Mackenzi Lee - The History of the World in Fifty Dogs

Editor: Samantha Weiner

Designer: Danielle Youngsmith

Production Manager: Kathleen Gaffney

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930872

ISBN: 978-1-4197-4006-0

eISBN: 978-1-68335-763-6

Copyright 2019 Mackenzi Lee

Illustrations copyright 2019 Petra Eriksson

Cover 2019 Abrams

Published in 2019 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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TO ALL THE DOGS IVE LOVED BEFORE.
BUT ESPECIALLY QUEENIE.

As it does for most people, my life completely changed when I got a dog.

I had grown up with dogs, worked as a dog walker, been the fun aunt to all my friends dogs, leapt out of moving cars to pet random dogs on the street. But it wasnt until I brought home a fourteen-pound fluffy loaf of St. Bernard puppy that I really understood what it means to have a dog.

It means every nice thing you own is going to have teeth marks or slobber or both on it. Or... maybe you just dont have nice things anymore. It means you never leave your house not covered in a generous layer of dog hair, and also the amount of time you spend out is determined by how long the pup can hold it. It means a big black nose sometimes shoves its way around the shower curtain when youre in the middle of lathering up. It means reaching down your dogs throat to pry out that dead bird from the gutter they tried to hork down when you werent looking. It means you wake up at 4:30 A.M . because that now-grown fluff wants to play, which is how you find yourself writing a preface to your book before the sun is up while she delightfully disembowels a stuffed animal at your feet.

It also means that your heart lives outside of your body. It means binding your happiness to that doggy smile and that tail wag. It means wanting to be the person your dog thinks you are, and knowing you never will be, but they will love you anyway. It means your camera roll fills up with nearly identical photos of your dog sleeping, and you whip them out to show everyone you meet whether they asked for them or not. It means your life is suddenly brimming with a limitless love that runs in two directions.

Turns out, all those clichs about dog ownership are totally true.

As is that age-old adage write what you know, which is why, as the past year of my life was completely consumed by my new fluffy dependent who now clocks in at 120 pounds of sass and slobber, I have been compiling stories of dogs in history.

I have loved history since I was young, but Ive always found that the pieces that fascinate me the most are not the wars, the politics, the congresses, or the big events people put on plaques. I gravitate toward the quirky, often lesser-known stories that not only prove history was deeply weird, but also show the universalities of the humanand, in this case, canineexperience. These stories of historys dogs provide small windows into the larger historical moments in which they happened and the lives of the humans these animals kept company.

This book contains stories of dogsreal, mythical, and some that are likely a bit of bothbut also stories of humans. I have tried not only to tell stories of historys goodest boys, but also to use them to contextualize some pivotal moments from the past. As a self-proclaimed history nerd who slept through her AP Euro class in high school because none of us make good choices when were sixteen and now has to sheepishly pretend she totally understands the context of the French Revolution, I hope that these small, accessible overviews will provide a foundational knowledge of some crucial historical moments for people who have previously had no idea what was going on.

Depending on where and when they appeared in the timeline, ideas about dogs and their role in society vary hugely. Dogs have been pets, companions, hunters, workers, protectors, pests, experiments; sacred, memorialized, feared, hated, loved, and everything in between. In order to understand dogs, their place in time, and also the particulars of that time and place, we are often required to suspend our modern ideas about the dog as pet/meme and, instead, try to look at their stories from the point of view of the world they lived in.

This also requires us to accept that the past is not always kind. In spite of the fact that dogs are perhaps the purest creatures on the earth, not all of these stories are pure, because as good as dogs are, human beings are sometimes the worst. And, as we are wont to do, throughout history we have made dogs complicit in some of our worst moments. I debated whether or not to include these stories in the book, but ultimately chose to do so because I felt they were critical in painting a complete picture both of the role of dogs in history and of history itself. The way we talk about, treat, and remember dogs often tells us more about ourselves than about them.

Now if youll excuse me, theres a wet nose pressed against my leg, insisting I throw her ball. Enjoy the book.

Before we begin this journey through historius canius, lets get one big question out of the way: How did dogs go from wild animals to our snuggly pets?

In the discussion of when dogs domesticated, its important to first make a distinction between domestic and tame. A tame animal is one that becomes accustomed to the presence of people and welcomes human intervention into their lives. Tame animals develop a symbiotic relationship by living closely with people. Domestication, in contrast, happens over generations, and means that an animal lives so closely alongside humans that it becomes dependent upon those humans for survival. Domestication alters animals on both a mental and a physical level. Most domesticated animals that have lived alongside people for multiple generations would not be able to thrive in the wild, due to both learned changes and evolutionary aspects that breed out their ability to fend for themselves. Theres a similar difference between wild and feralwild animals survive their entire lives without human intervention, while feral animals are from a species previously domesticated that has learned to survive on its own.

When we talk about dogs, were talking about a domesticated animal that can sometimes be feral. When we talk about wolves, its wild animals that can be tamed.