THE WRONG DOG
Dogly type deposes to take mild exception to a line in Tad Friend’s Talk of the Town piece, “Sound of Silence,” in the current issue of The New Yorker, in which he states that the Jack Russell terrier that appears in the new movie “The Artist” is “the breed that once cocked an ear to RCA Victrolas.” I don’t think so. The dog sitting attentively and eternally next to that old-fashioned phonograph horn on RCA Victor records is a pooch named Nipper, who looks to me like a fox terrier or something close. The canine belonged to a Royal Academy British artist, Francis Barraud, who painted “Dog Looking at and Listening to a Phonograph” sometime in the eighteen-nineties. The picture was acquired by the Gramophone Company in 1900, and shortly thereafter rights to it went over to Victor, where the painting was edited into its famous His Master’s Voice trademark. Only lately has anyone suggested that Nipper might have been a Jack Russell, but a good second look at those elegant Ionic forelegs dismisses the claim.
Jack Russell terriers are the wildly popular, intense, short-legged cutesters now probably visible (and audible) on a taut leash in your apartment lobby or around the nearest shopping mall. Fox T.’s, which come in the smooth or wire-haired model, are taller and narrower, and, by a fraction, more staid. Though probably outnumbered by Jacks just now, they are the older, more established breed; one version of Jack Russells, a country cousin, was developed in the eighteenth century by a British divine who gave the breed its official moniker, the Parson Russell Terrier. The American Fox Terrier Club was founded in 1885; the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America in 1976. I grew up in close proximity to dogs, but the first time I ever heard of a Jack Russell or laid eyes on one was in 1965, when an old Boston friend of mine, Kornie Parson (yes), introduced me to a delightfully waggling football he’d just picked up on a business trip to England.
A smooth fox terrier, Ch. Warren Remedy, won the Best in Show award at the very first Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, in 1907, and repeated in 1908 and again in ’09. Between them, smooth and wire foxes have won seventeen Best in Shows at Westminster, more than any other breed (Scotties are second, with eight). The most famous fox terrier was Asta, a wire who stole scenes from William Powell and Myrna Loy in all those “Thin Man” movies in the nineteen-thirties and early forties, and the next-best probably Ch. Nornay Saddler, who won fifty-one Best in Show awards (then a record) between 1937 and 1940, but somehow never the top Westminster prize, and became the subject of the very first New Yorker dog Profile, written by E. J. Kahn, in 1940.
Dogs have been getting a lot of attention from colleagues of mine in the magazine lately, what with the selection from Susan Orlean’s book “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” which ran in the issue of August 29th, and Adam Gopnik’s Personal History, “Dog Story,” which recounts his recent conversion to the world of dogs, thanks to a charming Havanese named Butterscotch. My own claim to distinction in this arcane area began when Carol took our fox terrier Willy out for a walk one morning in 1990, and encountered a fashion shoot in progress in Central Park: a photographer working with a chocolate-brown Lab and a tweeded-up male model for a Paul Stuart advertisement. When Carol and Willy came past again, on the way home, the photographer asked if he could please borrow our dog for a few minutes, and heartlessly made the switch. The resulting Paul Stuart ad ran in the issue of October 29th. My only disappointment was with Willy’s commission, which turned out not to be a fifteen-hundred-dollar Italian silk-Irish-tweed-mix jacket for his owner but a free copy of the Paul Stuart catalogue.
Fox terriers were bred for foxhunting, but not on foot. After the much bigger, no-relation foxhounds (with their floppy ears and waving tails) had driven the fox to earth, the F.T. would be handed down from a bag or basket on the Master of Hounds’ saddle and would instantly dig out the poor beast. Foxhunting has pretty much been abolished now, even in England, but more than one owner of the breed must have noticed that somewhere along the line fox terriers—with their long faces, straight front legs, and pricked ears—had been selectively bred to look a lot like horses. The young incumbent at my house, Andy, has yet to encounter a fox or a horse, but doesn’t seem to mind. My son, noting his unusual patching, thinks he looks a lot like a cow.
Post, November 30, 2011