bluewaterrider
Senior Member
Originally posted by Robtard
If you want to move onto your point with the White Fang excerpts, it would be nice ...
Sure.
I'd read long ago that Jack London, author of both Call of the Wild and White Fang, was able to write thrilling accounts of dogfights because he had firsthand personal experience. He had intimate knowledge of dogfighting and dog behavior, along with a plethora of other competencies earned from his own frontier life. He supposedly got the idea of White Fang, iirc, because he saw a wolf-dog hybrid that beat just about every dog it ever came up against.
In a very non-coincidental parallel, Chapter 3 of London's White Fang establishes the formidability of its own wolf-dog hybrid, White Fang.
The author takes great pains to convince of it, repeating it several times in several ways and describing various impressive opponents.
If you remember the book,
or read the excerpt I linked,
http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/WhiteFang/4chapter4.html
or simply noted what I bolded and underlined, however
then you know White Fang eventually does meet his match, and that in the form of the very unlikely-seeming combatant Cherokee, which was either an English or an American bulldog.
Why is that significant?
It's significant because bulldogs of today, quite a separate breed from the so-called "pit"bulls that regularly used to feature in the news, are widely regarded as relatively gentle, completely UNsuited-to-fighting family pets.
To see one of these today or even a generation ago, in, say, the 1980s and 1990s "Lucky Dog" commercials, is to wonder why London took so much "artistic license" to have his own ultimate dog lose to one of them.
The answer from most indications, however, was that he didn't.
It was NOT artistic license to suppose the bulldog of London's day could take down an animal like White Fang. They were bred to face far bigger challenges than mere fighting wolves and other dogs.
Read now something most people DON'T know about the way things used to be, one of many striking illustrations discoverable in written accounts of yesteryear ...
(This particular one was found in 1999's Webster's Word Histories, Page 72)
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The low-slung bulldog has bowed front legs that are so far apart that the dog looks as if it were eternally braced for trouble. Indeed its whole body has a sturdy, rock-solid appearance that suggests it could withstand a high wind and not blow over. There was a time when the bulldog needed all the sturdiness it could muster. It also needed plenty of courage, as well as something the breed is NOT characterized by today: ferocity. The bulldog gets its name not from the fact that it resembles a domestic bull but from its use in the cruel and savage sport of bullbaiting.
The bulldog was developed in England centuries ago specifically to attack an angry bull for the amusement of spectators, who could wager on the outcome.
The bull was chained by the neck or leg to a stake in an open arena, and often it was roused to fury by being whipped or by having pepper blown into its nose. Then bulldogs were loosed in the arena. The dogs had been specially trained to grab the bull's sensitive nose. The most successful ones could slip past the bull's horns, seize it by the nose, and hold on, no matter how the bull tried to shake them loose.
There were no winners in bullbaiting, for the bulldogs were often horribly injured or killed, and few bulls succeeded in shaking off the determined dogs. If one did, the spectators simply released more dogs into the arena. When bullbaiting was finally outlawed by an act of the British Parliament in 1835, the bulldog's admirers suffered mixed feelings. As an attack animal the dog had outlived its usefulness.
The bulldog's bred-in savagery could not be tolerated in a family pet.
Yet, admirers did not want to lose the many desirable qualities of this old breed, such as determination and extraordinary courage. So the dog was developed into the compact, muscular creature that it is today, with its former aggressiveness completely eradicated. Its four-square, low-center-of-gravity build has not changed. Nor its undershot jaw. These characteristics helped its ancestors stand their ground and bite tenaciously and powerfully. Its determination remains unaltered, too. In fact, the breed's name is a synonym for tenacity. See also PIT buLL [bull + dog] bullet See ballot. [MF boulette small ball, small missile and boulet cannonball, missile, diminutives of boule ball] bulwark, etc ...
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