Kirjahaku

One of the oldest known breeds of domesticated dogs, the Saluki traveled throughout the Middle East with desert tribes, who valued the dogs for their ability to hunt gazelles. Famously painted on the walls of the Pharaohs' tombs, the Salukis' history intrigued English dog enthusiasts who were instrumental in popularizing the breed and importing it to Europe and the United States in the early 20th century. This book tells the story of those who brought the Saluki to the West, most notably Florence Amherst, who discovered the dogs while in Egypt and went on to breed 50 litters. Other world travelers who fell under the Salukis' spell included Lady Anne Blunt, Austen Layard and Gertrude Bell. Also covered are lesser-known Saluki aficionados, mainly military officers who hunted with their hounds in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt and sought to replicate that experience at home.

General George Armstrong Custer and his wife, Libbie Custer, were wholehearted dog lovers. At the time of his death at Little Bighorn, they owned a rollicking pack of 40 hunting dogs, including Scottish Deerhounds, Russian Wolfhounds, Greyhounds and Foxhounds. Told from a dog owner's perspective, this biography covers their first dogs during the Civil War and in Texas; hunting on the Kansas and Dakota frontiers; entertaining tourist buffalo hunters, including a Russian Archduke, English aristocrats and P. T. Barnum (all of 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 rumors about a Last Stand dog. The Custers' pack was re-homed after his death in the first national dog rescue effort. Well illustrated, the book includes an appendix giving depictions of the Custers' 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. Stretching 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 World War II'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. "Cave Canem (Beware the Dog)"--or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore."