KILLER DOGS
by Irena Sehner
DOGS OF ARTEMIS, GODDESS OF THE HUNT |
| The Empires of the Orient used to be large and populous. The kennels kept by the kings of the Orient counted thousands of dogs of all common breeds. First came the quick-footed hunting dogs, followed by the vigilant watch dogs employed to guard military camps and other strategic facilities, and in their wake the fighting dogs charged to protect not only the sovereign´s herds, but the sovereign himself. Keeping the sovereign and his military commanders company, the guardian dogs assumed the role of working dogs and often found themselves in the turmoil of a battle. The sovereigns of oriental Empires were rich enough to buy and keep any number of animals, particularly horses and dogs. The small country of Greece, fragmented into independent city-states, was neither very fertile, nor especially populous. When compared to the Barbarians bathing in gold, the Greek rulers were people of meager means, whose dog kennels housed only as many inhabitants as they could afford to buy and keep as a necessary minimum needed to provide food for their courts. As early as then the hunting dogs were more or less well bred specialists - hounds or tracers; not just any mongrel could rank as a hunting dog. That is why a pack of hunting dogs was even then a rather costly investment. The health and fertility of dogs was partially on the agenda of Artemis, a Greek goddess of the hunt, game and the fertility of nature. To pay tribute to Artemis the Greeks erected in Ephesus a temple so impressive that it became one of the "Seven Wonders of the World".?For both the ancient and the medieval people hunting remained the staple source of meat, since their ill-cultivated, unfertilized fields sown with half-wild seed were incapable of yielding the required amount of crops, particularly of cereals. Famine, wars, epidemics and natural disasters together with no prospects for a brighter future acted as the most effective birth control. Just like wolves in times of scarcity have less offspring, because lack of food prolongs the intervals of mating, reduces the number of newly born animals, and induces female wolves to kill the young of their subordinate females, the tribes had also to regulate the number of new-born babies. Egyptians and Greeks were particularly ill-famed as nations following this practice. The new born babies were discarded in the desert or confined in earthenware vessels left to their fate at various desolated places. In Sparta the babies had to be presented to the elders of the tribe to be scrutinized. "In case the baby was weak and ungainly, it was sent off to a place called Apothet, a sort of ravine next to Taygeta," wrote Plutarch in his work entitled Lykurgos. This practice, however inhuman it may seem to be, represented the less evil when compared to the prospect of scarcity inflicted upon the entire tribe. A person of weak body cannot hunt and thus pull his own weight. In the days of old game, birds and fish abounded, since the forests were deep, the meadows stretched from horizon to horizon, and the steppes even beyond. Also the beasts of prey moved around in greater quantities than a person armed with just a bow and a spear found pleasant. Packs of wolves obliterated herds of cattle, the encounter of a human and a bear in a forest usually ended up with the human dead, dangerous aurochs and bisons lurked in the woods, sly wild boars could easily destroy crops on the palm-size fields, even the appearance of a lion was not rare. The largest and most populated dog kennels belonged to the king, as only the king could afford to keep a pack of dogs. The dogs provided food for the king and his retinue, for a host of officials and servants, for the royal guard... Country plutocracy kept large packs of hunting dogs on their estates. As follows from the Herodotus narrative On Croesus the peasants could ill-afford to possess hunting dogs. What did it look like at that time? "A giant wild boar appeared at Mount Olympus in Mysia. It set out on its incursions from the mountain range and destroyed the cultivated fields of the Mysians. Many times the locals organized an expedition to kill the boar. Not only did they not succeed, but the boar inflicted even more damage upon them. In the end the inhabitants of Mysia turned to Croesus, saying: "A huge wild boar, O King, descended upon our land and destroys our fields. However hard we try, we cannot kill it. That is why we implore you to send your son and a group of young men with dogs to rid us of the beast." ?The king with good grace sent his Lydian hunters and dogs, provided all a successful hunt requires, and rather worried he asked his only son to join the expedition. When the dogs managed to trace the boar, the hunters besieged the animal in a circle and started to throw spears at it. As foretold in an old prophecy, one of the spears killed the king´s son. The tracer dogs were trained to trace the animal, surround it, and keep it at bay so that the arrows and spears of hunters could kill it. The birds and small game were caught with nooses, gins and traps. The list would not be complete without pitfalls as described by Xenophanes in his work entitled Kynégetic. The pitfalls served primarily to catch game and some kinds of predators. Xenophanes says that hunting dogs, rather ineffective when the hunt relied on snares and traps, became quite indispensable when it came to the use of nets. He distinguished between several types of net hunting techniques. The hunting events leaned on such a large number of dogs that the Greek word for a hunter, i.e. kynégos, can be translated verbatim as a "dog driver". Particularly popular among the dog breeds were the dogs of Laconian lineage valued for their speed and readiness to fight. The Laconian dogs came from the southeast Peloponnesus, a region inhabited by Doric tribes. What did these dogs look like? Drawings on the vases and steles of the period depict them as hunting dogs with narrow pointed ears and a long snout. A black-figure vase painting (see the picture) shows a hunter shouldering a stick with a fox and a hare suspended from it. The hunter is accompanied by a dog obviously of the Laconian breed described by Aristotle in his Zoology as a cross between a dog and a fox. |
