512 



THE NEW BOOK OF THE DOG. 



in a record of the year 1121 B.C., in which 

 it is stated that the people of Liu, a country 

 situated west of China, sent to the Emperor 

 Wou-wang, a great dog of the Thibetan 

 kind. The fact is also recorded in the 

 Chou King (Chapter Liu Ngao), in which 

 the animal is referred to as being four feet 

 high, and trained to attack men of a strange 

 race. Aristotle, who knew the breed as the 

 Canis indicus, considered that it might be 

 a cross between a dog and a tiger, and of 

 what other dog was it that Gratius Faliscus 



THIBET MASTIFF (WITH SHORN COAT). 



IMPORTED FROM INDIA BY 



HR.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES IN 1906. 



Photograph by W. P. Dando, F.Z.S. 



wrote in his " Carmen Venaticum," Sunt 

 qui seras alunt, genus intractabilis irae ? 

 This " untamable wrath " remains a charac- 

 teristic of the Thibet Mastiff to this day. 



Great size and a savage disposition have 

 always been attributed to this dog. Marco 

 Polo, who made an expedition into Central 

 Asia and Mongolia, compared it in size 

 with the ass, and one can imagine that 

 Ktesias had these dogs in mind when, 

 writing of his sojourn in the East, he de- 

 scribed the Griffins that defended the high 

 mountains north of Persia, as a kind of 

 four-footed bird of the size of a wolf, with 

 paws like those of the lion, the body covered 



with black feathers, red on the chest. Let 

 us substitute shaggy hair for feathers and 

 we have the black and tan Thibet dogs, 

 whose inhospitable reception of travellers 

 invading the mountain fastnesses might 

 well deter the stranger from inquiring too 

 closely into the exact nature of their body 

 covering. 



It is a credible theory that the Asiatic 

 Mastiff, imported into Europe in the days 

 of early intercommunication between East 

 and West, became the ancestor of the old 

 Molossian dog, and, consequently, a forebear 

 of our own Bandog. This is the theory of 

 Mr. M. B. Wynn, the erudite historian of 

 the English Mastiff, and one sees no reason 

 to dissent from it. 



The first Thibet dog known to have been 

 brought to England was presented by 

 George IV. to the newly instituted Zoological 

 Gardens. Two very good examples of the 

 breed were brought home from India by 

 H.M. The King, in 1876, and one of the 

 pair, Siring, was repeatedly pictured in 

 canine literature in illustration of the true 

 type of the breed, until a similar repre- 

 sentative appeared in Mr. H. C. Brooke's 

 D'Samu. This last-named specimen was 

 24 inches in height, and about 100 pounds in 

 weight. He had a magnificent ruff and 

 mane of outstanding hair, and in type he 

 remains second only to Sir William Ingram's 

 Bhotean. He had been in England eight 

 years when he died at the ripe age of fourteen. 

 He was a good watch, but somewhat morose, 

 wishing only to be left alone both by other 

 dogs and by humans. Mr. Brooke informs 

 me of the interesting circumstance that 

 regularly in the month of October D'Samu 

 took on a strange restlessness of disposition 

 which lasted for about a fortnight. He 

 would refuse food and would wander all 

 night about his compound moaning plain- 

 tively, and on several such occasions he broke 

 down his fence and escaped. At other 

 times a fence of thread would restrain him. 

 The only reasonable inference to be drawn 

 from this recurrent restlessness is that the 

 dog's nomadic instincts were asserting them- 

 selves. His ancestral kith and kin are said 

 to have been for generations migratory 



