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# Dogs and the Stories We Tell About Them
- URL: https://goodoil.news/dogs-and-the-stories-we-tell-about-them/
- Published: 2026-11-06T21:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-06T20:59:59.000Z
- Description: Our closest animal companions have inspired us for millennia.
- Author: Lushington Brady
- Tags: Culture

For most of my life I wasn’t a ‘dog person’. Through the ’80s and ’90s my animal companions were a succession of cats. I still belong to a cat, but about 25 years ago, I homed the red kelpie my mum couldn’t look after any more. From then on, I was hooked. Ever since, I’ve been a dog and cat person. Aussie working dogs, specifically: heelers and kelpies.

That beautiful, smart and incredibly loyal red dog brought back to me the special bond between dog and human that I hadn’t experienced since my early teens.

That special bond is one of the oldest in human history. While we have spent the last few million years evolving away from our nearest genetic cousins, we’ve spent the last 20,000–40,000 years evolving closer to canines. Ever since the first humans tempted over those wolves who’d been sniffing around the campfire for scraps, humans and dogs have become inseparable.

It’s little wonder, then, that dogs feature so heavily in the stories we humans tell each other.

The oldest of those stories are the ones where the dog stands at the border between worlds. The Egyptians gave the god of mummification, Anubis, the head of a jackal, which is a canny choice for a culture that took the afterlife seriously and knew what sort of creature turned up around graveyards. The Greeks posted Cerberus at the gates of the underworld, a three-headed hound whose job was to keep the dead in and the unauthorised living out. It is, when you think about it, the most effective border control in the history of the world, and a good deal cheaper than anything Canberra has managed.

The Norse had Garmr, who is fated to kill the god Týr at Ragnarök, and to die by his hand in turn. He is often muddled with Fenrir, the wolf who dispatches Odin, but the surviving sources keep them distinct. Japanese folklore has the inugami, literally the *dog-spirit*, conjured by those after supernatural power, and, in some Slavic traditions, a black dog turning up unannounced, or one howling in the night, was read as a death-warning. Dogs, it seems, have always inspired a healthy mixture of love and dread, depending on whether they were on your side.

Not every dog in myth is a fearsome sentinel, though. The finest of the lot is a small moment in a very long poem. In **Homer**’s *Odyssey*, Odysseus returns to Ithaca after 20 years, disguised as a beggar. Nobody recognises him: not the suitors, not the servants, not, for a time, his own household. But the old hound Argos, neglected and flea-ridden on the dung heap, knows his master at once.

> [*Old and weak,*](https://www.reddit.com/r/FolkloreAndMythology/comments/1xj0x20/dogs%5Fguardians%5Fbest%5Ffriends%5Fand%5Fbig%5Fhearts/?ref=goodoil.news) he had waited long enough to see the man he loved one last time. Once Odysseus had passed, Argos died.

Three thousand years on, it still lands like a punch. The one scene in **Christopher Nolan**’s otherwise forgettable *Odyssey* to make a grown man shed a tear. Twenty years of absence and the dog is the only one who isn’t fooled.

Then there is the *Mahabharata*, which has what may be the best dog story ever told. At the end of his long journey, King Yudhishthira climbs towards heaven with a stray who has followed him loyally the whole way. Indra offers him entry, on condition that he leave the dog behind. Yudhishthira refuses. No heaven, he says, is worth abandoning a creature who has trusted him. The dog then reveals himself as Dharma, the god of righteousness, and the whole thing turns out to have been a test. A man’s goodness, the epic suggests, is measured not by his power but by his readiness to protect someone weaker than himself.

History, as ever, has its own dogs. **Balto** led the final team of sled dogs that carried diphtheria serum into Nome, Alaska, in the winter of 1925, though credit is also due to the many other dogs and mushers who made the relay possible. And in Japan, **Hachikō** kept returning to the railway station to wait for the master who would never come home, year after year. We have had a long time to invent stories about loyalty, but the dogs got there first and with no help from us.

Our own childhoods are full of them. Pluto and Goofy, Scooby-Doo and his cowardly mate Shaggy, Lassie, Beethoven, the Dalmatians, Lady and her Tramp. *All Dogs Go to Heaven* even offers a theology, which is more than can be said for most modern churches. **Channing Tatum**’s *Dog* sends a damaged ex-soldier across country with a military dog called Lulu, and both have to relearn how to trust. *Naruto*’s Kiba has Akamaru, and *Harry Potter*’s Hagrid has Fluffy, a three-headed hound guarding a trapdoor, which is Cerberus with a fresh coat of paint.

The common thread is simple. A dog does not care what we earn, what we do for a living or how clever we imagine ourselves to be. It knows our footsteps, our habits and our moods, and it is glad, quite simply, that we have come home. As *Marley & Me* puts it:

> “A dog doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.”

Mum’s old red kelpie, did exactly that. Years later, on an off-chance visit to the pound, I came home with a blue heeler. My wife, who was not impressed at first, was buying her toys within days. My eldest, who grumbled that we didn’t need a dog, soon had her sleeping on his bed. Now, I’m the special human to a black kelpie who’s my constant shadow – when he isn’t telling me off for some infraction or other.

That’s dogs for you. The stories, from Homer to Hollywood, say the rest.

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