Dog

Essay- satire

Dog


They said that you wuz high class…
But that was just a lie

From “Hound Dog” written by: Lieber –Stoller
Smash hits by: Big Mama Thornton & Elvis Presley


The Wicked Queen’s obsequious mirror in the Snow White Palace can’t best this. Dog Devotion is absolute. It’s mountainous heaps of admiration plus love and focus. Such focus that it makes the lyrics of Cilla Black’s You’re my World levitate and revisit in freshness from the misty banks of the Mersey. You can’t put off your pet dog. Take a poll - ask handsome “own store” pirate who denies being Quasimodo, Adolph Kumar the cable-laying communist house-painter, ask nation-building Saddam, Aqualung the hot item girl from Poland or your friendly neighbourhood Bin something back from a quick trip to Ayodhya. They all agree with No.10 who dutifully agrees with the children. But all the while humankind is busy opining on the dog, to it, you’re no less than a radiant planet and it is honoured to be your happy satellite.

A bad encounter with a dog is normally an armchair experience when you choose to meet the Hound of the Baskervilles or the Escapee from the Dog Crypt in Guatanamo Bay. But in real-time you’d have to be the kind of person who enjoys crawling across poison ivy on all-fours. It would have to be a craven quest for a rabid canine or one bred on mad cow. Some would refuse the heavy breathing role even then, offering a splendid profile instead like some sleek and effete Rudolf Valentino Doberman or lassitudinous German Shepherd. This sort would be less haughty about their rebellious mutation if they knew what we know now. The genetic foundation of practically every well-known dog is less than 500 years old. Most dogs we know have been bred, Mandingo fashion, by man according to a new paper just published by Elaine Ostrander and Leonid Kruglyale of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle) in the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science magazine. Interestingly, the duo is looking into dog genetics to cast some further light on human ones. But fact is, really “old family” dogs with a genetic trail going back 12,000 to 14,000 years are a surprising collection of creatures such as the Shar-pei and Chow from China, the Basenji from Africa, the Afghan from (paradoxically) Arabia and the Siberian Husky – all close genetically to the wolf from whence they evolved. Another oddity on this list is the small and fluffy Shih Tzu, which looks like a wind-up yappy toy. Just goes to show, that you don’t have to look like a wolf to be closely related to one.

This little excursion apart, for yourself, you could, I suppose, akin to walking down an uneven corridor in the dark, mistake a wolf for a dingo or reach out to a starving slavering half-crazed hyena for a sweetheart. This sort of action, plausible as it may be, is guaranteed to invoke and bring down upon your head a fleeting but unmistakable trace of canine contempt. You might also raise hackle hair if it senses your gaze has a suggestion of hunger about it because no dog in its senses relishes the idea of turning into an exotic meal. And if there is a look of bewilderment on your arriveste but bred-to-be-fierce Rottweiler/Tibetan Mastiff/Pit Bull’s kill-encrusted face - please tell it/the entire platoon behind it, that we hereby hasten to state and clarify that we weren’t talking about them!

But in the main, dogs have been propping up human beings from the time the first wolf walked into a cave that had a fire burning within. Celebrated and enduring may well be good words to describe the man-dog partnership with each side claiming to have tamed the other. On the dog side of the ledger, deserving of robust applause, is the civilising effect he’s had on man - when it comes to setting value tones and maintaining the aesthetics of a relationship. On the side of man’s evolution, observing dogs at play has led us to imitate and adopt whole chunks of the hind-quarters activity they seem so good at. Mankind has also taken the dog’s display of tooth and claw literally as a licence to bite with aplomb, preferably the hand that feeds.

Without doubt today, it is the dog that’s got the better take on compassion; unhesitatingly welcoming proximity to the more dysfunctional, manic-depressive or axe-murderish amongst us. Clearly, dogs can cohabit with the insane or the decrepit with no resultant loss of enthusiasm. Their invaluable assistance to the invalid, the lonely, the blind or the blind drunk is well enough documented. The dog’s light touch at apprehending criminals without offending their dignity more than is absolutely necessary is also a wonder to behold. But praise from man, whom the dog knows for his skittishness and vulnerabilities, embarrasses the quadruped. It’s no wonder that Squealer and a chorus of pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm keep chanting the mantra: “Two legs bad, four legs good,” just to keep things in perspective. It’s the dog with the wisdom to play the fool, happy to raise a laugh and glad for a cuddle when he’s around man…

But man has been carrying on an anthropomorphic affair of his own. Dogs come in great variety in style, plot, theme, song, book, art, film, fashion, cartoon and coffee mug. They’ve sparked a multi-billion dollar business, Thank the Great Borzoi in the Sky, in pet food and accessories, vet and dog shrink, beautician and sculptor - all the way from the kennel to the grave.

The make-like-a-dog audio honours go verily to a nameless Hound Dog of “you ain’t nothing but a…” fame. This do-wah-ditty and the accompanying pelvis action caused TV impresario Ed Sullivan (a straight-jacketed but hugely popular Oprah of his time), to picture Elvis from the waist up.

Not all famous dogs are nameless though. Take Devil and his tag-line “He’s not a dog, he’s a wolf” stated calmly when people go “Jeez, what is that!”

Devil accompanies The Ghost Who Walks out of the deep-woods at Bangalla whenever he chooses to don his townie props - hat (Fedora-pulled down over eyes), and belted overcoat (over usual purple tights), to sally forth into civilisation. This “town” usually means overseas on long Dakota rides to temperate Manhattan or Chicago. All you had to do was look at the whole panel to place things. But I’ve seen Phantom dress like that to go into towns in tropical Africa too. I’ve always put it down to a stylistic turn that made a nice contrast to the Bangalla forest highlights: Hero the white horse grazing in tranquillity, the waterfall in front of the Skull Cave flowing like a liquid curtain, smiling tourist poster quality Bandar Pygmy people in grass skirts capable of doing you in silently with their poison blow-darts and Devil - dematerialised in the forest.

A pair of literary top-dogs that best Lee Falk’s Devil with the full power of towering characterisation is Jack London’s Call of the Wild featuring Buck, half St.Bernard and half German Shepherd followed by the tale of White Fang, half husky and half wolf. These dogs are the central characters of London’s books with Alaska and The Yukon respectively as the supporting actors and the human decoration arranged artfully to populate the back of the sled.

Others walk the stage in smallish, frequently furry white aspect, being cute, cerebral but prodigiously influential. They are capable of turning their masters into twittering messes at a flick of a tail or the cock of an ear. To wit: Snowy, Tintin’s inseparable and one Dogmatix- beloved miniature four-legged buddy of unbreakable menhir delivery man Obelisk.There’s Size Big and master of the five panel daily comic strip- Marmaduke. This is a daily romp with a Great Dane in a suburban China Shop that wouldn’t trade him in for all the destruction caused by Vesuvius erupting. What more can you say about a lovable horse? There’s Snoopy, a kindred spirit, a writer atop his kennel, edited by friend Woodstock the bird, and tended to by that stoic hero Charlie Brown, who serves as a backbone to Schultz’s considerable wizardry. There are so many besides - untidy Ruff, alter-ego to one Dennis the Menace, Benji, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Scooby Doo, Deputy Dawg and gawrsh-making Goofy…The muppetisation and soft-toy farexation seems complete but wait.

Before we forget the hunting and gathering days altogether, not counting shopping - even if your dog does, that original man-dog partnership deed may need another look yet! Newsweek this week says sparsely populated parts of northern Europe, rural farmland for centuries, is being reclaimed by the wild and packs of wolves, not seen since medieval times. The wild bear too has put in an appearance. It’s declining or non-existent birth-rates, migration to the cities, a dwindling population of oldies that can’t work the land and no immigration from India, China, Philippines or Vietnam to fill in the gaps. Albeit Biharis from Patna would make for peculiar north Germans as would Norwegian boat people but that’s drifting yet again into another story. The ecologists, those little green men and women, making frantic love under their collars, may well like the idea of going back to nature, but actually there’s little bio-diversity in going back to seed. Nature takes a couple of hundred years to do some executive planting you see. The wolves like it the way it is, abandoned, but most Europeans are used to a landscape that has been transformed by the hand of man. It’s the only sight they know.

And pal dog - what’s the canine take? Though it’s technically true that dogs don’t speak, I was able to take a fairly comprehensive telepathic poll. The overwhelming consensus goes something like this: The wolf may well be Chow’s closest relative but the rest of us have no desire to turn into wolf lunch!


(1,674 words)

Title: Dog
By Ghatotkach
Wednesday, July 6th, 2005

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.