Title: The Great Grisby two thousand years of exceptional dogs
By Mikita Brottman
WilliamCollinsPublisher
Alwyn Viljoen
With six books bearing her name, professor Mikita Brottman writes with an easy style on a slobbery topic -- canine love. She squeezed 2000 years of a human-dog relationships into only 231 pages, which makes for a dense read, but her musings act like park benches to help the reader digest this potted histor at a leisurely pace.
She is at all times wryly aware that her care for her French bulldog borders on the obsessive. But this Oxford-
educated psychoanalyst must have been exactly the kind of human owner those first wolves had in mind when they slunk back to man’s cave for another morsel.
Brottman suspects food is still at the heart of her dog’s bond with her, specifically his favourite treat – ice cream for dogs. “To those who can barely feed their own children, the idea of ice cream for dogs must seem like a disgusting luxury,” she realises. But equally disgusting to pet owners is the fact that several cultures still fatten dogs for the pot, like some superstitious Koreans do with their Nureongi.
She explains that humans love their dogs because the dog loved first and to the end. “Still, we should not overromanticize animal companionship,” she warns, pointing out 85,000 Americans injure themselves every year by tripping over their dogs.
Brottman concludes a dog’s “personality” is the product of its owner’s unconscious projections. And therein lies the rub, for how we treat our dogs show how far we ourselves have moved out of the cave. Or as William Blake wrote: “A dog starv’d at his master’s gate, Predicts the ruin of the state.”
