Is Thy Servant a Dog?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 937, 26 July 1957, Page 9

Is Thy Servant a Dog?

by

SUNDOWNER

JULY 3

WILL not say that I gloat as often as I see farmers attacked for cruelty to dogs, but if the attack is justified and succeeds I get a certain amount of unholy joy. I was therefore delighted when the headlines told me that a veterinary surgeon had fired both barrels in Dunedin at the owners of sheep

dogs. Then 1 read the report and cooled down. Though the surgeon was

tight in general, I could not be sure that the farmers were wrong in this particular case, since I knew their defender to be above reproach himself. Now I feel like the man who jumps up in a tramcar to give an older man a seat and steps on the corns of an older man still. But it is difficult to understand why dogs are so often treated shamefully by the people who are most indebted to them. It happens all over the world, but I think it happens more frequently in Australia and New Zealand than in other countries on the same civilisation level. I know that the situation is improving year by year, and I can’t doubt that it will one day get into the heads of all farmers that the man who starves his dog to make it work is on the same level rationally as the woman who burns candles in her drawing-room to rest her eyes. As far as I know we are now rid of the boundary dog, but we are not rid of the superstition that two feeds a week are all we dare give a dog in the busy season, that dogs like fleas, that they are not troubled by frost, or draughts, or filth, or loneliness, that they enjoy running on three legs, and that it is good practice when a dog runs away to turn the rest of the pack on him.

JULY 5

FEW mornings back, when the ground was white with frost, I saw a bumblebee flying vigorously among the tussocks. This morning I saw it again, within a few yards of the same spot, and think it likely that it has a nest in the locality. But what are bumblebees searching for in July? Their story, as I have often

read it, 1s suspended animation for the queen in winter and death before

winter for all her associates and helpers. She does, I understand, emerge occasionally on a sunny day, but it is a mistaken awakening which, if it happened too often, would kill her, too. Is that all nonsense? = ee

If I were younger and more active and more curious I might give her a spot of white paint or a dusting with flour and try to follow her home. I don’t think it would

be a iong journey or, if she crossed no gullies, impossibly fast; but if I.did find the nest I could satisfy my curiosity only by digging it out, which might be difficult, and would certainly be repugnant. So I shall do nothing but keep my eyes and ears open for her next appearance. But my ignorance worries me. I find myself wondering whether it is just a fairy tale that every colony of bumblebees is reduced to one each year and started again when the sun gathers strength. If that really happens it must be a myth that bumblebees are necessary for the fertilisation of red clover. There can never have been enough bees in any district in New Zealand to fertilise all, or nearly all, or any considerable section of the heads of clover growing there. Bumblebees must be one only, and not the most important, of the agents of fertilisation, which I suspect include. wind, honey-bees, and perhaps butterflies, too; perhaps even white butterflies, which seem to visit every green thing that grows in summer and can hardly fail in their ceaseless hovering and carting and alighting and taking off to leave a trail of pollen behind them. However it is achieved the fertilisation of clover is too big a job for families of bees that die down to one impregnated widow every winter and never reach: more than 100 or 200 individuals in summer.

JULY 7

Ea * % F I lived near the British Museum I am sure I could find proof of. a curious custom in the Middle Ages that cuts across everything we now think about dogs. I have read somewhere that boys were sometimes ordered to sleep in

the kennels to keep their masters’ hounds’ from feeling lonely. Who the

boys were I can't recall, but the impression remaining with me is that they es

were not the sons of serfs. Perhaps they were page boys, apprenticed knights or squires, or hangers-on in some other order of chivalry who were required to give such proofs of their devotion to their masters-living applications of the love-me-love-my-dog argument. The dogs would certainly be hunting dogs, hounds kept by the master for the chase, and allowed more liberty and privileges than his most faithful human servants regarded as sub-human. (I hate to think that these were ever loyal, but am afraid that they sometimes would be, most of us turning to: worms when we are treated as worms.) What makes me think that these kennel boys were not serfs is the fact that the masters would be unlikely to leave their hounds in such coarse company. But I wish I could remember where I read about this. — and how long it lasted. P.S.: After much searching I have found a footnote in a history of the Middle Ages which, though it is not what I am looking for, goes some disstance in that direction. It is attributed to a book called; Master of Game, of which I can find out nothing except that it was written by a Duke of York. Without extending my tongue too far into my cheek I commend what follows to the attention of shepherds and farmers: 7 I will teach the child to lead out the hounds to scombre twice in the day, in the morning and in the evening, so that the sun be up, especially in the winter. Then should he let them run and play long in a,meadew in the sun, and then comb every hound after the other, and wipe them with a great wisp of straw, and. this he shall do every morning. And then he shall lead them into some fair place where tender gtass grows as corn and other things, that therewith they may feed themselves as it is medicine for them. Thus, since the boy’s heart and his business be with the the hounds themselves will become goodly and kindly and clean, glad and joyful and playful, and goodly to all manner of folks save to the wild beasts, to whom they should be fierce, eager and spiteful. (To be continued) ---