Dog Days

“Doaaaaaagggg daaays are ovaaaahhhhhhh!” warbled Florence Welch on my car radio and from the look of the sky I couldn’t help agreeing with her. Right on cue an autumnal nip crept into the air on the final day of the school holidays. The only way is down till next March at least. It got me wondering though. What on Earth are dog days and are they actually over (other than in pop musings)? And while we’re at it why bring dogs into it in the first place? A problem given the Trouble With’s antipathy to all things pooch.

Dog days have been around for a long time, at least since Aristotle in the 4th century BC and they refer to the hottest, most sultry days of summer. For some reason this period seems to have been perceived as a bit of a downer by the ancients. Full of fever and drought, mad people and well, mad dogs. Give or take a bit of rioting, we probably have a more up-beat view of the summer heat in modern Blighty, though anyone who has experienced the heat of high summer in Greece or Italy might think that the Romans were onto something sacrificing a dog appease the weather gods.

Though going out of your front door should be enough to tell that the hot bit of the year is finished I can confirm that the dog days are also officially over. The very latest estimate of their end is early September and in most sources they are considered to be wrapped-up by late August. The name derives from the position of Sirius the “Dog Star” during the summer when it rises just before dawn. The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that the seeming increased proximity of the brightest star in the sky increased the temperature on earth. Though that might sound silly now, they had no idea that Sirius (actually two stars not one) was around 50 or so trillion miles away and even the new Lewes solar power station would have a bit of trouble picking up heat from it.

The “dog” part of the Dog Star is due to the location of Sirius in the constellation canis major (the larger dog). One of the troubles with the ancient Greeks was that their names for the patterns of stars were fanciful to put it mildly. I mean look at this picture of Taurus. You might think “bull” but only about the possibility that Taurus remotely resembles a four-legged animal. Similarly canis major could be any number of things. To me it looks more like one of those giant mobile phones from the 1980’s or maybe a nice iron bath-tub on its side. Pity they didn’t think of that in ancient Athens. Every day in the summer could be a bath day. We might have been spared Keanu Reeves’ musical pretensions. And who wouldn’t pay to see a film called Bath Day Afternoon?

Lewes Astronomers put on a series of talks by guest speakers on the first Wednesday of the month in the Town Hall. Find details here.

Dogs

“Extraordinary creature! So close a friend” said Thomas Mann of his spaniel in his 1918 Essay Herr und Hund. It’s clear that Mann was a man who, when not meditating on the tensions of industrial modernity, liked to walk his dog. You’d be hard pushed to find a better account of the closeness between man and beast or a more eloquent testament of the power to see canines as crypto-humans (though without all the irritating baggage of actual people). For those of us less enamoured, this closeness is something of a source of puzzlement.  Dogs are supposed to endearing, faithful and even beautiful? Man’s Best Friend (assuming that whoever wrote that phrase had some human friends). In the parks of Lewes I am surrounded by people enjoying their pets (and the odd terrified child). I can’t help but wonder then just what is the trouble (or rather my trouble) with dogs?

It’s clear that human/dog camaraderie has been around for a while. The domestication of the wolf  is likely to have started at least 15,000 years ago presumably when some hungry stray decided that wondering into a human village and making a cute face was a good strategy for surviving the rigours of the ice age. Initially bred for work it’s clear that the new, more docile, wolves at some point also gained companion status. Can those who find pooches a pain in the arse have been far behind?

One thing that suggests they are more common than one might think is the large number pejorative uses of the word “dog”. Calling someone a dog signals something less than enthusiasm about their abilities or physical attractiveness. It can indicate low quality (that car is a dog), a poor investment (Enron was a dog) or a questionable effort (dog it). I expect the pre-dynastic Chinese (likely the first pet dog pet owners) had an equivalent phrase for “going to the dogs” to signal the Yangtze Valley neighbourhood taking a dive: Perhaps as a result of the increased in pooh. If you get bored with the word there are a number of negatively connoted synonyms of which flea-bag is one of the more polite. And the troubles with dogs are clearly many. They bark and occasionally bite. They have unfortunate ways of “making friends”, frequently smell (as do you after your un-wanted encounter with them) and their liberally shared faeces contain nasty bacteria.

It may be though that it is churlish to blame them for all this. Despite millennia of breeding it is difficult for dogs to be anything other than... well doggy. It could be here that the real trouble lies. After all it’s people who own them, fail to clear up their excrement and insist that their overtures are friendship. It’s owners who let them out to pee and yap at 6.30 AM. There is plenty of evidence that even dangerous dogs are actually the product of irresponsible owners rather than breeds we assume are aggressive. It’s humans who imbue dogs with emotions akin to our own. Perhaps the trouble with dogs is the trouble with another species.

I’m beginning to think maybe Thomas Mann had a point.