No real appetite for canines

In a dog-related term from his time, founding father Thomas Jefferson seemed to land upon a phrase he used as a metaphor once in a while. 

Jefferson contemporary Richard Peters, whose “On Sheep-killing Dogs” memoirs for the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture discussed animal husbandry and rural affairs, wrote that American dogs’ taste for preying on livestock and their diseases, including rabies, resulted from improper feeding.  They suffer from, Peters argued, “frequently effects, either immediate or consequent, of keen and long continued hunger; which stimulates to gorging voraciously on whatever…they find.”

“Canine appetite” was used in medical jargon then and our third president employed it to describe his love of poring over letters and books, which he called his “canine appetite for reading.”  Was this genius a bookpooch rather than a bookworm?

Jefferson also wrote that the Marquis de Lafayette had a “canine appetite for popularity and fame.”  If we thought of that in terms of our own era, one could imagine the Frenchman hiring a publicist to maximize appearances on “Entertainment Tonight” or becoming a YouTube star blazing across the Internet.

More interestingly, T.J. shared his life with dogs but not in the rosy, rollicking, companion-loving sense we might hope for.  Perhaps his interactions with dogs are more typical for people two centuries ago as our nation was born. 

The kind people at Monticello pointed me to their website for information about the man and his dogs following my inquiry.  The stories include Jefferson at Le Havre coming back from France with two daughters and Sally Hemings, as well as sixty trees and three dogs. 

Like King Lear, he had been wandering cliffs in a storm—stumbling across a person who’d committed suicide—in pursuit of some shepherd dogs.  The following day, Jefferson noted that he’d acquired a “chienne bergere with pup.”  The dog became known as Bergere and gave birth on the ship while on its transatlantic voyage. 

But was the man who helped author the Declaration of Independence and launched the academical village of the University of Virginia one whom you might see romping the fields of Monticello like Timmy and Lassie?

Sadly, one could argue that, in fact, he was in some ways a dog hater.  “I participate in all your hostility to dogs,” he wrote in 1811, “and would readily join in any plan for exterminating the whole race.”  What?  Those words are plain indeed.  Say it ain’t so, Tom!

It seemed that Bergere was a working dog whose activities included gathering poultry.  Her children were, according to Jefferson, “all remarkeably quiet, faithful, and abounding in the good qualities of the old bitch.” 

A second sheepdog who arrived at the Charlottesville estate from France was named Grizzle.  Grizzle’s offspring were “mischievous” and thus killed, except for one who was kept on a chain.  No one knows what these dogs looked like although one enslaved worker wrote that Jefferson had at some point brought bulldogs over from France. 

While people living in the American countryside during Jefferson’s time killed wolves to protect their livestock, free-roaming dogs also were an issue for farmers.  “In the middle and upper parts of Virginia they are subject to the wolf, and in all parts of it to dogs. These are great obstacles to their multiplication [of sheep].”

A law from the 1750s disallowed slaves taking dogs off plantations unless the slaveowner was bringing dogs along for his own recreation.  Sure, no problem for the property of rich white men!  Meanwhile, dogs on the loose who killed sheep could themselves be killed by the order of the justice of the peace.

After Pennsylvania started a tax on dogs, Virginians became motivated to do the same.  “I like well your outlines of a law for this purpose,” Jefferson wrote in 1811, “but should we not add a provision for making the owner of a dog liable for all the mischeif done by him, and requiring that every dog shall wear a collar with the name of the person inscribed who shall be security for his honest demeanor?”

Lo and behold!  If he were around today, one might imagine this founding father in Richmond lobbying for mandatory leash and confinement laws, as well as microchipping. 

It could be that he would have also advocated for laws requiring humans to properly care for their dogs by providing acceptable nutrition, thereby assisting more than the canine species.  Neglected and hungry dogs “prowl for themselves,” Jefferson wrote, turning them into “the most destructive marauders imaginable.”

“You will see your flock of sheep & of hogs disappearing from day to day,” he added, “without ever being able to detect them in it.”  Virginia’s agricultural community today, so often resistant to legal advancements on behalf of animals, might have gotten behind a Jefferson-led effort for stronger animal control.  Shelters might have supported him too, since many rural agencies often receive hunting dogs let loose and never collected at the end of a hunt.

Unfortunately, Monticello was not a blissful la-la land for animals.  It could be a dangerous place for dogs, who seemed never to be housepets in the glorious mansion. 

Jefferson wrote to his slave overseer that “to secure wool enough, the negroes dogs must all be killed. do not spare a single one.”  One dog was hung after being caught dining on a sheep.  Another died after being tethered “in the broiling sun one broiling day.” 

Yet there must have been some fondness for the canine residents of his Albemarle County home.  In Philadelphia, he received correspondence from daughter Martha that updated him on Bergere’s litters each year along with other news about crops, trees and grandchildren.  

In 1809, trained working dogs were sent to Jefferson by Lafayette from his La Grange estate in France.  These pooches “learn readily to go for the cows of an evening, or for the sheep, to drive up the chickens, ducks, turkies every one into their own house, to keep forbidden animals from the yard, all of themselves and at the proper hour, and are the most watchful house-dogs in the world,” Jefferson penned.

As time passed, descendants of this French canine line were bred by Jefferson’s relatives and others, helping to manifest the historical figure’s vision of “the most careful intelligent dogs in the world” proliferating throughout the newfound nation.  So, perhaps, he would not have been a proponent of spay/neuter?

It is not altogether possible to weigh our third president’s treatment of animals against our own sensibilities.  Two hundred years have passed in the interim; there were no humane societies or SPCAs back in the day.  The ASPCA, which is the granddaddy of U.S. animal protection organizations, was not founded till after the Civil War.  Even people were subject to all manner of inhumane treatment that was—even in the land of liberty and justice—legal.

The dogs of Monticello, as well as the other animals who lived there, no doubt endured conditions that likely would today be prohibited by law in the very commonwealth Jefferson helped to make a self-governing state.  That state now has a save rate for sheltered animals close to 90%, which conventional wisdom considers to be the no-kill standard.  The Old Dominion is a national leader in animal sheltering and adoption.

If he were around today, I like to think a brilliant, enlightened and philosophical leader like Mr. Jefferson would not only disavow slavery, but also advocate with a canine appetite for improving the lives of animals—dogs as well as all species of fauna.  Who knows what bugs he could put in Governor Northam’s ear?

Indeed, I like the idea of him kibitzing with Sissy Spacek at some swanky fundraiser for the Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA right there on the Monticello lawn.  Dogs welcome, of course.