Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Dog Handbook
. I ordered the two topics. hen, because waiting isn't my forte, I sneaked onto
the web to learn the basics of death and dogs.
• • •
No house would stand firmly founded for me on the Ahura-created earth were there not my herd
dog or house dog.
—Ahura Mazda, Zoroastrian god
In 2012, archaeologists in the Czech Republic published their discovery of three skulls of
what appeared to be domesticated dogs, shorter of snout and broader of braincase than their
wolf cousins. One of the skulls, 31,500 years old, had a flat bone fragment, probably that of
a mammoth, inserted in its jaws. It was so purposeful and evocative that the archaeologists
couldn't help speculating: Was that bone part of a funerary rite, appeasing the spirit of the
animal, inviting it to come back, or encouraging it to accompany deceased people?
The speculation wasn't much of a stretch. For all that dogs seem to lurk on the edge of
civilization, we've also let them in and granted them special status. For thousands of years
and in numerous religions, the living have depended on canines to help guide the dead—to
get us from here to there, wherever there is. Few myths have such worldwide resonance. One
can see the temptation of assigning dogs this task: They appear custom-designed for it. Dogs
howl at the moon, warning us that death is just over the horizon. They can hear and smell,
growl and hackle, warning us of specters that our dull senses miss.
They also like to eat things. Even us, given the opportunity. Dead people aren't so different
from other dead animals. We're protein. Given an opportunity, dead people get smelly. We
become deeply attractive not only to bottle flies but to more developed animals. Like dogs.
Part of the religious connection of death and dogs no doubt comes from a ritualized spin
on the grim but useful reality that dogs and other canids, like jackals, scavenge. People wit-
nessed that behavior—done with joy and impunity—and came to the obvious conclusion
that dogs and their close relatives must be powerful, immune to the demons of death sur-
rounding bodies. That made canids useful beyond the simple housekeeping function of get-
ting rid of bodies. So in ancient Egypt, in a simultaneously pragmatic and religious switch,
the jackal-dog became a god. Anubis, friend of the dead, was a protector, not a predator, of
the deceased in their tombs.
While artwork and accounts of Anubis are plentiful, we have only one or two nineteenth-
century accounts about how the ancient Bactrians (in what is now Afghanistan) and the Hir-
canians (then part of the Persian empire) handled this canid propensity. Those accounts note
that the Bactrians used dogs called
canes sepulchrales
. The dogs had a specific job description:
