updates

I noodled around with two earlier posts about the "turnspit" dog. Apparently I'm kind of obsessed with it!

"hoop, hoop!" / more on the turnspit dog

I posted last week about the turnspit, a variety of now-"extinct" small English working dogs used to turn meat on spits and perform other tasks involving repetitive circular motion. When I learned about these dogs, the following scene from Frank Norris' classic - or, as I prefer to categorize it, crazy - naturalist novel McTeague immediately came to mind:

The Sieppes lived in a little box of a house... In the backyard was a contrivance for pumping water from the cistern that interested McTeague at once. It was a dog-wheel, a huge revolving box in which the unhappy black greyhound spent most of his waking hours. It was his kennel; he slept in it. From time to time during the day Mrs. Sieppe appeared on the back doorstep, crying shrilly, "Hoop, hoop!" She threw lumps of coal at him, waking him to his work.

In this early scene, the titled character is visiting his girlfriend Trina at her family home - both blissfully unaware that her greed and his supposedly "crude, primitive nature" are about to converge in a horrifying spiral of death and destruction. Elsewhere in the book, McTeague's BFF/worst enemy Marcus has an odd job escorting rich people's dogs to and from an animal hospital. Against the backdrop of this emerging veterinary and pet-pampering modernity, the Sieppes' turnspit marks them as decidedly "backwards" people.

(Revised June 30, 2008)

the turnspit

Wikipedia find of the day: the turnspit, a type of working dog that, the entry tells us, went "extinct" after industrialization. The turnspit - or "turnespete," to use the 16th-century spelling - is one of 17 varieties described by Johannus Caius' 1570 treatise Of Englishe Dogges (Google has helpfully digitized the 1880 reprint of the English translation). It's not a "breed" as we understand the term now, but a functional category that basically describes small dogs trained to run in a wheel and perform various menial tasks involving circular motion - butter-churning, flour-milling, and as its name suggests and this sad-funny illustration confirms, turning meat on a spit. Now I'm going to think of my dog Timmy every time I see a gyro machine...

The wiki entry links to this photo with the irresistible caption, "Whisky, the last surviving specimen of a turnspit dog, albeit stuffed" on a Welsh cultural history site:


I'm not sure it makes much sense to talk about the turnspit as "extinct" - presumably dogs like Whisky continued to exist in Great Britain, people just stopped using them as rotisserie motors. What does seem to have died out, at least from the post-industrial United States, is the idea that dogs could be rigged to up to a machine like in this way. Kind of steam punk - or something...

(Revised June 27, 2008)