The history of dogs

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service.

We hear about the invention of the labradoodle, the first dog in space and how a Yorkshire terrier called Smoky became the world's first therapy dog.

Author Mackenzi Lee talks about her book, The History of the World in Fifty Dogs. She discusses Napoleon Bonaparte's turbulent relationship with pugs and the first guide dogs in America.

Plus, the guide dog who saved its owner's life during the 9/11 terror attacks and the man who dressed up as a dog to protest life in post-Soviet Russia.

Contributors:

Wally Conron - dog breeder. Mackenzi Lee - author. Michael Hingson - 9/11 terror attacks survivor. Professor Victor Yazdovsky - Russian immunologist. Oleg Kulik - Russian conceptual artist. Adrian Brigham - friend of American World War II veteran Bill Wynne.

(Photo: Estie the labradoodle and Lola the cockapoo. Credit: Reena Stanton-Sharma)

Transcript

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0:00.0	From Global Current Affairs to Art, Science and Culture.
0:05.0	The documentary from the BBC World Service tells the world's stories.
0:10.0	Search for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:15.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson
0:26.0	the past brought to life this week through first-hand stories about dogs in history and
0:31.1	no dog history would be complete without Liker the first dog in space.
0:35.0	Everybody was very worried for her. There were no systems at the time capable of returning living creatures from the Earth's orbit.
0:43.6	Everyone treated her as a hero.
0:46.4	Plus a remarkably tight bond between man and dog in the Second World War
0:50.8	and a life-saving dog in the 9-11 New York attacks.
0:54.0	She did not at any time act nervous or concerned.
0:57.0	When I kept encouraging her, good girl Rosal,
1:00.0	I was telling her, I'm okay, you can be okay. she focused all the way down that's all coming up later in the
1:06.0	podcast but first it's cute it's fluffy and it shouldn't make you sneeze it's the
1:11.4	labradoodle with an estimated 70,000 worldwide, the Labradoodle
1:16.0	is one of the most popular designer crossbreeds out there. But where did these hypoallogenic
1:21.1	fluffy balls first come from.
1:23.4	George Craver takes us back to Australia
1:25.4	in the late 1980s for the story of this canine creation.
1:34.0	It's 1989 in Melbourne.
1:39.0	Dog breeder Wally Conron looking down at a litter of puppies, that unlike anything he's seen before.
1:48.7	I went to our manager and I said we're going to have trouble with this and he said what do you mean and I said well to be quite honest I said I've opened a Pandora box and I've produced a Frankenstein monster.
	...

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