ABSTRACT
A late 19th-century Punch cartoon captioned ‘Dog fashions of 1889’ pictures a pug with corkscrew tail waddling through the park enveloped in folds of skin, a bulldog with fangs and tongue protruding from his outsized jaw, terriers and dachshunds crawling along the ground like huge elongated lizards, a small hairy dog resembling a hedgehog, an enormous hound the size of a pony and a micro-dog barely visible to the naked eye. 1 People have long ridiculed the breeding of animals to fit some human whim. A 1911 book by the dog breeder The Honourable Mrs Neville Lytton described ‘certain types of modern dogs’ as ‘monstrosities’. 2 Both the caricatured excesses and the criticism are familiar today. The dog adjudged ‘Best in Show’ at the British 2007 Crufts dog show and watched by 6000 people at the event and by millions on television was Araki Fabulous Willy, a Tibetan Terrier who would not have looked out of place in the cartoon of 100 years earlier. His body and legs were invisible under a curtain of hair that reached to the ground all around him and his head needed to be held firmly upward by his lead to allow the audience to see his face underneath its coverings.
