This page is dedicated to all those dogs who have helped us and still help in our lives, to all those who will help us in the future, and also those who will never be able to. So... dedicated to the DOG, our greatest thanks.

One day in 1912, the German painter Franz Marc, his wife and dog went out for a walk in the Bavarian Alpine village of Sindelsdorf. They stopped at a picturesque spot, rested and admired the view. Marc noted the intense concentration with which his hound, Russi, stared at the landscape. He turned to his wife and said, "I´d like to know for once what goes on inside that dog when he sits there and contemplates the landscape!" Bac in his studio he painted The dog in Front of the World, a painting which captures, maybe more brilliantly than any other work of of art, the dog´s role as a link between man and nature.
Another German, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote that, "The dog stands to the man in the same relation as a glass goblet to a metal one and this helps greatly to endear the dog so much to us, for it affords us great pleasure to see all those inclinations and emotions which we so often conceal displayed simple and openly in him. "Its behaviour, Schopenhauer went on to observe, "is characterized by a certain stamp of innocence in contrast to the conduct of men which is withdrawn from the innocence of nature by the entrance of reason..." To Schopenhauer and others, the dog is a reminder of an innocent, Edenic, past.
Dogs and men have grown up together and perhaps only the dog has been unspoiled by that growing up. Despite all the jewelled collars, sometimes absurd pampering, outlandish hair styles and often preposterous breeding it has been subjected to, it has remained close to nature. That closeness is a constant and useful reminder to humans that civilization is not, perhaps, everything.
We may admire the usefulness of the horse, the beauty of the cat or the intelligence of the porpoise, but it is the dog we love: our oldest and best friend. Our closest relative, the great ape-who is, indeed, almost our physiological and intellectual equal- is sometimes dignified as being "almost human". Our very distant cousin, the dog, has been made an honorary human with no questions asked. No other animal has been brought into the heart of the human family.
During the thousands of years in which man and dog have been partners, everything except the intensity of our relationship has changed. Once a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer, man has become-in the post-industrial world- a mostly town-dwelling creature who buys, rather than finds or catches, what he needs. But our old hunting companion is still with us. Some people may say that there is little point having dogs in today´s world. That they can be dangerous, dirty, inconvenient and an intolerable "luxury" unsuited for life on a crowded and rather sick planet like Earth. The municipal authorities in Beijing banned the private ownership of dogs for reasons very like these. In an almost immediate response, a dog zoo was opened where deprived human residents of the city can look at various breeds behind bars and, for a small fee, take the dogs for a therapeutic walk in an enclosed area. Having invented our best friend, we are unlikely to ban or disinvent him. There is the possibility, though, that we may change him.
Reason might dictate, for example, that people who live in the city centres will demand compact, barkless animals. I believe the possibility is a faint one and that love´s blindness makes us behave otherwise. I often see a woman walking two inconveniently huge borzois down my central London street. However, we may see an end to the obsessive breeding that means too many dogs are condemned to lives of inconvenience and medical problems merely to satisfy the arbitrary requirements of some breed standards. The English animal behaviouralist James Serpel has speculated that in the future we will breed dogs more for behaviour than for looks. Whatever happens, many of us will still want to share our lives with them: perhaps it all comes down to the fact that without dogs the world would seem a lonely place for man.
We use dogs to mirror or passions, fears and fancies. We gaze at them and see ourselves. Amiable and agreeable beasts, they are happy to be our looking-glass. We also see something we do not understand when we look at a dog. Jack London wrote that, "At times it was like gazing into a human soul, to look into his eyes; and what I saw there frightened me and started all sorts of ideas in my own mind of reincarnation and all the rest. I tell you I sensed something big in that brute´s eyes; there was a message there, but I wasn´t big enough myself to catch it... I don´t know what it was, but it gave me a feeling of kinship all the same. Oh, no, not sentimental kinship. It was, rather, a kinship of equality".

Taken from: "The Dog´s Tale. A History of Man´s Best Friend". Loyd Grossman. BBC Books. UK, 1993