Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  Writing under the pseudonym ‘Stonehenge’, Walsh imparted ancient wisdom, setting out the qualities of numerous dog types for the first time. He was a judge at the earliest recognised dog show, held in Newcastle in 1859, at which sixty pointers and setters were divided into categories and marked according to Walsh’s descriptions of perfection. From this, Walsh was instrumental in the foundation of The Kennel Club, the organisation that sets the rules and standards for every British pedigree dog to this day. He compiled his principles of breeding, ideas that echoed the importance society placed upon parentage. ‘Breeding in-and-in,’ Stonehenge stated solidly, ‘is not injurious to the dog, as may be proved from theory and practice; indeed it appears, on the contrary, to be very advantageous.’ The idea that inbreeding could produce a flawless purity seemed eminently plausible in the evolution revolution that followed the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It also played to the prejudices of a country which had long assumed that ancestry begat status, that blood dictated class.

  As people moved from the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, so did dogs. The mysterious science of breeding travelled into town too, stolen rural magic to be peddled on urban streets.

  Queen Victoria’s private vet, Charles Rotherham, told a parliamentary committee that the canine population had soared between 1865 and 1887 as the middle classes purchased pure-bred animals as domestic companions. As one breeder put it: ‘Nobody who is anybody can afford to be followed about by a mongrel dog.’

  Inspired by the monarch herself, Victorian society demanded ever more exotic and spectacular pets. Doggie fads changed with the season: one year, the miniature schipperke was the must-have canine accessory because its short, black coat was less likely to leave unsightly hairs on the chaise longue. The lapdog was as much a part of a lady’s paraphernalia as bonnet and parasol, a fashion statement requiring replacement with each change in vogue.

  Soon hundreds of thousands of dogs had infiltrated every part of city life, from the mollycoddled ‘toys’ in her ladyship’s boudoir to the feral packs of strays living on rats in the slums. Anxious humanitarians set up charities to deal with what was rapidly becoming an urban problem: the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the Metropolitan Canine Defence and Benevolent Institute and London’s Battersea Home for Lost and Starving Dogs were among the organisations founded to civilise the beastly mayhem. But they could do little about a terrifying canine threat that was oblivious to the social architecture. Rabies.

  The first ‘Mad Dog’ panic had been in the summer of 1830, just as the aristocracy was warning of the disaster that would result from ending the restrictions on dog ownership. In fact, there had been very few confirmed cases, but each rare example unleashed snarling prejudice. The aggressive poaching and fighting dogs of the poor were fingered as those most likely to carry the disease; the inbred curs, lurchers and ratters from the squalid hovels and slums were regarded with the deepest distrust. The disease had a moral dimension — rabies was seen as deviant and dirty, rabid dogs were guilty rather than sick. During official outbreaks, beat constables were instructed to keep an eye out for suspicious-looking animals. If a dog appeared shifty, the officer had powers to impound or kill it.

  The disease, however, failed to conform to this simplistic model and blame spread along with contagion and panic. The inbreeding associated with some ‘luxury’ dog breeds was considered to have debilitated or exhausted the pets’ nervous systems, making them more susceptible. This was exacerbated, it was suggested, by the introduction of foreign bloodlines — notably French and German breeds. Another theory, popularised by animal welfare groups, was that over-feeding and pampering of pets led to a greater risk of contracting the disease — a parable on the consequences of indulgence and extravagance. The expensively assembled packs of foxhounds and gun dogs serving the rural elite were not immune from blame, much to the fury of the aristocracy new and old; rabies exposed all the snobbery, self-righteousness and bigotry associated with dog ownership in Britain.

  Yet strange alliances were made across social divides as the debate coalesced into two distinct camps, described in the press as ‘dog maniacs’ and ‘muzzle maniacs’. The former argued that the whole rabies panic was based upon an urban myth, the latter that the only sensible way to deal with the risk was to muzzle every dog in Britain for a year and eradicate the disease. Rabies had infected British society with a madness that muddled traditional class understanding.

  The newspapers revelled in the gruesome suffering of its victims, publishing regular bulletins on cases confirmed and imagined. Public terror and outcry led to numerous parliamentary inquiries and initiatives, with campaign groups springing up to press their various causes. The Dog Owners Protection Association and Anti-Muzzle Association were joined by the RSPCA in claiming that the country had fallen victim to ‘hydrophobia-phobia’ — the irrational fear of rabies.

  They had a point. Annually, registered rabies deaths rarely exceeded more than a couple of dozen. In the seventeen years following its opening, Battersea Dogs Home received 150,000 animals, of which only one was rabid. You were ten times more likely to be murdered than die from an infected dog, but public hysteria demanded a political response, and so control measures were introduced to extirpate the disease from Britain once and for all.

  Muzzling and restricting the movement of suspect animals in outbreak areas led to fury, inspiring verbal dog fights between groups of owners. When Walter Long, then President of the Board of Agriculture, decided in 1897 that new widespread controls should apply to lapdogs but not to sporting dogs, he tore open barely concealed enmities. His rules set town against country, working dog owners against pet dog lovers. The rabies controls were ultimately effective in banishing the disease from the United Kingdom in 1922 but, in their wake, the once straightforward hierarchical structures of dog ownership had been left twisted and tangled. It required expert local knowledge to decipher the subtleties of station and status still inherent in the choice of beast and breed, a skill Britain quickly acquired.

  There are now more than 8 million dogs in the UK, a population growing faster than the human one. Canine companions still tend to reflect personality and class identity: an English setter, for example, is likely to mean ‘I am posh’; a French poodle might be saying ‘I am gay’; a Staffordshire bull terrier suggests ‘I am hard’ (or afraid). Questions of ownership and breeding continue to tug at society’s leash. The Dangerous Dogs Act, passed in 1991 in response to press and public anxiety over dog attacks, echoed the Game Act of 1671 in banning the ownership of certain breeds — legislation that had its impact almost exclusively among the urban poor. The new law did nothing to diminish the popularity of aggressive animals on the toughest estates — if anything the fashion intensified.

  Nor did it deal with the greatest threat from domestic pets: according to a study of 6,000 dog owners, the most aggressive breed was the dachshund — the little ‘sausage dog’. The chihuahua, Jack Russell, beagle and Border collie were all found to be more likely to sink their teeth into someone than the dreaded pit bull — suggesting to some that Parliament was once again responding to fears about the ‘underclass’ rather than a genuine canine threat to public safety. Although there have been tragic deaths and horrible mutilations, the average number of people killed in dog-related incidents in Britain stands at less than three a year. Around ten people a year are killed in horse-related incidents and yet few would want to ban riding or introduce strict limits on ownership.

  There are clearly negative consequences of having such huge numbers of dogs inhabiting every corner of our daily lives, but Britain’s passion for them shows no sign of diminishing. Quite the opposite. With more people living alone and families scattered, we look to dogs for communion in a less supportive society. A survey recently found that among singletons in Britain, 60 per cent had bought a dog or cat for companionship, with 39 per cent agreeing they had replaced a former partner with a p
et. Often the trigger for inviting a dog into a family home is when the children are preparing to leave it. Dogs have become loyal surrogates in a land of restless relationships. Once we called them Spot, Rover or Fido. Today the ten most popular dog names read like the register of an upmarket nursery school: Poppy; Alfie; Molly; Charlie; Max; Bella; Ruby; Millie; Daisy; Rosie.

  The life of a dog is no longer a dog’s life: it reflects the behaviour and routine of its owner. As the nation’s waistlines have expanded, so have our pets. The doggie-snack market is currently worth more than £215 million a year. Fat people, research shows, tend to have fat dogs: a third of British pooches are now overweight, with vets warning that if trends continue, nearly half may soon be dying early because of obesity-related illness.

  Overweight dogs are also more likely to sleep in their owners’ beds, a throwback to the comforter spaniels of Tudor nobility, but now regarded as a sign of dangerous anthropomorphism. We treat pets like people and deny them their animal integrity. Just as owners go on diets, so may their canine companions. There are UK slimming clubs for fat pets and weight-loss drugs specifically designed for dogs. If matters get really serious, overseas clinics encourage dog lovers to buy their porky pooch a tummy-tuck or a course of liposuction. High-street stores offer the ‘trendiest’ designer wear: sunglasses, jewellery and homeopathic remedies — all for dogs. Would our furry friend like some tree bark powder to aid digestion? Or skullcap and valerian tables ‘for symptomatic relief of anxiety, nervousness, excitability and travel sickness’?

  Increasingly, owners look for human answers to the psychological problems they perceive in their pets. Your puppy is a bit boisterous; get a diagnosis for ADHD and a vet to prescribe Ritalin. Poppy has lost some of her bounce; perhaps she needs antidepressants, which, we are told, ‘can have a positive effect on dogs when used in conjunction with behaviour therapy’.

  Dogs have been granted an extraordinary place in British daily life. They reflect our history, our politics and our prejudices. For those who can interpret the meanings, the breed at the end of the lead reveals something of the lifestyle, personality and temperament of the owner. To outsiders, perhaps, it is simply a pet. But not to us. Britain is fluent in dog.

  E is for Error

  It is dark and I am standing alone in the centre of London’s Olympic stadium. Suddenly, 500 huge floodlights crackle into life; 80,000 pairs of eyes turn to focus on me. With a jolt of panic, I look down and realise my dreadful error. I have forgotten to put my trousers on.

  Most of us have endured this kind of anxiety dream at some point. It is the subconscious just wanting to remind us that, while we all make mistakes, it is really far better to make them in the privacy of our bedroom than in the middle of a packed sports arena, where every member of the crowd has a pair of powerful binoculars trained on one’s underpants.

  The information age, however, means that these days such nightmares can easily become reality. Our failures, faults and foolishness may leak from the narrow confines of personal life into a public arena where, in Britain particularly, the lights are brighter and the eyes more numerous than any physical amphitheatre. We are all a misjudged mouse-click away from email embarrassment, a digital movie clip away from national humiliation, an injudicious tweet away from international ignominy. These are small (if nightmarish) risks for people whose lives are essentially private, but for anyone who flirts with fame or has a role on the public stage, error can be terminal.

  Albert Einstein once said, ‘The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.’ There are dozens of business and lifestyle books informing readers how failure is the route to success, how progress is built upon trial and error. Military training is designed to take soldiers to breaking point, to force them to stumble. Major General Patrick Cordingley, commander of the Desert Rats during the first Gulf War, noted how senior army instructors ‘were more interested in our failures than in our successes, because they felt that everyone learnt something from an error’.

  To err is human; to forgive, divine, suggested Alexander Pope. But we live in a secular society where to err is to risk public damnation and forgiveness is in very short supply. The arc lights of the media shine day and night; the protective varnish of deference has been removed; mistrust and contempt abound. One misjudgement, one moment of carelessness, can quite suddenly become a calamity. The recent scandal over illegal and immoral methods employed by Fleet Street reporters prompted national soul-searching about the dark arts of British journalism. But it also posed questions about the hostility of our public sphere, a brutal environment that has disfigured our politics and our way of life. The wealthy, the famous and the powerful have become preoccupied with risk management.

  Over recent years, tens of thousands of advisors, officials and consultants have been recruited to maintain the defences against public gaffe or blunder. In Westminster, spin doctors and crisis managers are now vital cogs in the political machine, charged with shaping narrative and limiting damage. The media, meanwhile, sees its role as trying to breach the barricades, to expose every flaw and transgression. It is a constant tension that soaks up the energy of government and media alike.

  Both sides claim the moral high ground: the press lobby argues that exposing the frailties of the body politic is vital for a healthy democracy; Parliamentarians maintain that effective administration is impossible in the full glare of publicity. Ministers must be able to learn from their mistakes or else they will adopt a safety-first principle that militates against innovation and change, Whitehall argues. The powerful must be held to account or canker and complacency will develop, journalists respond.

  So the executive has put greater store on hiding errors and spreading blame, in the ‘national interest’. Meanwhile, the media applies ever greater effort to exposing and apportioning fault, in the ‘public interest’.

  In such an environment, the stakes can rise fast. When a mistake comes to light, it may well dominate the national conversation for days or weeks. Promising political careers can be reduced to ash in the media firestorm that follows some perceived miscalculation or folly, an inferno potentially even more intense with the growth of instant political blogging and tweeting. Attempts to protect ministers from such a fate have seen the introduction of ‘special advisors’, political heavies with duties to shield their employer’s reputation from harm.

  On the afternoon of 11 September 2001, as Westminster watched live pictures of the horrifying events unfolding in New York, one such advisor sent a now notorious email. Both towers of the World Trade Center were in flames, having been hit in terrorist attacks, and Jo Moore told the departmental press office: ‘It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?’ The missive, when it came to public attention, created just the furore it was intended to avoid. In the bear pit of rolling news, spin doctor Moore was torn apart, and trust in government was left sporting another black eye. But there was something inevitable about the scandal: it was the unedifying fallout from a society that pretends one can have trial without error and whose response to failure is retribution.

  The fear of the voracious 24/7 news monster, gorging on poor judgement and spitting out public disgrace, extends far beyond Whitehall. Every individual, institution and enterprise with a reputation to protect is well advised to shore up its defences. Fortunes are made by those adept in risk analysis and blame avoidance. The famous beat a path to the door of consultants such as Max Clifford, whose business brochure explains how his job is ‘protecting’ as well as promoting clients. He boasts of his firm’s ‘valuable media relationships’ while simultaneously accusing the press of being ‘increasingly intrusive and vitriolic’. Clients trip along the narrow path between celebrity and notoriety, sometimes dancing with a foot on both sides.

  PR agencies have become as much about privacy as publicity. Members of the Public Relations Consultants Association in the UK saw incomes rise from £18 million in 1983 to £401 million in
2001, a phenomenal expansion explained in part by anxiety about protecting the reputations of the rich and famous in the media age.

  From its earliest days, the PR industry involved itself in reputation management. Ivy Lee, regarded as one of the founders of modern public relations, convinced the Pennsylvania Railroad to publicise rather than hide details of the 1906 Atlantic City train disaster, issuing what is said to be the first ever press release. It proved an effective way to calm the angry mob.

  A century later, with company executives increasingly conscious of corporate identity and reputation, the polished skills and black arts of PR were in greater demand than ever. Manning the institutional defences, the spin doctor and publicity consultant were joined by a third key figure — the corporate lawyer. The legal representative’s role was to defuse the danger from accident and error by treating them as technical matters, events to be dealt with by experts in insurance, health and safety, litigation and risk analysis.

  In the first decade of this century, the corporate legal sector in Britain grew exponentially. Law Society figures suggest the number of qualified solicitors directly employed in company legal departments more than doubled. It is estimated that there are now at least two hundred city lawyers being paid more than a million pounds a year in the UK. Protecting big business from accident and error has become big business itself. A government report in 2010 described the environment in which firms attempted to respond to such risks as ‘a climate of fear’, where health and safety consultants, insurance companies and legal experts contrive to create a growing view that if there’s a blame, there’s a claim.

  The author ofthat report, Lord Young, was later to be a victim of the changed relationship with error and misjudgement himself. What would once have been a private indiscretion, a candid remark to a friendly journalist over lunch, was splashed on the front page of a national newspaper and from there quickly accelerated into a national media storm. The Conservative peer had been secretly recorded saying that, despite the recession, most people had never had it so good. Before the sun had set, David Cameron’s enterprise tsar was out on his ear.