VENOM WAS A controversial bulldog owned by the eccentric Amelia (Emily) Stewart, the wife of Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary and the leader of the House of Commons from 1812 to 1822. The daughter of an earl, Lady Castlereagh was renowned for her beauty, her candid opinions, and her excessive love of animals. She kept a private menagerie at the couple’s country residence, Loring Hall in Kent; her contemporary Grantley Berkeley speculated that many of Lady Castlereagh’s exotic creatures had been sent to her as gifts from her husband’s subordinates in the War Office who hoped to ingratiate themselves with him. “A tiger perhaps helped one to an embassy,” reflected Berkeley, “and an armadillo made another at least a Secretary of Legation.” Regardless of their origin, the beasts certainly made a powerful impression. “Returned to town, having first seen all Lady Castlereagh’s establishment for animals,” wrote the social observer Mrs. Arbuthnot in her diary. “She has got an antelope, Kangaroos, Emeus, Ostriches and a tiger, which Ld Combermere brought from the West Indies for the Duke of Wellington and which the Duke gave to Lady C. It seemed very vicious & growled at us.”
Everyone knew Lord Castlereagh was devoted to his wife; his letters to her, written from abroad, are tender, endearing, and solicitous. He was apparently happy to indulge her unusual whims, which included, according to those who knew her, “a peculiar and not a praiseworthy partiality for large mastiffs,” and her husband’s “entire good nature and passive-ness to her pursuits induced him to bear with these savage companions.” In 1805, an American visitor to the couple’s home at 18 St. James’s Square recalled two of Emily’s bulldogs lying in front of the fireplace. (“Contradicting their looks,” he observed, “they proved good-natured.”) When he visited Castlereagh’s country residence, Loring Hall, the same visitor gave a little more information: “Two pet dogs had the run of the rooms, Venom and Fury—in name only, not conduct.” While Fury is seldom mentioned again, Venom, a female, became Lady Castlereagh’s special pet, rarely leaving her side. When Emily accompanied her husband to the second Congress of Vienna in 1814, Venom went with them. A noblewoman, Countess Brownlow, described the ordeal of having to share a carriage with the Castlereaghs. Lord Castlereagh was more than six feet tall and took up a great deal of room; even worse, complains the countess, “sharing the small space with us was Lady Castlereagh’s fat bulldog, poor dear Venom—she was a great pet, but her fat and heavy body was not exactly comfortable on one’s feet.”
Venom caused two minor controversies. The first occurred in August 1817, when Castlereagh was bitten and his hand severely lacerated by one of his wife’s dogs. According to press reports, the injury was a serious one, with “the sinews of the first and second fingers being separated, and the nail and top of the first finger being nearly torn off.” Castlereagh’s father was concerned about him, but restrained himself from writing “lest my ill will and discontent might have burst forth unguardedly in terms somewhat too strong against Lady Castlereagh’s favorite pets.” The culprit was not named; however, one report referred to the guilty party as “a favorite dog of his lady’s,” and a French source, the Comtesse de Boigne, described the nameless offender as a “bull-dog” that Lady Castlereagh “had hitherto overwhelmed with attentions and caresses,” which makes Venom the obvious suspect. (“It was not until four months later, when Lord Castlereagh was completely cured,” wrote the comtesse, “that she on her own initiative got rid of the dog.”) In 1817, an opponent of Castlereagh’s published a satirical pamphlet describing a mock trial in which a dog, standing accused of biting Lord Castlereagh, is unanimously acquitted. Such was Castlereagh’s unpopularity, claimed the satirist, that no juror would convict the dog.
The second scandal was caused by the fact that Lady Castlereagh was frequently observed, according to one source, “driving in an open carriage in the Park, with a full-sized Bull-dog occupying the place in the carriage which is now usually held by a Scotch Terrier or a King Charles Spaniel.” What made this behavior particularly controversial was that Lady Castlereagh was a fashionable member of Regency society and an arbiter of social respectability; it would have been surprising to see a lady in her position riding alone in an open carriage, and even more inappropriate for her to be accompanied by a large bulldog named Venom. In Regency England, bulldogs were not the lovable pets of today, but hefty, intimidating beasts (which may explain why Lady Castlereagh’s bulldogs are sometimes mistakenly referred to as mastiffs), cursed by the stigma of the bullring and linked indelibly to the lower classes. They were rarely kept as pets, and their ferocious appearance was generally considered brutish and lower class. William Youatt, author of a popular nineteenth-century dog lovers’ manual, asserted: “The bull-dog is scarcely capable of any education, and is fitted for nothing but ferocity and combat.” He also warned that any young man who acquired a bulldog would “speedily become profligate and debased.”
“Who will believe that animals closely resembling the Italian greyhound, the bloodhound, the bull-dog or Blenheim spaniel, etc.—so unlike wild Canidae—ever existed freely in a state of nature?” wonders Darwin in the opening pages of On the Origin of Species. Behind every dog breed is a cultural history and ethnography, as well as a story of genetic descent. “Everyone I know likes stories about the origin of dogs,” writes Donna Haraway in The Companion Species Manifesto. “Overstuffed with significance for their avid consumers, these stories are the stuff of high romance and sober science all mixed up together. Histories of human migrations and exchanges, the nature of technology, the meaning of wildness, and the relations of colonizers and colonized suffuse these stories.” The bulldog story is not so romantic, though, like the stories behind most dog breeds, it’s closely linked to issues of power, nationality, and class.
In the Middle Ages, the English nobility believed that beef had a superior flavor if bulls were made to exercise before being slaughtered. As a result, it became common practice to bait them with dogs, usually mastiffs—a barbaric practice that was believed to thin the bulls’ blood and make their flesh tender for the slaughter (bulls as well as cows are used for beef). This tradition became so entrenched that many parts of England had laws actually requiring that bulls be baited before they were slaughtered. However, bullbaiting, like bearbaiting, was also popular in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century as a “sport”; baiting sessions were widely advertised, and locals could place bets on their outcome.
Mastiffs—the original pugnaces britanniae (see BULL’S-EYE)—proved too large and slow for the task, so breeders developed new strains by crossing the mastiff with smaller dogs such as the pug, which had been brought to England in the sixteenth century. From these experiments in crossbreeding came the bullmastiff, the boxer, and, most successful of all for this grisly task, the English bulldog, selected for its strength, muscularity, fortitude, and stubborn ability to cling on at all costs. As Christopher Smart wrote in 1722, “Of all the dogs, it stands confessed, / Your English Bulldogs are the best.”
Rings built for bullbaiting were circular stone buildings rather like Roman amphitheaters, with tiered seating for spectators, who could place bets on which dog would bring down the bull. This poor creature would have a collar around its neck attached to a rope about twenty yards long fastened to an iron ring in the ground. One by one, each dog would be loosed, and each would be given the same amount of time to bait the bull, which would grow weaker with each assault. The dog would creep up on its belly so the bull couldn’t toss it up in the air, although this often happened anyway, much to the thrill of the crowd. In fact, a famous bulldog breeder named Caleb Baldwin enjoyed widespread fame for his ability to break his dog’s fall whenever it was tossed by rushing in and catching it in his arms.
To win the fight, the bulldog had to fasten itself onto the bull’s nose, its most tender part, and cling on no matter how much the bull tried to shake it off. For this purpose, bulldogs were bred to have wide mouths, powerful jaws, short snouts that allowed them to breathe while being tossed from side to side, and wrinkled foreheads to channel blood away from their eyes. When the bull was finally overcome, it would sink to the ground and remained pinned there by the dog, while the butcher slipped into the pen to finish it off with a blow to the head.
According to The Illustrated London Reading Book, published in 1851: “Of all dogs, none surpass in obstinacy and ferocity the Bull-dog. The head is broad and thick, the lower jaw generally projects so that the under teeth advance beyond the upper, the eyes are scowling, and the whole expression calculated to inspire terror.” When bull- and bearbaiting were both banned in 1835, it seemed for a while the bulldog might become extinct. Baiting was replaced with dogfighting (see BULL’S-EYE), for which the English bulldogs had the necessary aggressiveness but not the agility. New, more supple and equally tenacious strains were developed by means of crossing the English bulldog with various terriers, leading to the success of breeds like the pit bull and bull terrier. Today’s version of the English bulldog is a modern dog, the result of further crossbreeding with the pug. These square, stout dogs, though excellent pets and loyal companions, would never have been able to stand the rigors of the bullring.
Naturally sedate, the modern English bulldog is prone to weight gain, and soon grows too heavy to run. Weight can be an issue for the French bulldog, too, especially in later life, when extra pounds can cause extra stress on the joints. I’ve seen French bulldogs that weigh as little as ten or twelve pounds, but Grisby has always been a big boy, and for the last three or four years he’s been a few pounds overweight. Our regular vet has never brought up the subject, but the vet who issued his health certificate for a trip to England was very critical. “He’s overweight,” she said flatly, as I lowered a sheepish Grisby onto the scales. “He must lose five pounds.” She immediately switched him to a costly organic dog food that, she said, would help him lose weight, though in fact it only made him unusually flatulent. “His coat could be softer, too,” she said coldly, running her fingers disparagingly through his fur. (Perhaps it was not an error when the vet’s technician, on his paperwork, described him as “pie ball.”)
Grisby looked hurt, and as I left the vet’s office with a sack of “balanced nutritional formula” (on which she’s probably getting a kickback), I felt insulted myself. Grisby leads an active life and gets plenty of exercise. It’s true that he did develop a taste for human food at an impressionable age, and though he’s not allowed to beg at the table and has to sit for them, he does enjoy his daily treats (what dog doesn’t?). I can’t help identifying with him in this. I, too, have a fatal sweet tooth, a weakness for creamy desserts. I’d rather go hungry than face a plate of steamed vegetables; there’s nothing that depresses me more than the thought of a “nutritionally balanced diet.” (My hair could be thicker, too.)
I shouldn’t have taken the vet’s comments to heart—she was criticizing Grisby’s weight, after all, not mine—but her offhandedness struck me as tactless. While Grisby may not have understood her words, surely, as an experienced vet, she must appreciate how deeply owners identify with their pets, and how blind they can be to the way others see them. Any criticism of Grisby is a criticism of me, and her comments cut me to the quick. His coat could be softer? Is she blind? His coat is beautiful! Overweight? That’s just plain rude. She herself wasn’t exactly a supermodel. Anyway, Grisby is perfect, a big, muscular bulldog with a good healthy appetite. Seriously, why make a big fuss about two or three extra pounds?
Yesterday, to cool off in the middle of a hot summer afternoon, David, Grisby, and I went to get frozen custard. After preparing our order, the man behind the counter asked us to wait for a moment, then handed us an extra treat—a small, bulldog-size cone he’d prepared especially for my pet. Clearly, this didn’t fit the vet’s dietary regimen; should I then have refused it, right in front of Grisby’s eyes? If so, I need to ask: What’s the point of having a dog at all?