Diary of a Dog-walker by Edward Stourton Page B

brainy weekend. Our host, an art historian, was working on the definitive history of English collecting, and one of the other guests was editing a magazine supplement on the Far East. My wife held her own with her heavyweight television documentaries, but these were deep waters for a dog columnist. So I threw a question into the conversational pot that I felt had a bit of intellectual heft: why are dogs – black ones especially – associated with depression?
    Churchill made the phrase ‘black dog’ famous. John Colville, his private secretary, traced it to the nursery. He reported that the great man’s doctor would sometimes call after breakfast: ‘Churchill, not especially pleased to see any visitor at such an hour, might excuse a certain early-morning surliness by saying, “I have got a black dog on my back today.” That was an expression much used by old-fashioned English nannies.’
    Much academic energy has been poured into the search for the origins of the phrase, and most theories lead back to Dr Johnson, who used it just as Churchill did. ‘The black dog I hope always to resist,’ he wrote. ‘When I rise my breakfast is solitary, theblack dog wakes to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking …’
    But all this etymology rather misses the point. A good-natured dog like Kudu inspires cheerfulness, not misery, and he usually lifts me out of low spirits rather than the reverse, so why did the association with depression arise in the first place?
    It is true that dogs do not have a well-developed sense of humour. I have been reading a book of dog stories from the
Spectator
of the 1880s and 1890s. There are plenty of anecdotes about the canine ability to find home (including one, which I do not quite believe, about a dog that worked its way back to a farm near Gloucester from ‘the interior of Canada’), and there is a good story about a church-going dog that felt the vicar’s sermon was too long and took the collection plate round in its mouth to shut him up. But the offerings under ‘Dogs’ Sense of Humour’ are decidedly thin. One correspondent records a dog watching a man with a serious limp struggling down some stairs: ‘When the invalid was nearly at the foot of the stairs the dog began to follow, limping on three legs in humorous imitation of our poor afflicted friend …’ Hmm.
    But the fact that dogs are not great wits does not mean they make you want to slit your wrists.
    The clue to the conundrum was provided by our scholarly weekend host, who pointed me towards abook called
Saturn and Melancholy
, written by three German academics in the 1930s. To explain why dogs are associated with melancholia, they quote an early-sixteenth-century German translation of a fifth-century Greek treatise (stay with me) on Egyptian hieroglyphics, which states that ‘The dog, more gifted and sensitive than other beasts, has a very serious nature and can fall victim to madness, and like deep thinkers is inclined to be always on the hunt, smelling things out …’ And there is this in the seventeenth-century English work
The Anatomy of Melancholy
: ‘Of all other animals, dogs are most subject to this malady. I could relate many stories of dogs that have dyed of grief, and pined away for loss of their masters …’
    So it is not that dogs make us depressed, it is the fact that they get depressed themselves that has given rise to the association. And here is a terrible thought that flows in consequence: perhaps those doe-eyes that Kudu gives me when I leave him are not put on for show – perhaps, indeed, the absurd pantomime when we were reunited after our weekend apart represented genuine relief. Is it possible that when we are away he is, like a ‘deep thinker’, a prey to dark existential uncertainties?
    My wife recently took him to visit her sister, and left him in the house while the two of them