three puppies

Today I'm sending you to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a beautiful 16th-century Korean scroll painting awaits you. Enjoy the elegance of Yi Am's Puppies, Birds and Blossoms.

a fave fictional fido

For my money, one of the greatest dogs in fiction disapproves his way through P.G. Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. He's Bartholomew, the surly Aberdeen terrier belonging to Stiffy Byng, and he "biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder." He is also reported as "looking like a Scotch elder rebuking sin," biting the butler, and Bertie Wooster adds that at one point Bartholomew "gave me an unpleasantly superior look as they moved off, as if asking me if I were saved."

Bartholomew is based on an Aberdeen terrier called Angus, one of the many dogs Wodehouse gathered round himself in his long life. In 1966 he and his wife Ethel gave $20,000 to the Bide-A-Wee Association to build the P G Wodehouse Shelter for stray animals at Westhampton.

You really should read the book.

nini

He was just an ordinary, nice white cat who lived in a cafe in the second half of the 1800's. As it happened, the cafe was in Venice and handy to the Venetian Archives and the lovely church of I Frari. This meant that visitors to both those worthy places often made a new and bewhiskered friend. (You can make some today -- see some alla italiana here).

So many befriended Nini, in fact, that as Jan Morris writes "around him there grew a dead-pan cult, rather like the mock-serious fraternity that has grown up around the fictions of Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster." He had his own visitors' book at the cafe, signed in time by a Pope, a Russian Czar, an Emperor of Ethiopia, the great statesman Metternich, and Verdi (who wrote a few notes of Act III of La Traviata).

When Nini died, many kind words were lavished upon his memory. There was a memorial effigy, a plaque placed on the cafe wall, and a poem from the historian Horatio Brown, a fellow prowler of the Archives:

What wit and learning died with you,
What wisdom too!
Take these poor verses, feline cat,
Indited by an Archive rat.

--Once more from Jan Morris, A Venetian Bestiary (Thames and Hudson, 1982), pp. 70-71.

give!

Blood that is. Pets need blood too when surgery calls for it. But where do they get that red stuff?
Somebody writing in to the great Cecil Adams' Straight Dope column asked the same question a while back. The answer is: you wouldn't know it, but there are many national, regional and local veterinary blood banks. Your pet can be a donor, though they will get checked over first to see if they are in proper shape to do so. Your vet may have a kitty kicking around the office for company and extra hemoglobin (cats have 3 bloodtypes).

If it's a horse you're helping, the blood may come from Beevo, a horse at Oklahoma State University who happens to be one of the 5% of horses with a universal donor type. Horses have over 15. It gets tricky.

Read the whole answer here, unless you have a hamster, in which case the last sentence will make you pout and I warned you.

mjau mix

As a welcome to the new patrons visiting from The Cat Blogosphere, I'm going to send you all on a trip to . . .

. . . Moscow, where Andrei Abramov and Ekaterina Efimova have turned their home into a glorious museum of cat art, and created a most splendiferous webmuseum to match! I die of curatorial envy. They've even got a picture of Lenin holding a cat (see the "Cats in Russia" page).

There is no end to the wonders on the site. Every page has something artistic and clever to delight the cat-lovin' eye, and there are a lot of pages. Enjoy!

i missed one

After talking about Gates of Heaven a couple of days ago, imagine my surprise to learn that San Francisco's Presidio cemetery complex has its own pet cemetery! This particularly tickles me because my best friend is the current director of the Federal cemetery there.

Military families have pets too: "The majority of animals buried at the Presidio pet cemetery are dogs and cats, but there are also parakeets, canaries, pigeons, macaws, rabbits, hamsters, rats, lizards, goldfish, and mice." No one is exactly clear who authorized it, so probably someone just found a plot and stuck Kitty in. And Mr. Iguana, and Willie the hamster, and Raspberry. . .

But the little cemetery has been closed a while now, and bridge construction threatens its fate. Visit it here.

we all need some

But maybe not this much. Believe me, they were kidding when they made it: a little Brit funniness givin' you love, kitten stylee.

Because I'm on the road again today.

B3ta rocks. They love them some kittens!

"i knew love"

Errol Morris's first documentary, Gates of Heaven, is on the surface a 1978 film about two Californian pet cemeteries. One, a dream come true for a little while, must close after a legal battle. The second, the "inheritor" of the first, thrives to this day, but the humans founding it seem to have faded as dreams do.

I'll send you to Roger Ebert's review of this film, for he's seen it 30 times and can tell you about it better than I can. He says that people puzzle long and hard over it after viewing -- is it serious? Was Errol making fun of those people or did he feel sorry for them?

Personally, I think anyone who lived in the California of the 70's (I did as a kid) knows the answer. That WAS California then: not just a state, but a state of mind. It's an unparallelled look at ordinary folks grieving and remembering their pets, and the unusual people who made it their calling to give those pets a resting place. At one point, Morris scans a variety of grave markers, and that's where I got today's title: one says simply, "I knew love; I knew this dog."

``When I turn my back,'' says Floyd McClure, the first cemetery's driving force, ``I don't know you, not truly. But I can turn my back on my little dog, and I know that he's not going to jump on me or bite me; but human beings can't be that way.''

Keep your eyes on the road, your paws upon the wheel

Dogs.
Cars.
Dogs in cars.

(Sorry, your curator-type interface has a cold and can't do any better than this, but you're going to love this website.)

battlecat

Francesco Morosini (1618-1694) , the Doge of Venice who battled the Turks and laid siege to Athens, was said to have two loves. One was the glory of his country (Venice was its own state at this time). The other was his cat, whom he took on all his military campaigns whether by sea or on land. After her death, Morosini lovingly preserved and kept her skeleton.

A little bit on Morosini here. I couldn't find anything else about the cat, but gleaned this from Jan Morris' A Venetian Bestiary (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) p. 70.

argh!

This food recall is simply awful. To think of pets suffering from their very food is sad indeed. By the way, you've seen the links everywhere so I won't bore you, but I will reiterate that dry kibble is okay and so is pate-style moist. It's gravy-chunky-pouch type food that you had better pay attention to.

Which led me to think, what other stuff should I worry about in the house?

I should worry about

• daffodil bulbs
• rhubarb leaves
• mushrooms, even the nontoxic kind (!)
• guacamole
• grapes and raisins
• bread dough
• cyclamen
• fava beans

Exhaustive list of things to torment youself with here. Shorter one here. Just trying to help.

it's sunday and i would ride a pony if i had one

But I don't. And ponies and horses need lots of good space and special care, which I can't give right now. But sometimes the thought of a pony ride on the beach sounds grand.

This is my lazy Sunday morning way of explaining why today I bring you the Welsh pony. I think Welsh things are fascinating; my parents told me we were a smidgen Welsh. Did you know the word penguin is Welsh? It means "head of white". Interesting article on Welsh words here.

And did you know that the shortness and hardiness of the Welsh pony enabled it to survive when Henry VIII decreed that all horses over 15 hands be wiped out? It was able to hide in terrain where Henry's agents were quite unwilling to go. The breed has Arabian blood, too, which they must have gotten from the Arabs that acompanied the Roman forces. Someone at Yahoo Answers has quite a bit of good information on Welsh ponies, here (and Austrian Haflingers, if you are Germanically inclined).

The official website of the Welsh Pony and Cob Society of America Inc. has great photos, of course.

Hwyl and iechyd da! (Cheers and good health!)

yarn

I remember a Chwast cartoon from years back, something about either TV or books for cats. One was a ball of wool, and entitled, you guessed it, "Yarn".

But wait, now your cat can do yarn and be yarn too, if you go to VIP Fibers Inc. in Morgan Hill, CA. They specialize in spinning yarn from the silky undercoats of your pets, and your pup too can get in on this fiber action.

Comb your pet, send your fur, get your yarn. And why not? VIP assures us that long ago a garment spun of dog hair was good luck for the wearer. But don't knit your pet fur into socks: socks need to be stretchy, and pet fur is short and hasn't the crimp that sheep and goat wool do. But dog yarn is 80% warmer than ordinary wool, and traces of it have been found in textiles from prehistoric Scandinavia and the Navajo Indians. Nobody's said anything about the relative warmth of cat yarn, but you'd think it would be similar.

Go get your skein on here.

doesn't that tickle, mam'selle?

Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) was a master of French Rococo painting. Delicate, tender, pastel, beruffled, Rococo was an art movement suited to a society of light elegance. Such was the high society of Louis the XV's court. However, there was also a strong erotic streak in this society and to this art. How to portray it with taste and finesse? Well, here you are.

How long did it take you to realize that young lady isn't wearing any underwear? Not that anyone did at the time, but they didn't advertise the fact. Yet Fragonard, using bold drapery and curling rhythms of form, takes you round and round her hair, her hips, her plump feet, her dog, and so on until finally you find yourself coming to a halt, saying, "About those hips. . ."

Right now, she's an innocent and well-off girl snuggling her silky pet. But Fragonard knows, and is telling you in his own way, that she will soon be old enough to snuggle someone her own size. Her joy in her dog indicates that she'll be happy and generous to human beings. So watch how you treat your pets, lest you be painted making a statement you don't wish to make!

You can see this lovely work in Munich at the Alte Pinakothek.

boatswain

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), the great Romantic poet, had a fondness for keeping pets. He is recorded over the years as owning a bear, a fox, three or four monkeys, a parrot, five cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, five peacocks, two guinea hens, an Egyptian crane, a badger, three geese, a heron, a goat with a broken leg, and his many horses. All, except the horses, resided indoors at Byron's homes in England, Switzerland, Italy and Greece.

So did his dogs, of whom he had many: Thunder, Moretto, and Lyon, to name a few. The best known is Boatswain, whom Byron nursed through rabies to no avail, as there was no cure for it at the time. The inscription Byron placed upon Boatswain's tomb is well known, but worthy of repeating:

Near this spot
Are deposited the Remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.
This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery If inscribed over human
ashes, Is but a just tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a DOG Who was born at
Newfoundland, May, 1803, And died at Newstead, Nov 18th, 1808.

The poem Byron wrote in his dog's memory is high flown in its elegance, but sincere. Read it here. There's an excellent page on Byron and his pets here courtesy of his home, Newstead Abbey.

light and flaky cat tongues!

Or langues de chat, a French cookie. They are made by squeezing batter through a pastry bag in short strips. There's also a special cookie tin for them with indentations 3 inches long and about as wide as your finger. The little round bits at the ends where they puff up when baking reminded people of the rounded tip of a kitty's skinny tongue. The earliest cookies of this general type seem to have been developed in Northern Europe as early as the 17th century. A fascinating bit on this cookie's history here, and take a look at the Picasso link they give you!

In Italy they are called lingue de gatto, and in German katzenzungen -- I have had German chocolates called this, and as you'd imagine they were long, waferthin, rounded tiny treats.

I was trying to come up with a similar English animal-reference food name, and you guessed it, all I got was hot dog. Oh, maybe elephant ears.

Jacquespepin.net has a nice recipe for langues de chat here.

the englishman and his dog

Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian, was director of Britain's National Gallery, and the funny little man in brown suits you see on PBS reruns of "Civilisation".

I could talk about Sir Kenneth all day. The warmth and human wisdom of his scholarship made me fall in love with civilization, particularly art history, at a young age. To this day when I seek comfort I can always find it in one of his books. He's no longer in intellectual fashion, and we're poorer and crueller for it.

But I want to give you a taste of that scholarship, and so here's Sir Kenneth Clark musing about the world and the dog in it:

It is sometimes said that the love of dogs is more intense in England than
anywhere else; but this is an illusion. There are many passages in
Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches which go at least as far as
anything to be found in English literature in their love of dogs and
horses. Nevertheless there are countries where, for no clear reason, dogs
are despised. . . even in Catholic countries they come in for harsh
treatment from simple people who have been told that they are without
souls. As the Neapolitan says when reproved for beating his donkey,
"Perche no? Non e christiano."* I have also known some very intelligent
Englishmen who rebel against the Anglo-Saxon obsession with dogs. They
would be shocked by that remarkably intelligent and unsentimental woman, Edith
Wharton. Asked to draw up a list of the seven 'ruling passions' in her
life, she put second, after 'Justice and Order', 'Dogs'. 'Books' came
third. But in a diary entry she wrote a beautiful modification of her
feelings: "I am secretly afraid of animals -- of all animals except dogs,
and even of some dogs. I think it is because of the us-ness in
their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so
tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branced off and left
them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? Their
eyes seem to ask us."
-- Clark, Kenneth. Animals and Men (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1977), p. 51.
* Italian: Why not? He's not a Christian.

a bitch today sets a great example

We met Frederick the Great a few days ago, mourning the death of his dog Biche. Let us go to a happier time with him, when his greyhound Diane (all his greyhounds were female) had puppies. He wrote his sister Wilhelmine about it, of course -- he wrote her about everything. She must have been thinking of having a baby herself, for he wrote his puppy announcement in Diane's own voice, as follows:

A bitch today sets a great example.
I have had two little ones;
All the curious who come to see them
Find them beautiful like me, well-made and kind,
Be god-mother at their christening,
And my wishes will be fulfilled,
If, Madam, you shortly follow suit.
-- Katherine MacDonough again, p. 185.

Wilhelmine did have one child, a daughter named Elisabeth, whom Casanova thought to be the most beautiful girl in Germany.

is shakespeare a tall order?

Not if you're one of the Dachshund Shakespeare Cartoon Players. Ask Muriel Morris, a secondary school teacher in British Columbia.

For some crazy reason she found it difficult to keep her students focused when she took them to lives Shakespearean theater. Since they weren't able to follow the stories easily, they weren't interested. (Come now, I guarantee that 4-hour Kenneth Branagh Hamlet lost you a couple of times, too!)

But Muriel had secret weapons: cartooning ability, and the hot idea to spell out the plays using wiener dogs. Six plays are available on her site. They're short, fast and cute, 'cause dachshunds are good like that. Titus Andronicus will never be over your head again!

we will, we will pet you

Delilah, Delilah
Oh my, oh my, oh my, you're irresistible

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara, of Persian parentage) wrote "Delilah" for his cat, and you can find the song on Queen's 1991 Innuendo album. By all accounts, Freddie loved his cats dearly and drew great solace from them, even calling home to London while on tour so he could talk to them. Here's a list of them from a fanpage. Here's more photos. So imagine "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Fat Bottomed Girls" being written around a cat much as I type this wearing a suspiciously feline-shaped wrist corsage.

Delilah was his favorite.

You make me smile when I'm just about to cry
You bring me hope you make me laugh - and I like it
You get away with murder so innocent
But when you throw a moody you're all claws and you bite
That's all right

Freddie died soon after Innuendo was released. He knew he hadn't long to live when making the album, and made sure one of the last things we ever had from him was a song celebrating a creature he held supremely dear. Full lyrics here.

present for you!

That's the first thing you see upon arriving at Haro's Cute Hamster From Japan page: a fluffy hamster holding a lotus with the words "present for you!"

Hamsters, small, adorable and busy, must make ideal pets for the typical Japanese home, which is often stressed for space. The 6-year run of the anime series Hamtaro from 2000 to 2006 also launched the popularity of the hamster as pet. "Little hamsters, big adventures," the Hamtaro site promises, and who wouldn't like to give their pet its own fantasy life online?

Haro's site is a lovable example of that impulse. Did you find the secret page? Could you solve it? Not me!

elvis is back. in a box.

No, not that Elvis. Everybody knows he just bought a doughnut in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

This Elvis is a cool black cat with a thing for turning clockwise. See, Carlo Bertocchini's kitty was involved in a truck mishap and can't use his back legs. What do you do, if you're a loving owner with a thing for "Battlebots"?

Kitty kitty cyborg, that's what. Actually it's a little boxy vehicle that Elvis pilots by pressing two buttons. If Carlo or his wife call him he wheels right on over with a couple of extra gyrations thrown in. He is named Elvis after all. Cats, here's the proof, are trainable.

And here's the (flippantly named) video.

frederick the great on the death of his dog

Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712 - 1786) was a man of accomplishments both political and intellectual. Under his rule Prussia was transformed into a modernized state; he also built the beautiful palace of Sanssouci ("without cares"). Please note that name. Though royal, he had had a cruel childhood, as his father Frederick William I of Prussia was a brute who hit anyone he liked and mocked his son's artistic temperament.

Small wonder that Frederick the Great sought two great consolations during his life: the letters of his sister Wilhelmina, who had gone through those years with him; and the companionship of his pet dogs, from whom he got loyalty and love. The letters these siblings wrote over the years are full of warm observations about their creatures. When, as pets must, Frederick's beloved greyhound Biche died, his grief is as heartfelt as a boy's:

I have had a domestic loss which has completely upset my philosophy.
I confide all my frailties in you: I have lost Biche, and her death has
reawoken in me the loss of all my friends, particularly of him who gave her to
me. I was ashamed that a dog could so deeply affect my soul; but the
sedentary life I lead and the faithfulness of this poor creature had so strongly
attached me to her, her suffering so moved me, that, I confess, I am sad and
afflicted. Does one have to be hard? Must one be insensitive?
I believe that anyone capable of indifference towards a faithful animal is
unable to be grateful towards an equal, and that, if one must choose, it is best
to be too sensitive than too hard.

--Frederic II, Oeuvres historiques (Berlin, 1846-56) vol. 26
p. 288; from Katharine MacDonough, Reigning Cats and Dogs (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1999), p. 190.

well what about firehouse dogs?

What is the thing with Dalmatians and firemen? It goes back to firehorses. Horses need company and often may have a "pet" for just such a purpose. Dalmatians were found to be a good dog for this, as they would grow very close to the horses, and when the firecoach was called they would run and run alongside to help clear the way.

More about that here. And some more fun facts about the "fire dog" from the NFPA's kids' site here.

stuffed head of firehorse fred

From 1908 to 1925, Firehorse Fred pulled the firewagon in New Bern, North Carolina. On the average, horses live 20 to 30 years, so Fred must have been quite worn out when he died in harness aged about 17. At the time, he was pulling the firewagon to a false alarm.

Well loved by his firehouse crew and by the townspeople, Fred came in for particular attention: his head was stuffed and mounted trophy style and installed in New Bern's Fireman's Museum. And there he stays.

Firehorses seem to have done duty as late as 1929, if the articles in firehorses.info are any indication. Wonderful historical pictures there too. Many of them retired with honor from their working lives to nice pastures and ease.

They're a borderline type of pet, I think: their primary role was functional, but their situation was one of mutual trust and affection. What defines a pet to you?