Dogs in Our World
2 total works
The Custers and Their Dogs is the first book to seriously explore the little known history of General George Armstrong and Libbie Custer as wholehearted dog lovers. At the time of Custer's death at Little Bighorn, they owned a rollicking pack of forty hunting hounds-including Scottish Deerhounds, Russian Wolfhounds, Greyhounds, and Foxhounds. Told engagingly through a dog owner's lens, this biography of the Custers' life covers their first dogs in the Civil War and Texas, hunting on the Kansas and Dakota frontiers, entertaining tourist buffalo hunters such as a Russian Archduke, English aristocracy, and The Great Showman, P. T. Barnum (all whom presented the general with hounds), Custer's attack on the Washita village (when he was accused of strangling his own dogs), and the 7th Cavalry's march to Little Bighorn with an analysis of the many rumors about a Last Stand dog. Duggan also reveals how the Custers' pack was re-homed after Armstrong's death in the first national dog rescue effort-and the strange fate of Libbie's favorite staghound. Included is an appendix discussing depictions of General Custer's dogs in art, literature, and film.
How did beloved movie dogs become man-killers like Cujo and his cinematic pack-mates? For the first time, here is the fascinating history of canines in horror movies and why our best friends were (and are still) painted as malevolent canines. Stretching far back into Classical mythology, treacherous hounds are found only sporadically in art and literature until the appearance of cinema's first horror dog, Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskervilles. The story intensifies through WWII's K-9 Corps to the 1970s animal horror films, which broke social taboos about the "good dog" on screen and deliberately vilified certain breeds-sometimes even fluffy lapdogs.
With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes-the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. Beware of the dog-or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore.
With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes-the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. Beware of the dog-or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore.