They are one of life’s best things.
Here are a few dog stories from history.
Queen Victoria owned eighty-eight Border Collies during her long life. Her favorite was Sharp, who came into the royal household in 1866, after the death of her husband, Prince Albert.
At the end of her life, it was a Pomeranian named Turi who comforted her. It is said Victoria died with her eldest grandchild, the future German Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Turi, at her bedside.
Photographing dogs in costumes became popular in the early 1900s and stayed a part of American pop culture for about fifty years.
Princess Elizabeth got her first Corgi, named Dookie, in 1936. She owned more than thirty Corgis during her seventy-year reign, including two good ones who accompanied Daniel Craig and her through Buckingham Palace on their way to the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics.
Dogs don’t care if you’re rich or poor. Here, a North Carolina sharecropper’s dog keeps watch from the porch in 1938.
FDR owned a German Shepherd named Major and so did President Biden. Both Majors lost White House privileges and got sent home after biting incidents.
Some dogs were put on this Earth to work. Here, a dog helps a Montana shepherd guard his flock in 1942.
The US began using war dogs in World War I. Sergeant Stubby accompanied Americans into battle in France one hundred times and lived to ‘tell the tail.’ Dogs were used extensively in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Here, a Marine poses with his war dog on Okinawa in 1945.
These dogs were the stars of the Colorado State Fair in 1946. Their happy faces tell the story: ‘I’ll do anything for treats!’
On the left, a picture of President Kennedy and his family, with White Tips, Wolf and Clipper, on a visit to their house in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in August 1963. On the right, Pushinka, a dog which Soviet Premier Khrushchev gave to the Kennedy family. Carolina has said Pushinka ‘was a little bit nippy.’
In 1998, Hillary Clinton compiled a book containing letters children had written to the First Family’s pets, Socks, the cat, and Buddy, the Chocolate Lab.
In Afghanistan in 2019, a Belgian Malinois war dog named Kuno charged an al-Qaeda insurgent who was pouring a line of gunfire into a British assault team and subdued the gunman despite sustaining two bullet wounds in his hind legs.
Kuno’s wounds required amputations, but he recovered, was fitted with prosthetic limbs, and learned to run again.
And finally…
Meet my co-editors, Bill and Doug, who wear shirts and cling to the heating vent on cold mornings.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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