In Good Queen Victoria’s day, you did not buy your pet food at the supermarket. It was delivered door-to-door.

Kathryn Hughes shares a fascinating detail of daily life in London in times gone by.

On January 10, 1901, twelve days before Queen Victoria did the unthinkable and died, 250 cat’s meat men sat down to a slap-up dinner at a restaurant in Holborn, on the edge of central London. A cat’s meat man was an itinerant vendor who pushed a cart of cheap offal and horsemeat around residential streets while calling out something that sounded like “CA-DOE-MEE!” Sometimes he stopped at a house and delivered a pre-ordered package of meat, often threaded onto a long skewer. At the same time, his shout was the signal for householders and domestics to come out onto the pavement and buy their pets’ food straight from the barrow. For all that cats were supposed to cater for themselves by catching kitchen pests, urban owners increasingly found the money from the household budget to supplement their board.

Within minutes of the cat’s meat man embarking on his circuit, the barrow would be surrounded by felines, some of whom had perfectly good homes to go to and others who did not but still hoped that a sliver of flesh might fall their way. Although there were plenty of grim jokes circulating about how cat’s meat men supplied the toughest meat they could get away with, the fact was that many of these rough diamonds were known for their tender hearts. It was not unusual to spot a cat’s meat man slipping scraps to the hopeful strays that wound around his ankles. He was their guardian, their special friend. Sometimes he could even bring about fairy-tale transformations: no less a lady than the Duchess of Bedford had recently adopted a stray that had been rescued by her local London cat’s meat man.

During the middle years of Victoria’s reign, the cat’s meat man, in his livery of blue apron, shiny black hat, and corduroy trousers, had become a gift to investigative journalists of an anthropological turn. In his London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew plunges deep into their visible yet still mysterious world. According to Mayhew, there were a thousand such traders in London, serving about 300,000 cats, one for every house (allowing for multiple cats in some homes, plus strays).

RTWT

This is the best thing I've ever seen!! pic.twitter.com/ZysZcz6TwI

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) November 26, 2024

Country Life pays tribute to one of everyone’s favorite breeds of dog: the high-spirited (frequently much too high-spirited) Jack russell.

As legend has it, Oxford undergraduate John Russell was strolling dreamily in the meadows of Magdalen College — ‘Horace [poet] in hand, but Beckford [sporting diarist] in head’ — when he came upon an appealing rough-coated terrier bitch called Trump, with a ‘dot, no larger than a penny piece’ on her tail. The Revd E. W. L. Davies, who became Russell’s curate and biographer, wrote that his hunting-mad subject ‘halted as Actaeon might have done when he caught sight of Diana disporting in her bath; but unlike that ill-fated hunter, he never budged… til he had won the prize and secured it for his own’.

Tan-and-white Trump became the foundation bitch for generations of what would become known as the Parson Russell terrier, predominantly white with a few patches of colour, long-legged enough to keep up with hounds, but compact enough to fit down a fox’s earth. And the original retained her fame: Edward Vll commissioned a painting of Trump, which hangs at Sandringham in Norfolk.

RTWT

Country Life celebrates Britain’s Worst Behaved Pets.I think this one’s the winner.

It’s awkward enough having your pet swipe other people’s meals, but it is quite another matter when they consume each other — especially in public. During one now legendary Sunday lunch hosted by the late Maj Tim Riley of Blencowe, Cumbria, his black labrador slunk into the dining room, where he proceeded to sick up a cat under a sideboard. Without breaking the conversation, Maj Riley got up and deftly placed his napkin over the remains. It had, we are told, a really bushy tail.

RTWT

KHQ-Q6:

Tilly, the 2-year-old Border Collie who was ejected from a car Sunday during a crash, has been found.

He was found on a sheep farm, where he had apparently taken up the role of sheep herder.

According to Tilly’s owner, he has lost some weight since Sunday’s crash and is now drinking lots of water but is otherwise healthy.

Great Leader

HT: Vanderleun.

HT: Vanderleun.

Tilda Swinton is apparently one of the creators.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

The neighborhood around Howard University in D.C. has been improving, i.e. more whites are moving in, and white residents have taken to walking their dogs on the University’s grassy campus.

Howard students have freaked out over this horrible invasion of Black space, and complaints about “gentrification,” “colonization,” and memories of bloodhounds pursuing Little Eva and police dogs barking at demonstrators in Birmingham are flying.

Last Friday, the President of Howard issued a statement discouraging bringing dogs, other than service animals, onto the private university’s “beautiful,sacred space that provides comfort and, in many ways, sanctuary.” Meaning sanctuary from people with insufficient melanin.

Black news and cultural sites today are filled with expressions of the most extreme sorts of group chauvinism and racial animosity related to this story. One example

Hussar, enormous Taigan puppy, just about in my lap.

Dogs!

We have two: Uhlan, a 9-year-old Tazy (a breed of sighthound from Kazakhstan) and Hussar, a one-year-old Taigan (a breed of sighthound from Kyrgysztan, a member of the first litter born in North America). (I have friends who are into weird dogs.)

The tazy is significantly smaller, but smarter and a lot more feral. Uhlan has all the unspoiled-by-civilization-and-domestication wildness and complete lack of subordination that crazy sighthound fanatics particularly prize.

The taigan is huge, black, and goofy. He is a lummox with no sense whatsover of how much space he takes up and no regard for human property. He is fanatically playful, in the manner of a puppy, and he loves to fetch and retrieve dog toys.

The tazy is like the Dragon Smaug in The Hobbit. He considers all dog toys his and will collect them and then sit gloating over the pile of them.

Smaug’s greed recently reached a new peak. When he hears the impact of a toy I’ve thrown for the puppy, Smaug will deliberately come downstairs, confiscate the toy, and remove it to his hoard upstairs.

Last night, Karen and I were watching a movie, and the puppy wanted to play, so he brought over the flat, entirely disemboweled rag that was once some kind of stuffed animal. Karen and I were distracted by the movie, so Uhlan’s sudden arrival was overlooked. A violent dog tussle and spinning canine tornado erupted in front of us, which quickly took hold of the power cord of my brand-new $1500 laptop PC, yanking it right off the table and hurling it to the floor.

The new Lenovo survived, but the male end of the power cord was twisted and bent. Last night, I thought it still made an electrical connection, but I was wrong. That cord is as dead as Fogarty’s goat.

I ordered a replacement last night. $47.00 and change, discounted from Amazon. It’s due to arrive tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m back on my older, slower machine.

If anybody is planning any medical experiments, I know where he can get a couple of dogs.

It is also monsooning here and satellite Internet is out a great deal. Blogging will be light.