’s corgis wear his crown and carry the royal sceptre about. We’re so staid these days.

Caius describes all kinds of ‘sundrye’ dogs but my favourite is the tumbler, clearly no longer in existence because this sounds like a marvelous kind of dog: ‘This sorte of Dogges, which compasseth all by craftes, fraudes, subtelties and deceiptes, we Englishe men call Tumblers, because in hunting they turne and tumble, winding their bodyes about in circle wise, and then fearcely and violently venturing upõ the beast, doth soddenly gripe it, at the very entrance and mouth of their receptacles, or closets before they can recover meanes, to save and succour themselues.’

I know I’ve heard of duck tolling retrievers doing such a thing although literally the only thing anyone’s ever contacted me about tolling-wise was the very famous scream. PS don’t search for ‘tumbler dog’ because you’ll just get all sorts of food dispensers. How the times have changed. Lurcher owners have claimed the tumbler for themselves, but I’m not sure I’d call a lurcher fraudulent or crafty.

This dog, by any account, hunted rabbits and tricked the rabbits into thinking they were very friendly, before grabbing up those rabbits: ‘This dogge vseth another craft and subteltie, namely, when he runneth into a warren, or setteth a course about a connyburrough, he huntes not after them, he frayes them not by barcking, he makes no countenance or shadow of hatred against them, but dissembling friendship, and pretending favour, passeth by with silence and quietnesse, marking and noting their holes diligently, wherin (I warrant you) he will not be overshot nor deceaved.’

Beware the dog who pretends to be your friend.

Caius describes them as: ‘When he commeth to the place where Connyes be, of a certaintie, he cowcheth downe close with his belly to the groũd, Prouided alwayes by his skill and polisie, that y^e winde bee neuer with him but against him in such an enterprise.’

I mean I don’t know about you, but that sounds a bit like a setter. If any dog could trick you into thinking they were your friend, a setter would be that dog, but the crouching down when you find your quarry, that definitely sounds setterish. They’re silent on the hunt as well, and they get all the stills like a pointer when they sense prey. I know setters came from spaniels and from Spain, and are for birds (hence the spaniel bit) but if any dog were to flop around like your best mate and give you a death nip when you were least expecting it… that doesn’t sound like a lurcher or a retriever to me.

Anyhow, of the Tumbler, there is no sign. Maybe Caius made them up a bit? I mean they sound quite magical. Also Caius describes setters later anyway, so he clearly didn’t think they were like setters. You can understand why lurcher owners have appropriated the Tumbler: ‘A man that shall marke the forme and fashion of their bodyes, may well call them mungrell Grehoundes if they were somwhat bigger.’

Maybe Caius heard about lurchers from a man in a pub somewhere?

He also mentions a dog called the ‘Stealer’ and then doesn’t bother to describe them. That’s also infuriating. I would very much like to know what a stealer is, and I suspect it to be a form of spaniel.

His middle section describes fowleing dogs - the dogs from Spain that we now know and love as spaniels, setters and their ilk, both water fowl and land fowl. Only, Caius says, it’s ‘The common sort of people call them by one generall word, namely Spaniells.’

Common sort, I am.

Caius describes them having come from France, namely because English men were such fashionistas:

‘for we Englishe men are marvailous greedy gaping gluttons after novelties, and covetous corvorauntes of things that be seldom, rare, straunge, and hard to get.’

Indeed, Johannes. Indeed. I don’t suppose he’d be surprised by a cockapoo or a white dobermann.

Setters come into this category for Caius, making the lurcher a more likely descendent or long-lost relative of whatever kind of dog the tumbler or stealer might have been. The setter, Caius notes, ‘creepeth forwarde like a worme’ when he spots a bird. I think this should be part of the breed standard, henceforth.

The water spaniel and the Canis Piscator or fishing dog get their mention. The water spaniel is of course for the ducks, and the fishing dogs for the fish, of course. Well, since Caius goes to some length to discuss whether an otter and a seal are fish, we may supposed they could be otterhounds.

Having dealt with all the ‘gentle’ dogs for the passionate and fashionable English hunter, he turns to others. The ‘comforter’ is his first, a small lap dog from Malta that we would undoubtedly think of as a Maltese; dogs who are ‘litle, pretty, proper, and fyne… sought for to satisfie the delicatenesse of daintie dames, and wanton womens wills.’

As a non-daintie dame or wanton woman, I can’t lay claim to such a dog. I can see why. The chief purpose of such a dog is ‘to tryfle away the treasure of time’ - and since I have little time to treasure, and certainly none to trifle away, you can see why a Maltese is not for me. Where Lady Isabella Wentworth, some two centuries’ later, may be chastised by her son for feeding her dogs too much meat, Caius reports that such a habit was already well-established for the comforter, these daintie dames who ‘nourishe with meate at bourde’ and take their dogs for a ride in the wagon.

Much like Lady Isabella’s (gently) scornful son, Caius has little sympathy for such wanton women: ‘these kinde of people who delight more in dogges that are deprived of all possibility of reason, then they doe in children that be capeable of wisedome and judgement.’ Indeed. Delighting more in dogs than children. Cough.

If that wasn’t barbed enough, this was most likely to happen to you when you were beautiful but had no children. Good grief. I thought you were writing a breviary of dogs, Caius, not a social commentary on dogs filling the role of children. These dogs, he notes, are not without use. They make good hot water bottles and if you have ‘sickenesse of the stomacke’ or you’re fairly weak and feeble, then a comforter may well be medicinal. And you thought emotional support dogs were a modern thing? In fact, the disease often leaves the human and goes into the dog, and sometimes the dogs die, he recounts. Well. The martyred comforter.

Caius’s fourth section is the one I like the most, the pastoral dogs. Caius makes a good point that shepherd dogs in England were already small by 1570 because they had no need to protect the flock from wolves. No need for Maremmas or Grand Pyrenees dogs here. In fact, Caius writes more about Prince Edgar, who he eulogises for his work in ridding the British Isles from wolves, although in reality, wolves would stick around a bit longer than he did.

As you will notice from the description, Caius may as well be writing about the modern collie: ‘This dogge either at the hearing of his masters voyce, or at the wagging and whisteling in his fist, or at his shrill and horse hissing bringeth the wandring weathers and straying sheepe, into the selfe same place where his masters will and wishe is to have them, wherby the shepherd reapeth this benefite, namely, that with litle labour and no toyle or moving of his feete he may rule and guide his flocke, according to his owne desire, either to have them go forward, or to stand still, or to drawe backward, or to turne this way, or to take that way.’

Those lazy shepherds and their clever dogs.

He raises a point I was seeing argued about on a forum for continental herding, that ‘it is not in Englande, as it is in Fraunce, as it is in Flaunders, as it is in Syria, as it in Tartaria, where the sheepe follow the shepherd, for heere in our country the sheepherd followeth the sheepe.’

Almost 500 years ago and we see behaviours that are entirely different in how sheep are kept and moved, behaviours that mark the difference between the ‘collecting style’ of the collie and the ‘tending style’ of the continental shepherd - who were much bigger since they, of course, had to protect the sheep from wolves. Interestingly, in another recent discussion on a British friend’s page following a dog attack on sheep in the borders, she was wondering whether livestock guardians might be re-introduced into the UK - this time to protect the flock from other dogs. I can’t see this becoming a thing not least because there’s over five hundred years of British sheep having an adversarial relationship with dogs, whereas livestock guardians are very much family members.

Only last week, a European gentleman herder chastised a person working with a German shepherd for sending his dog to collect them rather than calling the sheep and the sheep following him. It’s a bone of contention because in the Fédération Internationale Cynologique (FCI) trials, the tests have changed for continental shepherds, meaning they are required to do things that are traditionally ‘border collie’ dogs’ jobs - splitting the sheep, managing obstacles, collecting sheep etc. This has caused a lot of anger towards the judges and the trial setters because the people complaining (rightly so) say this is not how continental shepherd dogs work. Caius would no doubt agree.

Caius writes in detail about the Mastiff or Bandogge: a dog described as ‘vaste, huge, stubborne, ougly, and eager, of a hevy and burthenous body’. Included in this category is the bull dog. The mastiff served, as shepherd dogs and livestock guardians would across Europe and Asia, to protect rural properties from ‘theefes, robbers, spoylers, and night wanderers’. I don’t know what spoylers do, but I’m pretty sure a mastiff would stop it. He goes on to explain that the mastiff is useful against foxes, badgers and wild boar, as well as for bull baiting, well known at that point for ‘softening’ the meat. Much like myself, Caius then digresses to have a whinge about people and forgets about the dogs. He returns to the ‘Butcher’s dog’ and the Molossus, much the same as a mastiff in his eyes.

Although much has been made of dogs pulling carts in Belgium around the turn of the century (well, not much being made of it… Clive Wynne did a single post some time back on his facebook page with a photo of some big shaggy Belgian dogs pulling beer or something) Caius says such big dogs in England were also put to use. In this case, it was to pull up water, usually by pulling a wheel around.

The ‘Tynkers curr’ may also have done a lot of lifting, carrying extra stuff around for the tinker. Rather than being some lowly mongrel of little value, the Tynkers curr played a valiant role: ‘they love their masters liberally, and hate straungers despightfully, whereupon it followeth that they are to their masters, in traveiling a singuler safgard, defending them forceably from the invasion of villons and theefes, preserving their lyfes from losse, and their health from hassard, theyr fleshe from hacking and hewing with such like desperate daungers’.

I’d be quite glad to have a dog who protected my flesh from being hacked and hewn. Harding’s ‘protection’ category from last week’s post is not such a new thing after all.

Indeed, you’d be pushed to find a difference: ‘They flye upon a man, without utteraunce of voyce, snatch at him, and catche him by the throate, and most cruelly byte out colloppes of fleashe. Feare these kind of Curres, (if thou be wise and circumspect about thine owne safetie) for they bee stoute and stubberne dogges, and set vpon a man at a sodden vnwares.’

Colloppes of fleashe indeed. That sounds painful.

I feel a bit more comfortable with a stout and stubborn dog (and you thought anthropomorphism was a new thing?!’) than a comforter made for dainty ladies, it must be said.

In all honesty, though, it is Caius’s fifth section that catches my eye: ‘Containing Curres of the mungrell and rascall sort’. Mongrel, rascally dogs. I’m all about that. Sadly, Caius refused to write about them, banishing them from his book. And you thought concern over racial purity was a Victorian thing?!

‘Of such dogges as keepe not their kinde, of such as are mingled out of sundry sortes not imitating the conditions of some one certaine spice, because they resemble no notable shape, nor exercise any worthy property of the true perfect and gentle kind, it is not necessarye that I write any more of them, but to banishe them as unprofitable implements, out of the boundes of my Booke,’

Good grief, Johannes. I thought you were fit meat for the contents of Thinking About Dogs With The Grown-Ups, and here we are at a point I suspect you’d frown upon any -poo or doodle or mutt, ‘mingled out of sundry sortes’.

If you thought that Capitalism was a 17th Century invention, finding steam with the transport, agricultural and industrial revolutions, you are very sorely wrong. Those dogs are ‘unprofitable’ even then. I mean my GCSE History book started in 1660 (post Cromwell, I’m guessing?!) so how can we have had capitalists profiting from dogs before? The only use Caius finds for these dogs is they’re very good at barking. Plus ça change, and all that. That’s my current caseload: dogs who bark in the day time.

No wonder Sherlock Holmes found it astonishing when he came across the curious incident of the dog who didn’t bark in the nighttime.

The worst kind of these rascally curs, Caius says, is the turnspit dog. I’d think he really meant it to be the most rascally kind, mic drop kind of a moment, but then he adds another, the ‘daunser’. I take it that he would not approve of Mary Ray or heelwork to music. Bah, to you, Susan Garrett and your dogs as what do tricks.

Caius then seems to dive into the realms of chimeras and mythology: the dogs bred from male wolves and female dogs - not quite sure how that happened given the complete lack of wolves in the Isles… the dogs who were bred from male foxes and female dogs. It’s surprising how long these myths lasted. In fact, it was only DNA that put fox-dogs and jackal-dogs myths to bed in the 1990s. Konrad Lorenz, who failed to apologise to Niko Tinbergen for being a Nazi, but did write a lot about animals, believed there were purer ‘wolf dogs’ (guess what, GSD lovers, that’s your dog!) and the rest were descended from second-rate jackals, especially if they were nice to people. That was his book just after WWII.

The third is my favourite, because it defies all logic: the mastiff-bear mix. That well-known hybrid. That makes my dread of husky-malinois mixes seem rather silly and trivial. Sadly, huskies can mate with malinois, making the best escape artists known to man, whereas the mastiff-bear dog is little more than a myth. Even so, Caius was a fairly credulous reader: ‘For wee reede that Tigers and dogges in Hircania, that Lyons and Dogges in Arcadia, and that wolfes and dogges in Francia, couple and procreate.’

I remember that delicious little line from that angry man in Ingrid Tague’s book who berated a person for letting a dog and a cat have babies - those myths still going strong some two hundred years later. Caius’ source for these is a Roman writer: Gratius (aka Grattius) who wrote a poem about hunting. This is why, though, those so-called breed specialist books that go back to X or Y Greek or Roman writer, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt or two, since they’re especially fond, as Caius seems to be, of taking stories as fact. Well past Homer, the Greeks were still blending fact and fiction in ways that still make it really hard to know what’s true and what happened and what’s not.

Caius’s small contribution to Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium on the Englishe Dogge may be of little interest to many, other than dog lovers such as ourselves, but it’s a piece of social history in itself telling us much about how we lived with animals in the reign of Elizabeth.

There are undoubted overlaps - with dogs used to attack and kill indigenous people for instance - and with Shakespeare, to whom we turn next week.

Prizes if you can name the play with the most dog references in it?

See you there!

1. https://www.thelabradorsite.com/silver-labradors/

2. https://fidoseofreality.com/truth-merle-cocker-spaniels/

3. https://www.birminghamdobe.com/copy-of-feb-2018-bhc-s-health-repor