Cruelty to Dogs

Chapter 2 ‘The Children’s Hour’: Cruelty to dogs The priest had a dog. And he loved it. It ate a piece of meat. He killed it. – Russian nursery rhyme The title of this chapter alludes to the Hollywood film ‘The Children’s Hour’ (1961) based on the 1934 play by Lillian Hellman who in turn wrote it around a real life event in Scotland.1 Produced after the end of the 1950s, a decade closely orientated to family values, this film over- turned the perception of children as innocent creatures in matters of human sexuality. It shows pre-teen girls in a private boarding school orchestrating a major intrigue against their two schoolmistresses by accusing them of having a lesbian relationship. The well-read girls observe and collect pieces of evidence that lead them to conclude that the schoolmistresses have romantic leanings towards one another. This launches a series of events that lead to an innocent woman’s sui- cide. The title of the film encapsulates the double irony of children’s ability to penetrate the secrets of sexual attraction and to plot a major intrigue. The film also challenges adult naïveté, prompting its viewers to reconsider their assumptions of childhood innocence. This chapter examines stories from the Russian literary canon that educate adults on the subject of children’s wickedness through the narratalogical use of a dog. Most of these stories are not written for children; in some of those cases when they did become part of juvenil- ia this happened by default. The texts chosen for analysis in this chapter include episodes that contain manifestations of the sadistic or unkind treatment of dogs by children. Some relate to children’s sexuality through contacts with dogs and other animals. Others reveal in- 1 The Children’s Hour. Dir. William Wyler, screenplay John M. Hayes, USA, 1961. 80 Political Animals stances of extreme cruelty: in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov a boy feeds a hungry street dog with bread into which he has put a pin;2 Anton Chekhov in his short story ‘Kashtanka’ (1887) describes a boy who tortures a female dog by feeding it a piece of meat that is attached to a string which he then pulls out of its stomach.3 Alexander Kuprin’s (1870-1938) ‘The White Poodle’ (1908) draws our attention to class differentiation amongst children in the story of a spoilt rich boy selfishly possessive of the working dog belonging to a working boy. Although the rich boy does not torture the dog physically, his unkind nature makes the dog suffer. In ‘The Elephant’ (1907), Kuprin enters into the world of a child’s unconscious, the world defined by Freud as a child’s ‘sexual life’.4 Behavioural psychologists note that the majority of children who abuse insects or small pets do so as part of the process of learning about the world: how the spider is put together, what separate parts of an insect will do if not connected to the whole; whether a bird can fly if a wing is torn off, and so on.5 Data on criminal adults, however, suggest that a significant number of killers abused pets in their childhood. Russian literature, in the case of the authors analysed in this chapter, has produced motifs that recognise these behavioural patterns and drives in children. In The Brothers Karamazov children learn about the world by observing dogs’ sexual behaviour: this is regarded as part of the ‘normal’ learning process. Yet, in the same novel and in Chekhov’s story ‘Kashtanka’, children abuse dogs in a way that can be classified as zoo-sadism. These texts are thus directed at adults to alert them to children’s potential sadistic inclinations and to promote a more realistic psychology-based attitude towards children. At the end of this chapter I analyse a little-known collection of children’s stories about dogs: Sobaka: rasskazy o sobakakh (The Dog: Stories about Dogs, 1883) as an example of an educational counter-narrative to the 2 F.M. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Leningrad: izd-vo Nauka, Vols. XIV and XV, 1976. 3 A.P. Chekhov, “Kashtanka”, in Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh. Mos- cow: izd-vo Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955, Vol. V, 452-472. 4 Sigmund Freud, “The Archaic Features and Infantilism of Dreams”, in Introduc- tory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. James and Alix Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library, London: Penguin Books, 1991, Vol. I, 235-250. 5 Arnold Arluke, Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves. Phila- delphia: Temple UP, 2006. .

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