Yap! A Short History of Small Dogs by Stephanie Howard-Smith

🎧 Paired Listening — Quiche Lorraine by The B-52’s 

🌊 Acqua Alta — +130 (Passerelle!)

📖 Read curled up next to a furry friend

In Yap! A Short History of Small Dogs, Stephanie Howard-Smith gives a brilliantly witty and swift account of the history of our furry little friends and the roles they have occupied in our lives since Roman times. What emerges is the realization that the lives of lapdogs of centuries past are not so different from those of today. Neither, as we will see, are the charges made against their owners, especially when those owners happen to be women.

From the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the marriage bed of a critical 18th-century French ruler, little dogs have stayed loyally by the sides of their humans, dead, alive, or distracted. In return, we’ve memorialized their tiny bodies in tombstones, paintings, taxidermy, photographs, prose, poems, and songs. Their presence in our laps and at our feet has always meant a great deal, and has always caused a great stir.

The one constant throughout history is the use of small-dog ownership as a vehicle for expressing broader cultural anxieties, especially against women. It’s all there in the word yap. The diminutive sound of those three letters evokes the high-pitched staccato call of a Chihuahua, while a German Shepherd gets the authoritative bark or woof. Small dogs yap; women yap. Both are accused of being shrill, frivolous, overindulged, and too loud for the space and body they occupy. Contempt for small dogs has rarely stopped at the animal itself. More often, it has provided a convenient path to ridicule the person holding the other end of the leash.

Stephanie Howard-Smith’s brief but full account of the history of small dogs touches nearly every subject you might have questions about: morality, the Church, the afterlife, pedigree, the billion-dollar pet industry, and even the changing tide of the poodle haircut.

There is one small-dog story, however, that Yap! only brushes past, and, writing from Venice, I can hardly do the same. In the courtyard of a private home-turned-art museum, tucked into a corner behind a stone gazebo, lie the ashes of Peggy Guggenheim and her fourteen beloved dogs. Peggy was the de facto queen of Venice long after the Doges had left and the noble family palazzi along the Grand Canal were emptying out. She ruled the lagoon from a private gondola, hosting parties populated by the rich and talented and, most importantly, toting a string of Lhasa Apsos around with her everywhere. And that means everywhere.

Yap! A Short History of Small Dogs is about the way in which the Peggy Guggenheims of the world have existed in tandem with their tiny four-legged friends for centuries, all the while facing the same slew of insults and assumptions, packaged anew every few hundred years. Not even the Industrial Revolution, the invention of electricity, or, say, war, can stop a man from hating a woman with a passion for her little dog.

Howard-Smith has written a history that is funny, strange, moving, and remarkably expansive for its size. Like its subjects, Yap! is small, but has rather a lot to say.

Yap! A Short History of Small Dogs by Stephanie Howard-Smith is published by Granta on October 8 in the UK.

Many thanks to Granta for providing The Venetian Standard with an advance review copy.