From a spread entitled “Training Police Dogs” 警犬之訓練 in the November, 1935 issue of The Young Companion [Liangyou 良友], a Shanghai-based illustrated monthly magazine. Photographs by WEI Shouzhong 魏守忠.
Apologies for the fuzzy picture quality (click to enlarge). The dogs in this article appear to be primarily Shepherd dogs (Malinois, GSD, etc.) that are generically translated as “wolf dogs” (狼犬) whether or not they have actual wolf ancestry. Not all the text is clearly visible either. I’ve transcribed what I could below. There was one significant portion that was not translated into English, so my rough translation is included in italics.
When this magazine commissioned these pictures from the reporter, Mr. Wei Shouzhong in Beiping (Beijing), attached to two were these notes: “These dogs are being raised privately by Mr. Jiang Bin. The dogs’ performances were photographed with his permission, and under guidance of trainer Wang. The training of police dogs depends entirely on the synergistic energy of the trainer and his dog, using a combination of authority and affection. The dog’s every action comes from his devotion to his master, with no concern for anything else. Achieving the command comes first; all the rest follows. The difference between police dogs and traditional dogs is that there are only two ways to train traditional dogs: with punishment by beating and with the lure of food. None of their actions come from their devotion to their master, but rather from their desire for food or their fear of punishment. These are not methods that can be used on police dogs. The reward and punishment of police dogs is entirely dependent on spirit of behavior, or else when it comes time to put their life on the line, they may stop mid-path for want of food or fear of blows, and thus be rendered useless indeed!
“The dogs trained by Mr. Jiang are all Western breeds, because they are quick and intelligent in spirit, strong of memory, and hale of body. As for dogs of our country [China], because of [canine] race relations, and the closeness of bloodlines, the dogs bred are dull and stupid, and thus not appropriate to become police dogs. Unless we organize the breeds in our country, employ a systematic method of breeding, after ten or so years, it would follow that breeds would gradually improve, and could be used selectively. The West not only attends to the pairing of canine bloodlines with precision, [livestock animal husbandry] of cows, sheep, horses, etc. is also like this. We rely on foreign countries for everything. If we don’t increase our efforts, foreigners will have the advantage even when it comes to a single chicken or dog — a disgrace indeed.
Police dogs provide a tremendous assistance to police work because their exceptional sense of smell can accomplish what humans cannot. We often get a glimpse of this in the movies…
To find the smell of a stolen object
尋犯所匿物，犬聞者氣，尋其藏件。覓者藏之件使嗅犯之味再覓所物。
Running
警犬之奔馳練習。
Crawling
使伏爬練，便尋人時為手見犬地行習以於緝犯不敵所。
Keen watch over his master’s possessions
警防物之練主指地犬伏件，為守犬守件訓，人定點即物前嚴看。
How easy it was for 19th century colonialists to regard all street dogs from Constantinople to Peking in the same, unflattering light. American missionary Arthur H. Smith had this to say about Chinese street dogs in his most well-known book amongst readers of English (both foreign and Chinese alike):
“The Buddhist religion is responsible for the reluctance of the Chinese to put an end to the wretched existence of the pariah dogs with which all Chinese cities are infested, yet the trait of character thus exhibited is not so much Chinese as Oriental. Mr. J. Ross Browne, who was once Minister from the United States to China, published an entertaining volume of travels in the East, adorned with drawings of his own. One of these represented what appeared to be a congress of all varieties of lean and mangy dogs, which was offered as ‘a general view of Constantinople.’ The same cut would do good service as a sketch of many Chinese cities. The Chinese do not appear to experience any serious discomfort from the reckless and irrepressible barking of this vast army of curs, nor do they take much account of the really great dangers arising from mad dogs, which are not infrequently encountered. Under such circumstances, the remedy adopted is often that of binding some of the hair of the dog into the wound which it has caused, a curious analogy to the practice which must have originated our proverb that ‘the hair of the same dog will cure.’ The death of the dog does not seem to be any part of the object in view.”
Arthur Smith, Chinese Characteristics (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1894) p. 136.
The picture that Smith references is reproduced below. A pity that neither Browne nor Smith, writing decades later, found it worthwhile to unpack the motley composition of a very interesting looking group of dogs. Rather, their own prejudices compelled them to Orientalize, homogenize, trivialize, and ultimately to dismiss a scene which no doubt could have revealed a radically different conception of how dogs have long been an organic element of their own environments, with fortunes and vicissitudes determined by human interference — whether native or colonial.
John Ross Browne, Yusef; or, The Journey of the Frangi: A Crusade in the East (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853) p. 152
When I read these anecdotal encounters between imperialist men and foreign dogs, the language is often so thick with ideological bias, I can’t help but to regard it all as fiction. By fiction I don’t mean writing which is false, but rather, an imaginative account that situates and embeds an author in a particular time and space, even as they purport to be offering transcendent, ahistorical facts. As a matter of habit, I am suspicious of anyone who relies on the authority of facts to speak unaided. For behind every such act of “objective” documentation, there has always been a person — the objectifier who selects and crafts their textual, visual, phonographic or other evidence, transforming it from the merely true to the real.
Cynically, I commented that the only reason the BBC considered this “news” was because it came out of China. That is, it’s no surprise to anyone who knows dogs that they express something we might describe as loyalty. For the BBC, with its typical anti-China’r reportage (sometimes warranted, sometimes mere ideological reflex), this account was rather anomalous for the sheer fact that the Chinese villagers are represented as being sympathetic to the dog’s plight. The BBC story concludes noting that the villagers were moved to continue feeding the dog, and had planned to erect a shelter for him.
I wanted to square this against a report from Chinese photojournalist Wang Meng (王猛), who posted a slightly different story a few days after the BBC for Bandao News. According to Wang, the original owner, a 68-year-old single man, had passed from illness on November 11th. As it turns out, he had left behind two dogs — Dahuang (大黃 or “Big Yellow”) and Xiaohuang (小黃 “Little Yellow”). Xiaohuang was discovered on the 16th, having starved to death in the absence of the old man.
Dahuang, the dog originally featured in the English report, had disappeared for a while, but reappeared after the old man’s burial to linger at his grave and keep guard over the now-empty house.
"After the owner passed away, only Dahuang remained to guard the junked courtyard." (Source: same as above)
Wang noted that around November 19th, Dahuang had ducked back home with a lame leg and a bloodied muzzle, and showed no further inclination of wanting to venture out of the house. At the time of the writing, he was refusing food, even offerings of sausage ham from the reporter. Villagers feared that he had resolved to commit suicide by starvation, as they had ruled the cause of Xiaohuang’s death.
Given this chronology, I’m not sure when the “seven days” fast referenced in the BBC story took place. I’m also less impressed by how the dog’s plight was enfolded into a romantic story of everlasting loyalty beyond the grave to a dead master.
"Now, Dahuang has been eating less and less, and everyone is worried that he will also commit suicide." (Photo: Wang Meng)
Here’s the thing about most stories about loyal dogs. Someone always has to die for such loyalty to find its fullest expression. Part of this is sad reality. Life ends, and life goes on; there is nothing new under the sun. But the way that death is framed, and where the narration is truncated, often reveals less about valor itself, but how we measure such stoicism. When we talk about loyal dogs, we look for emotional servitude that exceeds a lifetime to affirm that our mortality matters at all. The figure of the dog that pines after a dead master is readily absorbed into a human-centric conception of the world at the expense of the animal’s autonomy. A similar hierarchical ordering of nature propels stories of noble animals that “sacrifice” their own lives to preserve another human’s.
What I’m saying is that there is room for us to be moved less by death, but by the every day living relationship between humans and animals. I wish I had known more about Old Pan, the man who lived unwed and childless in that decrepit hovel with two constant canine companions for four or five years. Certainly he knew every day how special his dogs were, and his ghost — if there are such things — must find it horribly ironic that their lives only became significant because of the circumstances resulting from his death.
Anyway, the last that I read of Dahuang the loyal dog was a follow-up posted on December 1st. When word got out about his plight, one reader was moved not by the fairytale future fabricated by the BBC report, but by the report of his injuries and his lack of immediate shelter. On November 28th, a woman, surnamed Yue 岳, drove out to find him with an entourage of eight other people. They captured Dahuang by luring him onto a soft kennel mat, wrapped him up, and then drove him back to their home.
Over the course of several days, Miss Yue had been trying to win him over with food, treats, and conversation. There’s something extremely rich about this last detail to me: According to the article, she stayed up the first night talking to Dahuang until 3 AM. She explained that Old Pan was dead, she was his new caretaker, and she didn’t want him to starve himself. And as if he understood, he got up and swallowed the chicken eggs she offered.
Who’s going to tell her that her words didn’t matter? As far as she’s concerned, they both passed some test of inter-species communication by giving him a reason to keep on living — never mind all who would claim reason as the privileged domain of humans.
Once Dahuang regains his strength and he’s acclimated to the new environment, Miss Yue intends to get him vaccinated. She is dog-experienced, and calls herself a dog lover. Even the local veterinarian has vouched for her in the article, assuring the reporter that Dahuang will have a permanent, stable home. She intends to rename him Chengcheng 诚诚, honesty and sincerity, to honor his virtues.
So obviously, these stories of loyal dogs are not without inspirational value. But I think it’s worth stepping back and asking why these stories endure so persistently, with such modularity, across so many cultures.
I certainly don’t have a universal answer.
It’s something I’ll have to think about some more. Indeed, there’s no shortage of opportunities to revisit the theme.
Source: Wang Meng, same as above
To conclude, I’m reaching far back in the past to append an excerpt from Gan Bao’s Sou shen ji [搜神紀], a set of “anomalous” historical accounts compiled in the 4th century CE. This early anecdote suggests a premodern lineage to this idea of a dog’s faithful nature that long preceded contemporary media accounts. The following is translated by Kenneth DeWoskin and J.I. Crump, Jr., from their collection In Search of the Supernatural: the Written Record (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) p. 241. I’ve changed their Romanization to pinyin where applicable, for ease of reading.
Li Xinchun came from Ji’nan in Xiang-yang in the days of Sun Chuan. His family owned a dog named Black Dragon, which Xinchun loved deeply. Walking or seated, they were always together, and the man shared everything he ate or drank with that dog.
One day Xinchun had been drinking at a tavern outside the city walls and had become so drunk he could not make it home. He lay down and slept in a field of dense grass.
Now, it happened that the Grand Protector was on a hunt in the area, and seeing how dense the grass was in the field, he dispatched a man to set it afire and burn the cover off. Xinchun’s grass bed was downwind of the flames. Black Dragon saw the fire coming and seized his master’s clothes, but Xinchun did not move.
Near where his master slept ran a small stream — perhaps thirty or forty paces away. The dog raced over to it and jumped in the water to wet his coat. He returned and rolled all about near Xinchun’s bed, thoroughly wetting down the grass. The dog so exhausted [himself] spreading the water everywhere that he finally dropped dead beside [his] master.
14 June 2011
Suddenly Xinchun awoke and saw the dog dead beside him with [his] coat soaked. He was astonished, but seeing the wet grass all about him, he understood in a flash what had happened and burst into tears.
These events found their way to the ear of the commandery’s Grand Protector who felt sympathy and compassion for the dog. “A dog’s willingness to show gratitude far surpasses man’s,” said he. “Men are no match for the dog when it comes to faithfulness.” He then ordered that the dog be buried properly shrouded and in a wooden coffin enclosed within a brick vault. To this day there stands in Ji’nan the Tumulus of the Faithful Dog, and it is many rods in height.
I am intrigued that this is a more active representation of canine loyalty, perhaps ridiculously so. But even though the dog is granted a bit more agency in this tale, the final burden of recognition is on the human who commemorates the dog’s sacrifice.
Film: La Condition Canine [Gou de zhuang kuang 狗的状况] Director: JIA Zhangke 贾樟柯 Breed featured: Shepherd mixes, Chinese village dogs Production Information:: 2001 (China)
In a rural Chinese town, a bunch of puppies are stuffed tightly into two hemp bags, sealed inside, then left in the road.
Men and chained dogs mill about, nonchalant and idle. The puppies continue crying in the background, indignant, scared, cramped and confused. You cannot see them, but you cannot ignore them.
Eventually, one of the puppies manages to chew his way out of imprisonment. First his muzzle is visible, then his whole head. Rebirth. His attempted escape is noticed, and the surrounding villagers react with bemusement. A few hands tug at the bag, twist it around for a better view, but the puppy doesn’t try to worm his way out. Instead, he sits silently, almost too docile for the situation, while the remaining puppies continue to squirm inside the bag.
And with no further explanation, the film ends. It’s all of six minutes long.
When I am in a good mood, I am willing to interpret the film as a message of hope. Maybe this is the lone brave wolf who might be saved from the rest of the puppies’ unknown fate. There’s at least one resourceful, resilient puppy in the whole bag. This one has proven himself to be ahead of the pack.
But when I’m in a foul mood, I can’t see what the poor puppy could possibly look forward to — a lifetime chained to a tire in a dusty yard, like the rest of the adult dogs? Did he stop trying to fight his way out when he saw how little his escape mattered? Where would he or could he have gone if he was able to get out?
It’s the dilemma of Lu Xun’s iron house for the new millennium, written doggy-style.
‘Imagine an iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible, with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation. Dying in their sleep, they won’t feel the pain of death. Now if you raise a shout to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making these unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you really think you are doing them a good turn?’
‘But if a few wake up, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.’
True, in spite of my own conviction, I could not blot out hope, for hope belongs to the future.
Lu Xun, “Preface to Call to Arms, 1922, Trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, Lu Xun Selected Works Vol. I (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003) p.37
The outcry of the past century rendered as the whimper of puppies in this contemporary version. How one reacts to these pitiful cries — as dog, as human, as film spectator — is really the central test.
Availability: A supplementary short to the DVD Jia Zhangke Collected Short Films [Jia Zhangke duan pian ji 贾樟柯短片集] (Guangzhou: WorldStar Music, 2007) or streaming on various sites online.
I’m reading Johan Gallant’s Story of the African Dog (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002) and it’s interesting to see the nouns used to describe dogs that predate breed standardization. He devotes one page to this list:
In Zulu
isiqha: powerful, medium sized, most common dog
isimaku: small, shortlegged type
ichalaha: big, male dog, taller than isiqha, fast and slender
isigola: slender, medium sized dog that is lazy to hunt
ixhonti: refers to a long or wiry coat
ubhova: heavy-skulled dogs with a big mouth
ibhansi and itswili: cross between Greyhound and traditional dog, used for hunting
In Xhosa:
itwinia: very typical slender hound of medium size
ibaku: a taller, heavier dog usually with hanging ears
ingeke: a smaller type, often because of short legs, comparable with isimaku
ingesi: indicates a mixture with exotic (English) breeds
In South Sotho:
lekesi: dog used to hunt hares
lebeletoko: big heavy dog
ntja e liqholo-qholo: very lean dog
mcle: small dog with short legs
All three lists above are from Gallant, p. 11. There should be quotation marks around it, or at least the entire thing should be set off in blockquotes, but I was having formatting difficulties.
15 September 2011
Meanwhile here’s a list in Chinese drawn primarily from the Erya 爾雅 (a 3rd century BC lexicon):
狗 gǒu, 犬 quán: dog (generic)
牻 máng: shaggy dog
毫 háo： small dog
獫 xiǎn: long-snouted dog
猲獢 xiē xiāo: short-muzzled dog
狣 zhào: large and powerful dog
獒 áo: dog taller than 4 chi (Chinese feet)
猣 zōng: a litter of three puppies
師 shī: a litter of two puppies
玂 qí: a singleton puppy
The above is adapted from material provided in QIN Yongzhou 秦永洲 and LI Yunquan 李云泉, Zodiac Dogs [Sheng xiao gou 生肖狗] (Jinan: Qilu, 2005) p. 16.
[Incidentally, while I love this current WordPress theme, Chateau, its blockquotes look hideous. I may purchase a style upgrade just so I can bypass the mandatory burnt orange, extra-large italics every time I want to quote something at length, since I do that often. If anyone has hints as to how I can tweak this without having to pay for it, please drop me a line.]
Speaking of visibility, here’s a neat Chinese ad from the Shanghai-based Eastern Miscellany [Dong fang za zhi 東方雜誌], March 1930:
The American Eveready company (known today for Energizer batteries) published a series of ads illustrating the urban dangers that could be illuminated and thus avoided if one is prepared with a battery-powered electric torch. Not only could a simple flashlight help catch burglars, surveil sneaky, promiscuous daughters, and thwart child kidnappings, they could also help prevent hapless citizens from getting mauled after tripping over a sleeping street dog.
Oh, how modern technology eradicated the hazards of old…
From The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog, written by Yo Fei and edited by his missus, Florence Ayscough (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926). Yo Fei was a Chinese ha pa dog 哈巴狗, the Chinese predecessor to the pug. He is named after the 12th century general Yue Fei 岳飛 (in modern spelling) — a very large personality to embody in such a little dog!
My favorite walk — and Missus took me out every day — lay across the Wu Sung Chiang, or Pine-Tree River of Wu, which foreigners call the ‘Soochow Creek.’ Some twelve centuries ago the famous poet Tu Fu closes a poem called ‘A Jest on the Theme of a Hills and Water Scroll by Wang Tsai’; which poem refers to the Western and the Eastern extremities of the Empire, with the words:
How did you obtain the sharp scissors from Ping Chou City –
Scissors which lay hold of the waters in the Pine-Tree River of Wu, and cut them in half.
I fancy that it is greatly changed now-a-days. Cottonmills, silk-mills, factories of all sorts line its sides; and there are literally ‘ten thousand’ boats pressed between its banks. These boats are loaded with every imaginable cargo from bales of cotton-seed to piles of pottery jars — jars of peacock blue and soft pellucid green glistening in the sunshine. They are the homes, too, of many thousand people, who are born, live, and die between their decks. So, as we ferried across the Wu Sung River, we saw Chinese life at every stage; here an infant tethered to the gunwale, there a coffin awaiting burial.
On the other side of the river we always landed at a police station. This was purely ‘modern style.’ Old China didn’t bother with policemen and such-like things: the village elders settled difficulties. I must say that the part of modern policemen or soldier does not fit my country-people very well; they appear much more at home as farmers and workmen — creating, not destroying. After all, soldiers are not so fashionable as they were, even in the West; and it seems a pity that the Chinese should try to make popular things that other people have tried and found inconvenient. (40-1)
There are literally 'ten thousand' boats pressed between its banks
The illustrations by Ayscough’s frequent collaborator and fellow expatriate Lucille Douglass really add to the charm of this most curious artifact.
While this quote was selected merely for my own amusement, and has nothing directly to do with Chinese dogs, other parts of the book offer more vivid depictions of life as a lapdog in Republican Era China. There’s also a fairly extensive summary and review of V.W.F. Collier’s Dogs of China and Japan in Art.
This is supposed to be my “fun” bedtime reading, but the grad student’s curse is to close read everything as if it were potential dissertation fodder. One thing I can say in favor of this book so far — if I ever find myself in a spiteful and foul mood after grading a stack of poorly-written student papers, I’ll be able to ream out my class by telling them that I’ve read dogs with more substantial thoughts on topics in Chinese culture, literature, and arts.
Okay, I’m not that mean. But henceforth, the temptation will always be there…
Someone has been slowly recalling my library books on Asian dogs. Don’t get me wrong — I’m guilty of hoarding (as are most academics I know), and I certainly don’t begrudge this stranger their right to use the recall function. Yet, the longer a book stays in my “care,” the more attached I get. The sting of having to relinquish my stash would be lessened if I could find out who is also checking out these books, as I’m sure we could have some interesting conversations. Obviously, the library can’t just give out this kind of patron information.
This one which I had previously blogged briefly about, V.W.F. Collier’s Dogs of China and Japan in Nature and Art (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921) is a rare book fetching $200-$400 in its original edition. However, since the copyright has lapsed, it’s available as a print-to-order bound book and in several free digital editions. The .pdf file available HERE on archives.org is a full-color scan, including all the reprinted illustrations, and of much higher quality than the paperback edition that’s available on Amazon. They scanned the same copy that was living in my house for the past six months, so it’s kind of like I still have it on hand, even if I can’t physically touch it…
Two illustrations by Chinese artist FENG Zikai (豐子愷, 1898-1975):
Dutiful police 義務警察
Torture by Branding 炮烙
I want to point out the dual attitudes towards the dog as exhibited by these two pictures, illustrated by the same artist and appearing on the same page in The Young Companion illustrated magazine, the most popular general interest periodical of its kind in Shanghai (“Feng Zikai hua 豐子愷畫,” Liangyou 良友, no. 34 [1929], p. 35). The top one is a solemn praise, taking the dog as a melancholy but noble figure, steadfast in his duty to an unseen master. The bottom one veers towards the scornful, even violent treatment of dogs — but this attitude comes from the picture, not from the illustrator.
As far as I know, household dogs in China were not routinely branded. I honestly can’t be sure whether Feng Zikai is suggesting that the dog threatened with “torture by branding” is meant for the crockpots bubbling ominously in the background, or if the dog merely happened to be a wandering stray who was hoping for a handout, and fell upon the punishing end of a pair of flaming iron tongs instead.
Given what I know of Feng Zikai as a Buddhist and a Pacifist, I am sure that he imagined both scenes with the sense of tenderness and pity that lurks behind so many of his simple sketches. Feng was an artist, an observer, but also an acute theorist who was deeply invested in the power of the visual. He believed he could gently prod his readership to accept the values of compassion that many of his pictures convey. Looking at these pictures a century later and a continent removed, I can’t help but want to bring that loyal dog out of the cold, or confiscate those tongs from that vicious-looking hag — and it’s likely that’s exactly how Chinese audiences were meant to respond back at the time, as well.
I said this elsewhere, and I’m going to say it again. If there is any such thing as an “age-old tradition” of cruelty towards dogs in China, then there exists a concurrent measure of sympathy for that poor beast. Which is to say, it’s not much of a coherent “tradition” at all when you look closer and and realize that there are degrees of relative difference within any cultural category that is presumed stable and unchanging. Most “traditions” turn into rituals or practices in which some people participate while many others actively and conscientiously chose not to. The historical archives will show that this applies “way back” then, as it does now.
One difference that I would embrace, enabled by new media technologies: there are more ways to document acts of heroic compassion when they occur. No matter where you are in the world, I applaud the impulse to do right by one of the few species who would behave as if it is his “duty” to do right by you.
Chinese dogs rescued by Chinese animal lovers -- what next? (AP Photo/Capital Animals Welfare Association)
(Please click the link embedded in the above text for the AP news story on these dogs.)
How about a list to end the new year? If you’ve got the luxury of vegging out over the winter holidays as I do, you may have been holing up with a stack of films to plug through. Might I suggest some dog movies to liven things up?
In chronological order, here is my list of most highly recommended dog movies. This list is geared mostly towards adult viewers. I’m skipping over the more saccharine, family-oriented fare of the 1930s through 1960s, as I don’t have much to say on the predictable titles that most immediately come to mind. The films below are not necessarily my “favorite” per se, but they’re the ones that left a deep impression, for reasons that I try to explain below. I didn’t include full summaries for everything, because you can easily read them elsewhere — clicking on any of the titles will take you to an IMDB link, for starters. Trailers and favorite excerpts are embedded here and there.
"The shrill piping of the wind, the rasp and hiss of driving snow, the mournful howls of Nanook's master dog typify the melancholy spirit of the North."
Okay, so the dogs aren’t central to this one, but rather a symbol that is alternately shoved to the center of the frame as some of the most fierce actors in this survivalist drama, or relegated to the periphery — left outside in the cold, while the family and puppies huddle in the sheltered igloo. The closing scene of poor huskies slowly becoming snow-puppies in the oncoming blizzard is such a haunting, indelible image, perhaps one of the most devastating that I can think of in film history. In an instant, it presents the melding of nature and creature, the elemental and the organic more effectively than any other early film that I know. No wonder audiences at the time were inspired to praise the power of a well-plotted image; the dogs of Nanook don’t get much screen time, but they are significant, and they really make the film cohere for me.
Flaherty’s documentary techniques would come under fire for staging “reality” as he wished to see it presented, but that matters little to me in this context. There’s a lot here about the dogs that remains up to the viewer’s imagination in the oldest sense of the word, which is often as it should be when it comes to film.
The Golden Age of Snoopy feature-length films was short-lived, but it was nice while it lasted. I’m a huge fan of the world’s favorite bulbous-nosed beagle and his human gang. For me, the pre-1980s cartoons (ending with Bon Voyage Charlie Brown) are the cream of the crop. The plots usually enhanced the Peanuts universe in some meaningful way, while the dialogue was peppered with classic quips from the daily strips.
Aside from the stunning revelation that Snoopy had a previous owner (*faint*) who happened to love him very much (so why did they give him up??), what makes this film a childhood favorite is its jaunty soundtrack. What the songs lack in lyrical finesse, they make up for in catchiness — no surprise, since they were composed by the masters of musical kitsch, Richard and Robert Sherman.
Charlie Brown: “I never thought of myself as being a dog owner. Snoopy was more like a friend.” Linus: “Friends get bored too, Charlie Brown.”
This is an early feature by now-famed documentary director, Errol Morris, on the relocation and final resettlement of a pet cemetery in California. While there was potential for the documentary to turn hokey (as indeed parts of the film cannot help but be), I thought Morris remained respectful of his human subjects. He is extremely adept at teasing out personalities and showing how they’re influenced by time, event, and place. This film is more about people than pets, about California Valley culture in the 1970s than pet cemeteries more broadly, but make no mistake that dogs factored into shaping their particular communities.
My only criticism, or at least question, is — why aren’t the interviewees ever featured with their own living pets? We’re not told if they currently have pets, how they themselves see pets as part of their own, daily lives, names, breeds, types, or anything. Aside from one little random lapdog, we are not shown any live animals throughout the entire documentary. It’s very strange and definitely skews the documentary balance in favor of the humans, whom are ultimately Morris’ focus, but this nevertheless robs the documentary of some potential for greater warmth and vivacity.
For the sake of narrowing down this list, I eliminated wolf movies (as much as I wanted to include titles like Never Cry Wolf [1983] and Mononoke hime [1994]). However, I’m keeping this story of a teenaged runaway accompanied by a wolf-dog, because I think it’s fair to say he’s not portrayed as a pure wolf in the story, but a hybrid – an uncanny creature that’s not all that he appears to be, much like Natty Gann herself.
This movie will always be close to my heart. Having rewatched it recently, I realized how much it must have influenced me as a kid. Things I learned from the world of Natty Gann:
Adults are not to be trusted.
If you are kind to animals, they will be kind to you. Similarly, if you whip an animal and encourage it to fight, watch out that one day that violence you unleashed won’t turn against you. The same goes for humans.
Girls can be tough without being conventionally pretty. And girls with badass wolf-dogs are the apex of awesomeness.
Sometimes you gotta eat out of dumpsters just to survive.
Work sucks, but there are times when you’ve gotta be thankful to have it, even when it could kill you.
Of all the “incredible journey” type animal films out there, I consider Milo and Otis one of the more creative and endearing. It’s narrated mostly from the perspective of animals, with nary a human to be seen throughout the whole show (I don’t count the omniscient narrator). I do wish I could see the original version, presumably dubbed in Japanese. While Dudley Moore’s voice acting was sufficient for children, it is silly and downright grating on my adult ears now. I do, however, have to give him props for his most inspired performance of expectant pugs and cats. Truly one of the highlights of his career, I’m sure.
I think Christopher Guest does smart, genre-defying work. It’s a coincidence that he plays my favorite character in this pseudo-documentary spoof on the US dog fancy. He takes the role of a down-to-earth Bloodhound handler. I’m quite familiar with his cast of regulars, and they keep impressing me with the personality reinventions and fresh performances each time. I consider this to be Guest’s most balanced film yet, where he most successfully treads the fine line between playful satire and mean-spirited laughs at the expense of small town America, which some of his other films are more merciless about lampooning.
What I love about this film is that it shows that the purebred dog fancy is just as much about the people in each breed as it is about the dogs. No matter any inaccuracies of portrayal, we can probably agree that very different type of people are drawn to each very different breed of dog. Guest’s film does make you speculate as to why, even if it’s based on pure fancy (pun intended).
Anyway, here’s a trailer:
Amores Perros [Love's a Bitch] (2000). Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu.
This might be the most difficult film of any on my list. It’s violent, it’s sexy, it’s loud, it’s complicated, it’s hard to stomach. It’s incredibly wrought with cruelty, driven by the emotional charge of all the shitty things that people do to each other, and the way cruelty is perpetuated by the thirst for revenge and redemption. Dogs are the vehicle through which people express their various social inadequacies. Even dog fighting is glamorized to a point, which made many scenes really hard to watch (despite being assured that no animals were harmed in the making of this film).
If you find it difficult to be emotionally or intellectually challenged, this film is not for you. After my first viewing, I wanted to exhort dog lovers not to watch it — not because I think it should be censored, but because it wreaked havoc on my cinephile senses. I am not accustomed to watching films that make me feel so physically wretched. But I’ve since come around to it, though I recommend it with some strong caution. If you’ve ever shared your heart with a dog, you will get a lot more out of this film, but you’ll also react a lot more viscerally.
I’m actually not very satisfied with the HQ English-language trailer for this film, but I haven’t found an acceptable substitute, so here are some screenshots of more pleasant moments instead:
This is probably the most least-known film on my list, but it’s truly undeserving of its obscurity amongst English-reading/speaking audiences. As of yet, there is no US domestic release, although you can purchase a region-3 DVD with English subtitles through Yesasia.com (no idea of the quality of subs).
When an outbreak of rabies prompts the cops to actually enforce the local dog-licensing ordinance for once, a family dog named Cala is impounded. Since there’s no way that the family can afford to purchase a dog registration on the father’s limited income, they resort to all sorts of methods in a frantic attempt to spring their pet before her deadline to be destroyed. This film typifies modern Beijing to me, as laid out by its rules, and its Rules with a capital C-C-P.
It is rather inadequately classified as a comedy. I don’t know… maybe in a Coen Brothers sense. But it pushes reality to the point of absurdity and total aggravation, such that the very ending is rendered unbelievable and dreamlike — I’m really not sure if it’s a happy ending! You will have to see and judge for yourself.
And though I’ve seen it in person before, a couple scenes were still a bit of a culture shock to me — namely, a short shot of a meat truck supplying freshly butchered dogs, and a scene of a back-alley pet market, where peddlers sell small caged animals and animals that shouldn’t be in such tiny cages.
Inu no eiga 犬の映画 [All About My Dog] (2005). Dir. Atsushi Sanada (“Marimo” segment), et. al.
The Japanese make great dog movies (refer to Milo and Otis, for example), but I can’t say I’ve found many examples where they do justice to Nihon ken. There’s a reason that Hachiko monogatari, the 1987 feature-length about the famous loyal Akita, or its recent American remake, and Mari to koinu no monogatari, the 2007 film about the Shiba Inu that helped her puppies survive the 2004 Niigata earthquake, did not make my list. I think they’re terrible movies, for reasons that I might detail later.
Inu no eiga, on the other hand, is one that I would recommend for general audiences with no reservations. Again, it might take some hunting to track down a copy with English subtitles, since it has not been released in the US, but there was at least a Region 3 DVD released at some time in Hong Kong, with English subtitles.
Several directors collaborated on this portmanteau film that bounces kinetically from animation to musical to infomercial to anthropomorphic romance to straight-up, serious drama. The main story arc is about a modern-day adman who recalls his boyhood pet, a Shiba Inu named Pochi, whom he lost when an asthma attack sent him to the emergency hospital. Pochi sets off in search of his boy, and has a series of adventures with an assorted cast of strange people along the way. I can’t even begin to summarize it, but suffice to say, the scenarios were conceived by true dog enthusiasts who allow their poochies to perform, as often as possible.
The last segment, a standalone piece about a border collie named Marimo and the girl she spent her lifetime with, had the Doggy Daddy and me openly weeping in a Taiwanese movie theater even after we thought we couldn’t cry anymore at the end of the film. As much as it tears my heart out every time, it’s still the most potent 10 minutes that I’ve ever seen to describe a lifetime of love between any dog and her human.
My Dog, Tulip (2009). Dir. Paul and Sandra Fierlinger.
Nope, I couldn’t quite make it to 2010 with my list, though I did see this in the theater within the last year. This animated memoir recounts British writer J.R. Ackerley’s German Shepherd bitch. I don’t know much about the Fierlingers, the filmmakers, but they definitely put together something to be proud of. They have an eye for form (loose sketches and contour drawings), and the human traces of production are insistently foregrounded in their style. Their idiosyncratic aesthetics succeed on their own merits, where whimsically hand-drawn computer renderings of a not-too-old world wiggle with life and substance — a refreshing difference from the typical CGI fare that currently dominates the big screen, and which I’m still slow to accept.
This is not a sappy little animal story for kids. Ackerley, voiced by Christopher Plummer, is candid, explicit, unabashedly sentimental, and eloquent about his canine companion, such that you wonder at points if there might be something wrong with him… until you find yourself unable to withhold your laughter at some of the most ridiculous moments of the film because he does, after all, speak a recognizable truth.
A good half of the film is devoted to Ackerley’s efforts to “marry” his unspayed Alsatian — that is, to find her a mate and breed her in order to satisfy his own sense of responsibility towards her anthropomorphized sexual needs. We call them backyard breeders around here, but for Ackerley, it’s more like terrace breeder, living as he does in a small, urban flat. As politically incorrect as such a practice is amongst contemporary viewers, particularly American ones I think, I appreciated the film’s fidelity to its source. It does also give gentle voice to some of the unintended emotional consequences that come with haphazard breeding.
I think where I might agree with Ackerley is that dogs do teach us how to be in the world and how to interact with other people in ways that may force us out of our own element, but they do not teach us to like other people as unconditionally as our own dogs love us. We’re overreaching if we say that love for dogs can be broadly applied, just because most dogs themselves are gregarious by nature. The love we have for dogs might not even make us better individuals!
But I think it might still make us better people, in a more abstract, generalized sense.
More dog films can be found by clicking my blog’s FILMS category, to the left, or accessing the index of films reviewed and screencapped on this blog.
