Death and the Dog - What the Dog Knows - page 14

to eat the dead. In exchange, they received the greatest care and attention, “for it was deemed
proper that the souls of the deceased should have strong and lusty frames to dwell in.” It was
a pretty nice deal for the deceased, who then got to hang out in a mobile furry coffin. The
limited history doesn't note what happened after the dog died.
In Persia, the Zoroastrians made canids' roles more layered and central to mortuary rites.
Like the Egyptians and Bactrians, they clearly decided to make the best of canids' tendency
to love smelly protein. Zoroastrians were already using working dogs as a central part of their
ancestors' nomadic herding existence. Mary Boyce, considered the greatest scholar of ancient
Iran, wrote that “mortal dogs receive a striking degree of attention” in Zoroastrian holy texts.
They likened the dog to fire, both protective and destructive. “It seems probable that this
power came to be attributed to the dog because dogs are the animals always referred to in the
Avesta as devouring corpses,” Boyce wrote.
It takes some real mojo for dogs to do that and not be harmed by Nasu, the demon that
brings putrefaction. The funerary rite in Zoroastrianism was called the sagdid , “seen by the
dog.” It took a special kind of dog for this work. A kind of German shepherd-like dog. The
ideal sagdid dog was to be at least four months old and male, “brownish-golden” with “four
eyes”—perhaps not unlike rust-and-black Solo, with twitchy black spots of fur over his eyes.
One of the small cast-metal art objects in the Tehran museum looks like a stocky German
shepherd, although German shepherds didn't exist then. The dog could be white with tawny
ears, probably not unlike what we see in the Canaan dog of Israel, an ancient herding breed
still in existence, or one of the guard breeds of that area.
The dogs chosen for sagdig got paid for their work. Zoroastrians knew their dog training.
Three pieces of bread were placed on the corpse to induce the dog to approach, gaze steadily
on the body, and drive Nasu away. That would be exactly how I started training Solo to both
recognize and happily approach the scent of human death—only I used liver treats and then
toys, rather than bread, to draw him in.
The work of dogs didn't end with sagdid . After the four-eyed dog was done with his job,
corpse bearers took the body away, and the village dogs and vultures followed and feasted.
Zoroastrian dogs—from the herders to the hunters to the house dogs and the village
dogs—had a pretty good deal: They got especially well fed when people died, and not just by
getting a bit of bread or helping dispose of the bodies. They were given a whole egg and por-
tions of the food offerings for the dead. When Zoroastrian house dogs died, they got extra-
special treatment: Boyce noted, “Until the mid-20th century when a house dog died, its body
was wrapped in an old sacred shirt tied with a sacred girdle, and was carried to a barren place,
and brief rituals were solemnized for its spirit.”
All the rituals sounded lovely, especially the one for the house dog. It was a step up from
what we did with Zev after he died: We got his ashes in a hard plastic canister from the vet.