a beautiful dog cup

“York Museums Trust Online Collection,” OpenGLAM Open Collections, accessed April 26, 2015, http://opencollections.okfn.org/items/show/123. License CC BY-SA 4.0

This sensitively modeled dog's head is an earthenware stirrup cup from the mid 19th century.  A stirrup cup was given to a rider on horseback, and was quickly emptied, so that's why it hasn't a flat base: no place to put it.  Since the riders in question were usually about to go off on a hunt, I'm not surprised that hounds and foxes were frequent inspirations for these cups, though they weren't the only figures by far.  Here is an excellent blog post on stirrup cups with lots of illustrations. 
I privately wonder how you could drink from a beautiful fox-shaped vessel and then go kill an actual fox.  I wonder at a lot of things.