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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Stanley Coren, a psychologist and dog trainer, is haunted by a primal scene. He pictures a distant ancestor, clothed in skins, huddled by a tiny fire. Next to the ancestor sits a dog, its pointed ears pricked for sounds of danger--sounds too faint for the man to hear. "What do you hear, my dog?" the ancestor says. "You will tell me if I should worry?" Then, Coren writes, "his rough hand reached out and stroked the dog's fur, and that touch made them both feel content."
Coren is the author of several books about dogs--"The Intelligence of Dogs," "What Do Dogs Know?," "Why We Love the Dogs We Do," and "How to Speak Dog." He is the host of "Good Dog!," a Canadian television show. But his most recent book, "The Pawprints of History" (Free Press; $26), is his first attempt to do justice to the primal scene--to come to grips with the fourteen thousand years that man and dog have lived together. It is Coren's mission to set the record straight: he is indignant that conventional historians had ignored the canine contribution, as though, all these years, dogs had just been standing around, wagging their tails. "Pawprints of History" is not just a story; it is an homage. Historians must look carefully, in the crannies of the past, to find the dogs of yore. "The pawprints of many dogs are there," Coren writes, "but they are faint, and the winds of time erase them if they are not found and preserved." Dogs, like women before them, have been confined, illiterate and voiceless, to the domestic sphere, and so dog history, like women's history, must be found in private places.
But do dogs really have history? Of course, things have happened to dogs, and dogs have caused things to happen, and dog breeds have changed over time. But has dogginess itself changed? Dogs have been treated well and treated badly, thrown into battle and laid on sofas and bred into unnatural shapes, and yet each new birth produces a litter of Edenic puppies that develop entirely unaffected by their ancestors' ambiguous past. Can there be history without resentment? Without, at the very least, some sign of evolving irritation or pride at the way dog life has, in the course of things, turned out? One wonders what a modern dog would think, for instance, about the reign of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, born in the Year of the Dog, 1646. Tsunayoshi felt so strongly about the welfare of dogs that he instituted the Laws of Compassion to protect them. Under these laws, not only injuring or killing but even ignoring a dog might be punished by death, and...
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