Anything can be sold by using a dog or a child

‘How intelligently it can look, it almost speaks’ – many dog owners say this about their faithful pets. One of their agilest parts is the ears, which allow them to make varied ‘faces’. Dogs’ most refined sensory organ is their ears. Their hearing is perfect because it moves in a wide range, thus they can sense sounds that humans cannot. We all know the floppy or the jauntily upstanding ears, don’t we?

The anatomical conformation of dogs is very interesting, they can see in the dark better than humans, but their colour vision is rather weak. Researches showed that they can make a difference among complex geometrical forms and they are extremely interested in shadow-figures, reflections in the mirror and doggy videos, which make us humans very happy, to admit the truth. But our pets are also famous for being active characters of the advertisement industry. People use them to promote pet food and equipment among others and there is a great deal of dog videos on the internet due to their popularity. Most enthusiastic dog owners also create Instagram profiles for their pets, which makes other people and of course their own wallets contented.

The world organisation of cynology distinguishes nine autochthonous Hungarian dog breeds: puli, pumi, mudi, kuvasz, komondor, Hungarian vizsla (short-haired and wire-haired types), Hungarian greyhound and Transylvanian hound. In the photo of our collection, singer Márta Eggerth is hugging a puli dog.

Now that the ‘dog days of summer’ have gone, we feel that winter is going to be as cold as a ‘three-dog night’ and we ‘work like a dog’. The word ‘dog’ is often used as a synonym for swear-words in many countries in the world. In certain cases it is used for euphemism instead of a profane word, for example ‘bitch’ when it is not used in the female dog meaning.

The explanation is simple. Dogs play an inferior role in humans’ society. The pejorative meaning occurs in sayings like: lead a dog’s life, as sick as a dog, a bitch of a day, son of a bitch. Fortunately, it is not the only way that humans remember their best friends.

The first dog, whose name was related to faith, was Odysseus’ dog Argos. He was waiting for his master to return for twenty years. Naturally, you know a lot of examples for faithful dogs in history. Hachiko got a statue in Shibuya (Japan) because he was waiting for his master (who died) at Shibuya station for several months in vain. Famous Hungarian dogs are: the police dog Kántor, famous for his stories immortalized in a film series, the rescue dog Mancs, who took part in several rescuing actions. 

There are also many film and cartoon dog-characters: Frakk, Bogáncs and the kind doggies in István Homoki-Nagy’s films. Honestly, it is not only the internal features that we love about them; we also appreciate their beauty. The newsreel excerption below is reporting on a classic dog exhibition.

TÉ
Translated by Zita Aknai