Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1544027
From pharaohs' tombs to Pharrell Williams' runway, our love affair with dogs predates agriculture, has outlasted every monarchy, and currently commands a multi-billion-dollar economy. By Paul Jebara. Photograph Khristio. T he dog has outlasted every empire it ever served. It survived the pharaohs, the Forbidden City, the fall of Versailles, and the entire British monarchy. It has been worshipped, weaponized, legislated, commodified, and loved in ways that would embarrass most marriages. And, at no point in this arrangement has the dog appeared to be the one compromising. Pick any century, and the evidence is there. Alexander the Great founded a city in the Punjab around 325 B.C. and named it after his dog. Greek biographer Plutarch recorded the fact without so much as a raised eyebrow. Twenty-four centuries later, Barbra Streisand paid thousands to clone her coton de tulear and told Variety she was disappointed. "You can clone the look of a dog," she said, "but you can't clone the soul." The conqueror and the icon wanted the same thing. Neither quite got it. The bond predates agriculture by roughly 20,000 years, which means humans committed to dogs before they committed to wheat. Intef II, who ruled around 2100 B.C., had his four hunting dogs carved by name onto his funerary stele. One name is now illegible, worn smooth by 40 centuries of sand and political upheaval. The other three survived, which is more than most human legacies manage. Inside the courts, where the laws were drafted, a different species of absurdity flourished. At Versailles, Louis XIV maintained more than 300 hunting dogs in a sprawling kennel complex, and his personal favorites wore diamond-studded collars and slept on satin. Halfway across the world, in the Forbidden City, Empress Dowager Cixi ran shih tzu breeding programs so elaborate that palace eunuchs competed to produce dogs matching imperial specifications, the animals housed in silk- lined quarters and hand-fed by servants. Every shih tzu alive today descends from just 14 dogs and one Pekingese smuggled out of China between 1928 and 1952, a genetic bottleneck that would horrify any modern breeder but that also makes the breed a kind of living imperial relic. Frederick the Great of Prussia kept Italian greyhounds, which he called his "marquises de Pompadour" as a jibe at the French royal mistress. He wanted to be buried beside them on the vineyard terrace at Sanssouci, but his nephew ignored the instructions, and it took 205 years and German reunification to finally honor the request. Eleven greyhounds had been waiting there the whole time. His last recorded words, possibly apocryphal, were reported as: "Cover the dog, he's shivering." Hollywood got involved in the 1920s and never quite recovered. Rin Tin Tin, rescued as a nursing puppy from a bombed German kennel near Flirey, France, in September 1918, was earning $1,000 a week at Warner Bros. within five years while his human co-stars made $150. Toto, the cairn terrier who played Dorothy's companion in The Wizard of Oz, earned $125 a week in 1939, outpacing 124 of the Munchkin performers, and by the time Tinkerbell t h e C h i h u a h u a appeared tucked inside a handbag on The Simple Life in 2003, the formula had shifted from on- screen heroism to tabloid accessory. Shelters termed the fallout Paris Hilton Syndrome, a wave of impulse purchases so catastrophic that by 2014, 75 percent of dogs arriving at Oakland shelters were Chihuahuas. Los Angeles resorted to airlifting the surplus to New Hampshire. The American Kennel Club, founded in Philadelphia in 1884 with nine recognized breeds, all of them hunting dogs, now registers 205, and the shifts in that registry track broader cultural appetites with eerie precision. The Labrador retriever held the top popularity spot for 31 consecutive years before the French bulldog dethroned it in 2022 on a 1,000 percent registration surge over a single decade, and the Frenchie's provenance contains its own whiplash: Originally companions of Parisian lace- makers and sex workers in the 19th century, they went from brothels to Buckingham Palace in less than 100 years. Americans spent $860 million on Halloween costumes for their pets last year. The top costume was a pumpkin. Nobody founds a city for a creature they merely tolerate. Nobody clones one, or waits two centuries to be buried beside one, or recruits a psychic to ask one how it's doing on the other side. Somewhere, right now, a goldendoodle in a stroller is being pushed down a sidewalk — and it is winning. 57