Dan Snow's History Hit - Dogs

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

From the small corgis that drove cattle to Smithfield market to the Dalmatians that protected carriages from highwaymen, humans and dogs have relied on each other for millennia. Historian and dog-lover Mike Loades joins Dan to trace the history of our close relationship with dogs. They discuss the first proto-dogs, the bloodhounds that hunted down William Wallace and the little lap dog that hid under Mary Queen of Scots' skirts during her beheading (allegedly.) You can see History Hit's 'History of Dogs' documentary series on History Hit TV. To watch, sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.Mike's book is called 'Dogs: Working Origins and Traditional Tasks'We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's a love affair stretching back tens of thousands of years. The love between a dog and an owner. In some ways, more dependable and long-lasting than the love that exists between two humans. On an ancient Roman tombstone, one bereft owner wrote of his deceased friend, my eyes were wet with tears, our little dog, when I bore thee to the grave. So, Patricus, never again shall thou give me a thousand kisses. Never canst thou be contentedly in my lap. In a resting place of marble,

I have put thee for all time by the side of my shade. What a loved companion have we lost. Now if I drop dead today, I'm not convinced my wife would write that nice and epitaph for me. Not convinced. And that's because, well, we all know dogs understand human emotions more than any other animals, often more than any other humans. They have astonishing senses.

Their sense of smell can be something up to 100,000 times stronger than ours. It's why they can sense chemical changes in our bodies. They can detect diabetes and epileptic seizures before they take place. As I'm sure many of you know, the connection between us and dogs is one of the greatest joys of our human experience. It has been for millennia. I grew up with Welsh Corgis on my grandma's farm in Canada. My wife and I had a great day before we had kids. He was called Otto after the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.

And through the ages, dogs have been protectors and hunters and gatherers and comrades and companions. In fact, I learned from this podcast they've been doing a bewildering range of very important jobs. I'm joined today by historian Mike Lodes.

He has recently made a documentary for History Hit, so make sure you go and get a subscription, everyone, historyhit.com slash subscribe. The documentary is all about this tangled story of man and canine. It's available now on the History Hit TV app. And here he is to help us trace the history of our relationship with dogs. We're going to talk about bloodhounds, Elizabeth I's army. We're going to talk about the Dalmatians, fierce Dalmatians apparently, that protected coaches from highwaymen and the vital role of collies in the agricultural revolution. If you're a dog lover, this episode is for you. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity until Welcome back to the podcast, Mike Lodes.

Thank you. Good to be here. Let's get the housekeeping done. Dogs and wolves, wolves and dogs, are they the same thing, different, descended? Do the family tree for me. Okay, so it all starts around 100,000 years ago, but the dates are very murky and the information is quite murky, but there is general acceptance as to what happened. And that is that some kind of symbiotic relationship between wild wolves and humans started then. They were a mutual benefit. They're scavenging around human camps. So if you have a wolf pack that doesn't mix particularly with other wolf packs,

but just breeds within itself quite a large pack, over the generations, it becomes beneficial to survival for that pack to become slightly more docile, less of a threat to the humans, docile, less of a threat to the humans, so it can edge in closer and scavenge around the camp. That obviously takes thousands of years to develop. And they get to what is called a proto-dog, though no one's ever found a proto-dog, but it is referred to. And that happens but about 15 000 years ago so there's a sort of 85 000 year slow wooing between the two species but then around 15 000 years ago we start to get evidence that the dog has been domesticated or 15 10 000 ago, coinciding with the beginning of agriculture, as far as we know at the moment. I learned from your book as well that dogs are less closer rated than modern wolves.

They're distant, distant cousins now. That wolf has morphed into other things as well. It has, but it has a, you know, you even take a Pekingese and the DNA, it's in the 90%, I think, of wolf, you would be surprised how small the dial is on the genetic changes from a wolf to a domestic dog. And I'm so interested by this symbiotic, these are two animals, humans and the wolf in this case, that just sort of realise subconsciously that their interests are aligned and they start working together at first, I say not consciously, but eventually the human will take one of these animals in hand and train it. But there is an

understanding between these two animals. It's fascinating. Exactly. It really is. And I think that's the key for the enduring fascination. We were predestined to come together in the sense that we're so similar and we see ourselves in dogs at an animal level. We're both pack animals. We are both social animals. We both have hierarchies. We hunt strategically, tactically in packs. That's a lot of commonality at an animal level. And we both have deep affection. Yeah, both capable of enormous loyalty and affection. Presumably, we've then also selected for, quote-unquote, nice, affectionate, useful dogs as well. So actually, there's a permanent artificial selection, in fact, going on in this story.

Absolutely. So once we get to roughly 15,000 years ago, then what happens is the natural selection of it being beneficial to be a little bit more docile around humans, because if you are, they'll throw you a bone. And there's a reciprocal arrangement that they can help guard you, they can do all sorts of things. Once you get to that, then people start breeding for particular traits that are of use to humans. But what is always of use to humans is that bond of affection and loyalty. So even if you're breeding a shepherd dog, well, a shepherd's a lonely fella. He's on the hill day and night,

months on end, his only companion, his dog. So yes, the dog's very good at rounding up sheep or guarding sheep or whatever it may be. But you also want one that's a best friend. Similarly, the hunter's dog, you know, he's out there in the watery wastes hunting ducks or he's off chasing something somewhere else. He wants the dog to do that job, but he also wants a pal with him. So it's natural that that companionship gene actually comes in pretty much all the things, even if you took guard dogs who you're breeding for aggression, but the handler doesn't want to get bitten. So it'll be a one man dog, but it'll have affection

for him. Yes, now that my children are getting older, I realise that I need a dog in my life because a dog is the only thing that looks at you like a nine-year-old child looks at their parent. They just think he's the coolest person in the whole world and they just want to spend all their time with them. Then sadly, the children grow up and realise the flaws of their parents. But dogs just seem locked in that state. It's great.

You're exactly right. And they are. That is one of the things, comparing it back to the wolf, dogs are in a permanent juvenile state. So for instance, a wolf cub has floppy ears. The pricky has come later on as it matures. Well, our soppy spaniels, I've got floppy ears. So it's a juvenile trait that's perpetuated. Traits are important because as you've started to allude to, humans quite quickly start to select dogs for actually completely different tasks. And we see in the world today, we've got cozy little dogs just to keep us company and help boost our mental wellness. And we've got dogs,

as you say, that retrieve, that track, that round up sheep. So if you go back in the archaeological record, do you see humans selecting for these traits quite early on? Yeah, absolutely. And that's where my interest really starts. I mean, you know, the stuff we've talked about is we can't quite pin a date on it. But once dog history intersects with human history in a way that we can read about and study and see evidence for, then that's where I think it gets really interesting. And that dog history and human history from then on are interlinked and both can inform each other. We use dogs to do different things and we influence the breeding. So if you had a dog that was particularly fierce,

then you might develop that into a strain of guard dog. If you had a dog whose natural instinct was to herd, to shepherd, and you see it in little puppies that some do some things, some do others, and you can create a type quite quickly. You know, a dog litter has anything from sort of eight to 14 puppies. So a male dog can sire several hundred puppies in its lifetime. So, you know, in a decade, you've got a completely different style of dog with human selective breeding influences. And that is why we have this fantastic portfolio of amazing dog types. Breeds are a different thing. And that doesn't really happen until the 19th century. Until the 19th century and the kennel clubs were formed and breeds were

identified of, you know, you have to have this characteristic and your tail needs to be so many inches long and your back needs to be at that angle and your whiskers must be this color or whatever it may be. Until then, selective breeding was entirely for function and form and function were intertwined as they always are so we had types but the specific breeds where they're locked in didn't really happen until the mid-19th century and the kennel clubs but i learned from your work that the romans i mean the romans really evolved pet so it's not that everyone had working dogs in the past and lap dogs were popular in elite Roman circles. Absolutely they were. And they're the ones we know about the most, obviously one of the most moving images from antiquity is the dog from Pompeii. But there is

also, you know, the cave canem guard dogs, the mosaics with hunting freezes on them when they're sighthounds. And they had their herding dogs and their livestock guardians. So they had the full range. But yes, companion dogs, the milites, the sort of predecessor of the Maltese, were popular. And we know they had dog burials, which shows us that they were beloved pets. But they were beloved by the Greeks as well, and I have no doubt. Also by the Egyptians and by unnamed cultures. Listen to Dan Snow's history. More dogs coming up after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. Let's whiz forward a little bit to where we have really quite interesting sources tell me about the Tudor court what have you learned about the various different kinds of dogs that you might have stumbled across in the court of say Elizabeth I ah well there's an interesting question the dogs of the Tudors we really start to get good evidence because Elizabeth I's physician, John Keyes, was also a naturalist. And he wrote the first book, he was the first Englishman to write a book classifying all the dogs in Britain, depending if you're talking about geographical Britain or Britain as a political idea. But he categorized these dogs. Now, in his classification, there are a lot of hunting dogs,

gazehounds, which are like our sighthounds, greyhounds, Beagley, Harrier, sighthound-type dogs, pack dogs, and the bloodhound. And I've just recently filmed with bloodhounds. Oh, they're wonderful. Do you know that a bloodhound has 230 million olfactory cells? What, those are for smelling? Yeah, smelling sensors, which channel the scent up to the olfactory bulb, which channel the scent up to the olfactory bulb where they create an odour image. And an odour image for the bloodhound

has, I think, 40 times more information than does a photograph for a human. What? Yes, it's quite interesting, isn't it? Well, we know today, you know, we have dogs that can detect cancer in people. Dogs are extraordinary. And those bloodhounds were evolved as incredible sniffer machines. Sniffing machines, yes. For hunting or the battlefields? Why?

For hunting, but particularly for hunting down fugitives. So William Wallace was hunted down by bloodhounds. Robert the Bruce was hunted by bloodhounds when they were out trying to escape the English armies. The Duke of Monmouth was hunted and found by bloodhounds after the Battle of Sedgemoor. They're used quite a lot. And the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's one-time favourite, took 800 bloodhounds with him on his expedition to Ireland to put down a Catholic rebellion.

Why would he do that? Because he presumably thinks it's going to be a guerrilla war and he's going to need to hunt down fugitives in the wild countryside. We filmed with a bloodhound pack. And bloodhound packs today, they hunt down a cross-country runner. Nobody's hurt. The worst he gets is he gets licked a lot if they catch him. But he sets off in advance, cross-country runner, just the faintest of scent they're given, and they follow him.

But how do you film that? That was one of the most fun filming days I've ever had. Because he's a cross-country runner, we know the path he's going to take. We know that, you know, the route he's going to take. So we plotted that on our phones, on GPS. And then I picked various spots where the hounds are going to jump over a hedge or a fence, come around a right angle bend over a brow of a hill, all of that. Picked spots for cameras. But it was magical because it was a timeless scene.

That's one of the things about dogs when we're thinking of dogs in history is they're so authentic. They're so natural. When you put a dog in an historical context, it's the same. I'm having the same experience with that dog as whatever century you care to put it in. That gives me a connection with the people of that time. So we've got the bloodhounds, which is just extraordinary. Because some dogs, you think, well, they've got no purpose whatsoever. They look nice look nice they feel nice but poodles had a purpose oh yeah again in elizabeth's time they were extremely

popular as duck hunting dogs they were water spaniels so you think of the word poodle well it's like puddle and our word puddle comes from the german poodle which means a sort of splash so there is this water connection. And they've got webbed feet, you know, the big standard poodles. They've got webbed feet, a water-repelling coat. They're great water dogs, very powerful swimmers. And the way that you hunted a duck in the 16th century was with a crossbow. So John Keyes actually writes about the water spaniels

retrieving the hunter's crossbow bolts when he missed. How useful is that? So we did that, you know, we shot a crossbow and the poodle went out and retrieved it. And he went out and retrieved a rubber duck in our demonstration. And they're wonderful, really wonderful working dogs. So got working dogs.

I always remember there's a story about Mary Queen of Scots, isn't there? When she was beheaded, didn't a little dog pop out from under her skirt? So she had dogs. Yeah. The other really important category that John Keyes talks about in his book is what he calls little dogs or chamber dogs, and what today we would call lap dogs. And they were universal at the Tudor court. And Mary Queen of Scots, who had a very lonely childhood,

she had a pack of 22 chamber dogs. And it is said, legend has it, that when she was executed, after her head was chopped off, they found her loyal little spaniel hiding still beneath her skirts. Doesn't get sadder than that. I think it's the 18th century. I remember a story off the top of my head about these drover dogs, because obviously no refrigeration. If you want to take meat to the city, it's got to be alive. It's got to walk there itself. And these dogs would, you tell me, but they would sort of go from South Wales across to southern England. And then they'd find their way back home again by themselves and stuff.

I mean, it's an extraordinary... Yes. And the dogs you're talking about there are corgis. And I went to meet this wonderful character who still herds his black cattle with Welsh corgis. He's in Wilthwells in Wales. And you think corgis, surely that's, you know, our associations of them as royal pet dogs,

but they're lively little dogs, much faster than you might expect. And because of their proximity to the ground, what they do is they nip at the cattle's heel to move them along. And when the cow kicks, it just misses the dog because the angle of a cow's kick and the height of a corgi is a hair's hair's breadth and the corgi can nip at the cattle and be unharmed. But yeah, they would drove from Wales all the way to Smithfield Market in London. We used bearded collies, the shaggy dogs, similar to the old English sheepdog type, and I've worked with those down in the West Country where they would bring the sheep up to London. The deal with that, the deal with droving,

is you need your livestock to arrive at market in prime condition, you know, with as much meat on it as you could sell it per pound. So the droving dog needs to be quite gentle, quite different to that style of working of the border collie, which is always a magical sort of Formula One thing to watch. But it's lightning fast and it whizzes those sheep around, gallops them around, gets them into a pen. Very useful for managing them on the farm. But when you want to take them a long distance, you need a completely different character, and that's the droving dog.

Whether it's the little corgi pushing cattle or a bearded collie droving sheep. And walking along that day, even though we're filming, I often forgot we were filming because it was so calming, so pleasant. That ability of dogs to, you talked earlier about their ability to sort of heal us, is they really can have a wonderfully calming energy. And those beardies were magical.

So speaking of that period in our history, carriage dogs, I've always been struck by that expression, carriage dogs. What does that mean carriage dogs were dogs that guarded the carriages so 18th into early 19th century is the grand age of carriage travel it happens then because it's only by then that roads are good enough for there to be you know know, fast, decent carriage travel. Yes, royals had had a few trundling carriages before, but they weren't really a good way of getting around. But once you start to get a better road system, then you have carriage travel.

And once you have carriage travel, then you are prey to highwaymen, not just the travellers inside the coach who may be carrying valuables, but also the horses. Horse theft was a big thing and carriages had to stop up inns overnight. So carriage dogs, now there's limited space in a carriage, Space is at a premium. So the carriage dogs used to run behind. Tremendous stamina. Dalmatians were the favoured type. And although they're wonderfully affectionate today because of selective breeding to create that, they were once quite aggressive. And I remember, because I'm very ancient as a child,

you know, Dalmatians had a reputation of being a bit bitey. Not anymore. Not really. Oh, yeah. But absolutely, in the 18th century, they were aggressive, but with this enormous stamina. And they would trot behind the carriages for mile after mile after mile, guarding the coaches.

Spotty dogs, you could see them, so a deterrent to highwaymen. And of course, you know, highwaymen comes and you think, oh, how are they going to, you know, highwaymen's got a gun. But you see, the highwayman has to get to the carriage on a horse and a carriage dog will drive that horse off before the highwayman can get in shot range. And they slept with the horses in the stable overnight so that if you're stopped at an inn, you don't want your horse to be stolen,

but you want to go to bed. You know, if you didn't have a carriage dog, the coachman had to sleep with the horses. But with a carriage dog sleeping and guarding the horses, he could get a bed for the night. You're just describing a world in which dogs, we're so familiar with dogs now, but for most people, dogs primarily in a pet role, very controlled boundaries of going for a dog walk and having a cuddle on the sofa at night.

You're describing a world in which you'd have seen dogs everywhere, serving purposes, doing jobs, as we might describe them. Yeah, and interdependent. That was the engine that powered this deliberate development of different types. That's why we have this galaxy of different types. And we could lose it very quickly. It's a precious and fragile heritage. And I personally think we need to look after it just as much as we need to conserve the wildlife in the natural world. Let's finish up with the Monmouths. You do mention that dogs have been trained to sniff out cancer, and that symbiotic relationship continues, not just in those traditional fields of retrieving for hunters and

sportsmen or rounding up animals. There are other symbiotic jobs that go on. Yes, they are. And one of the everyday things that's symbiotic is people throwing a stick or a ball for their dog. There's a lovely letter from Lady Lyle, who was at Henry VIII's court, and she talks about a poodle who's very good at retrieving a glove on a stick. So you imagine sticking a glove on a stick and throwing it for the dog to retrieve. Well, that's just like you go to the park today and see all these people with these plastic ball throwers. So everybody loves throwing something for their dog and the dog bringing it back. It's a mutual reward system that goes on with all dogs every day. But yeah, we use them for guarding us. We use them, a lot of

military and police and things use dogs in those roles. They're used as flock guardians more and more as there is more rewilding, reintroduction of wolves in certain areas. And the way to help keep that balance is to give the flocks a flock guardian, which deters the wolves. There is niffer dogs at airports. There is guide dogs for the blind and for the deaf. Our interdependence is now so deeply interwoven. Mike Lodes, my interdependence with your history content is interwoven as well. So thank you for coming on and talking all about your wonderful book and your TV show.

Tell us what they're all called. The films which are now on History Hit are Dogs of the Tudors and Dogs in the Age of Revolutions, which is roughly 1760 to 1850. And my book is called Dogs, Working Origins and Traditional Tasks. Beautiful. Thank you very much, Steve, for coming on, Mike. Thank you, Dan. you