From loyal pets to menacing monsters: How dogs feature in famous books

“My dogs will never harm me; they’re loyal beasts,” Bolton says, to which Sansa Stark replies, “They were. Now they are starving.” She leaves him, and leaves him, even as he desperately tries to save his life from the animals that were his pets until a day ago.

Best friend turns fearsome foe in Cujo

Perhaps no book captures the havoc a mad dog can wreak as Stephen King’s Cujo. (Source: amazon.in)

It is their ferocity when provoked (whether by disease or circumstances) that makes so many people fear dogs. And perhaps no book captures the havoc a mad dog can wreak as Stephen King’s Cujo. The book, which revolves around a larger Saint Bernard dog named Cujo, comes with the telling subheading

His bite is worse than this bark

Cujo is wonderful, patient, loyal and loving, until he chases a rabbit and ends up in a cave full of rabid bats. He gets bitten and becomes rabid, and then starts attacking people.

This being a Stephen King book, there is a wide array of characters with complex lives in a small town called Castle Rock, but the shadow of the mad, giant Saint Bernard looms above them all. The suddenness of his attacks, which totally disrupt the lives of people in the town, show the impact a rabid dog can have. At around 400 pages, it is a book that will make many wary of dogs, even though King keeps stressing that Cujo was not a bad dog, only one who had been infected by rabies.

Interestingly, King is believed to have been inspired to write the book when he himself was attacked by a Saint Bernard when he had taken his bike for repair in 1977.

The terror a rabid dog can inspire in a town was also poignantly captured in Harper Lee in her famous book, To Kill A Mockingbird. Lee used the image of a rabid dog, Tim Johnson, to reflect the dangers of racism, and how it made seemingly rational people behave in a cruel and insensitive manner. Atticus Finch, the main character of the book, eventually shoots the dog with a single bullet, showing the need of society to stand up and eliminate its own ills, in this case, racism (you can see the film version of it, starring Gregory Peck on YouTube).

The fact that a rabid dog was used to reflect a social ill just shows how dangerous rabies was. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also used a large dog as the instrument of a curse to a family resulting in perhaps the most famous lines uttered about a dog in literature in The Hound of the Baskervilles:

“Footprints?”
“Footprints.”
“A man’s or a woman’s?”
“Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

Answering The Call of the Wild

But no book shows us the role of dogs and how it gets changed by human beings as Jack London’s epic Call of the Wild.

But no book shows us the role of dogs and how it gets changed by human beings as Jack London’s epic Call of the Wild. The book tells us the story of Buck, a pet dog who lives a happy life, but then gets kidnapped and sold and transported to another land to pull sleds in the snow. The sequence where Buck is thrashed into submission by one of his kidnappers remains stirringly poignant to this day, and is used by many as a symbol of man is crushed by authority. A confused Buck fights other dogs and finds another master, but even he is killed by a Red Indian attack. A furious Buck finally fights back, kills many Red Indians, and giving up on humans who have deserted and betrayed, finally joins a wolf pack, answering as it were, the call of the wild.

The 200-page book is easily the closest any author has got to a dog’s perspective, and also shows how an animal can be forced from being friendly to going utterly wild.

If Call of the Wild shows a dog returning to his wolf roots, another book by Jack London shows a wolf becoming comfortable with humans and living with them. White Fang is considered by many to be the mirror of The Call of the Wild, and tells the story of a wolf named White Fang, who is taken to the city and is trained to participate in dog fights. He is treated badly, but survives and is in the end adopted by Weedon Scott, a kind man, whose gentleness overcomes Fang’s aggressive nature.

The book’s opening chapter, which describes two men surrounded by a pack of wolves that is slowly closing in on them, is one of the most terrifying ever written, and the manner in which London narrates dog fights, with people betting on two animals trained to maul each other, shows human cruelty at its worst. Such is the intensity of the tale, that the end of the 250 page book, one is almost tempted to lie down with White Fang and rest. If The Call of the Wild shows how humans can drive dogs to wildness, White Fang shows how they can come back from the wild and be a part of human ligr.

The canine companion, the furry, faithful friend

There are many who have written about how having a dog changed their lives, such as John Grogan’s Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog.

They might have their dark chapters, but for the most part, dogs have been seen as faithful companions in books. Indeed, there are many who have written about how having a dog changed their lives, such as John Grogan’s Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, which is about the 13 years Grogan spent with an energetic eccentric dog.

An even more warm and hilarious story of the companionship between man and dog is seen in Mark Shand’s River Dog, in which he describes his journey down the Brahmaputra with an Indian dog as a constant companion. And few will remain unmoved by Bruce Cameron’s touching A Dog’s Purpose, which is told from the perspective of a dog and his multiple rebirths and how he ends up with the human he was always supposed to be with, reinforcing the strong bonds between human beings and their canine companions.

Dog Stories is a wonderful compilation of just how happily humans and dogs can live in harmony, caring for and often saving each other.

But perhaps the most popular books on dogs have been the ones written by James Herriot, whose warmly humorous and sensitive stories of a veterinary doctor attending to animals in Yorkshire have become an integral part of many textbooks. Many of Herriot’s patients were dogs, and his Dog Stories is a wonderful compilation of just how happily humans and dogs can live in harmony, caring for and often saving each other.

While dogs can pose a danger to us (as indeed any insane or ill creature can), it is perhaps important to remember that they are capable of giving us immense joy too. And that is exactly what the most famous dog in literature does to this day – a Beagle who almost all of us have seen, heard and read about. This is Charles M Schulz’s Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s pet in the legendary Peanuts comic strip that continues to appear in newspapers all over the world, making people smile, and reminding us all that

Happiness is a warm puppy.