What the Dog Knows Read Online Free PDF Page B

three skulls of what appeared to be domesticated dogs, shorter of snout and broader of braincase than their wolf cousins. One of the skulls, 31,500 years old, had a flat bone fragment, probably that of a mammoth, inserted in its jaws. It was so purposeful and evocative that the archaeologists couldn’t help speculating: Was that bone part of a funerary rite, appeasing the spirit of the animal, inviting it to come back, or encouraging it to accompany deceased people?
    The speculation wasn’t much of a stretch. For all that dogs seem to lurk on the edge of civilization, we’ve also let them in and granted them special status. For thousands of years and in numerous religions, the living have depended on canines to help guide the dead—to get us from here to there, wherever there is. Few myths have such worldwide resonance. One can see the temptation of assigning dogs this task: They appear custom-designed for it. Dogs howl at the moon, warning us that death is just over the horizon. They can hear and smell, growl and hackle, warning us of specters that our dull senses miss.
    They also like to eat things. Even us, given the opportunity. Dead people aren’t so different from other dead animals. We’re protein. Given an opportunity, dead people get smelly. We become deeply attractive not only to bottle flies but to more developed animals. Like dogs.
    Part of the religious connection of death and dogs no doubt comesfrom a ritualized spin on the grim but useful reality that dogs and other canids, like jackals, scavenge. People witnessed that behavior—done with joy and impunity—and came to the obvious conclusion that dogs and their close relatives must be powerful, immune to the demons of death surrounding bodies. That made canids useful beyond the simple housekeeping function of getting rid of bodies. So in ancient Egypt, in a simultaneously pragmatic and religious switch, the jackal-dog became a god. Anubis, friend of the dead, was a protector, not a predator, of the deceased in their tombs.
    While artwork and accounts of Anubis are plentiful, we have only one or two nineteenth-century accounts about how the ancient Bactrians (in what is now Afghanistan) and the Hircanians (then part of the Persian empire) handled this canid propensity. Those accounts note that the Bactrians used dogs called canes sepulchrales . The dogs had a specific job description: to eat the dead. In exchange, they received the greatest care and attention, “for it was deemed proper that the souls of the deceased should have strong and lusty frames to dwell in.” It was a pretty nice deal for the deceased, who then got to hang out in a mobile furry coffin. The limited history doesn’t note what happened after the dog died.
    In Persia, the Zoroastrians made canids’ roles more layered and central to mortuary rites. Like the Egyptians and Bactrians, they clearly decided to make the best of canids’ tendency to love smelly protein. Zoroastrians were already using working dogs as a central part of their ancestors’ nomadic herding existence. Mary Boyce, considered the greatest scholar of ancient Iran, wrote that “mortal dogs receive a striking degree of attention” in Zoroastrian holy texts. They likened the dog to fire, both protective and destructive. “It seems probable that this power came to be attributed to the dog because dogs are the animals always referred to in the Avesta as devouring corpses,” Boyce wrote.
    It takes some real mojo for dogs to do that and not be harmed by Nasu, the demon that brings putrefaction. The funerary rite in Zoroastrianismwas called the sagdid , “seen by the dog.” It took a special kind of dog for this work. A kind of German shepherd-like dog. The ideal sagdid dog was to be at least four months old and male, “brownish-golden” with “four eyes”—perhaps not unlike rust-and-black Solo, with twitchy black spots of fur over his