Free Diary of a Dog-walker by Edward Stourton

they moved into the Master’s Lodge, and Lady Butler was not someone accustomed to being told she was not allowed to do things.
    Rather than rewriting the ancient anti-dog statutes, the college authorities decided to reassign her pet’s species. An undergraduate who spotted the terrier in Great Court rather cheekily brought it to the attention of one of the college porters (never without their intimidating bowler hats, the porters were responsible for enforcing college discipline). ‘That, sir,’ he was told, ‘is not a dog – College Regulations do not permit that. That is a cat.’
    Trust the good book to give a dog a bad name
    9 January 2010
    Jerusalem is not a doggy city; when I return there next week (on Radio 4 duties) I do not expect Spaniels in the throng at Damascus Gate.
    There have been doggy episodes in its long past. The Crusaders brought their hunting hounds (think of the stone dogs on Crusader tombs), and dog stories feature in accounts of the British Mandate period. But the city has its alchemy for managing foreign cultures: it absorbs the bits that suit it, and shakes off those that sit uneasily with its soul. Its doglessness is true to its Biblical roots.
    Dogs get a bad press in the Bible. Brewer (of
Phrase and Fable
) notes that ‘There is no expression in the Bible of the fidelity, love and watchful care of the dog, so highly honoured by ourselves.’ Instead dogs are represented as debased and worthless creatures.
    In the First Book of Kings, dogs are used to curse Jeroboam, the errant leader of the Israelites who persuades his people to worship two golden calves. Jeroboam receives this prophetic warning: ‘Thus says the Lord … I will … consume the house of Jeroboam, just as one burns up dung until it is all gone. Anyone belonging to Jeroboam who dies in the city the dogs shall eat.’
    It is the same in the New Testament. The Second Letter of Peter explicitly links dogs with that most unclean of animals, the pig. Of apostates the writer declares, ‘It has happened to them according to the true proverb, “The dog turns back to its own vomit,” and “The sow is washed only to wallow in the mud”.’
    The post-walk towelling of Kudu this winter has left me puzzled by this Biblical view of dogs as unclean. The goats in Bedouin settlements outside Jerusalem may be a little dusty, but the writers of 1 Kings and 2 Peter surely never encountered anything remotely like a Spaniel back from a ramble in the English countryside.
    Kudu has recently been walked in North Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and on the Surrey Downs. The pattern is always the same. First he gets wet and looks bedraggled. Then he acquires a long bramble in his bottom fur, and races around like one of those military jeeps with floppy aerials waving wildly from the rear end. Then he finds a fetid puddle and sinks his legs and tummy down as far as they will go. Then we (my wife usually, if I am honest) rub him down in an affectionate way, as if all this is somehow endearing.
    Surely we, not those who gave us the Bible, should be hurling imprecations at this wilful wallowing in filth.
    The clue to this conundrum may lie in the writings of St Paul. There is a famous passage where Paul condemns the practice of circumcision – it is controversial as well as famous because it is cited as a foundation of Christian anti-Semitism. ‘Beware of the dogs,’ writes the Apostle to the Gentiles, ‘beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh.’
    Paul is using ‘dogs’ as a metaphor for false teachers who are preaching a perverted Christian message. He has taken the very thing we modern British dog-walkers value – the human-like qualities of our pets – and turned them into something sinister. We look at dogs and see the best of ourselves reflected back (those dogs on Crusader tombs were an artistic shorthand for fidelity to God) while