Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

he same issue of the monthly magazine
included photographs of Winston Churchill
patting a Great Dane and of a Kerry Blue
champion. There were adverts including
those for Hackbridge Kennels to which dogs
could be evacuated for ‘the duration’, Spratts
dog food ‘still carrying on!’ and canine gas masks
and gas –proof kennels. The editorial written at
the height of the so-called Battle of Britain was
headed with the much-used epithet ‘We can take
it’, endorsing the myth of a resilient Britain
standing alone. [iii]
This jocular advert is aimed at dog lovers.
The cartoon bulldog, recognised as a specific
breed by the Kennel Club from the 1870s, wears
its regulation collar and acts symbolically for
Britain reassuring the nervous puppy. As Steve
Baker has argued ‘any understanding of the
animal is inseparable from the knowledge of its
cultural representation’: Britain and bulldogs go
together. [iv] T
The dogs’ male gender is
NERVOUS DOGS
NEED ADMIN, SON!
This advert comes from a British magazine The Tail Wagger, October 1940. The Tail- Waggers Club had been
founded in 1928 to promote dog welfare stating, ‘The love of animals, and especially of dogs, is inherent in nearly
all Britishers’ and by 1930 numbered some 300,000 members. [i] All dogs were eligible for membership, not just
those from established breeds. By July 1930 it had become a general legal requirement that all dogs should wear
collars and the club and magazine endorsed such measures. [ii]
Text by Hilda Kean
61
emphasised by the language: ‘sir’ and ‘son’.
However this particular ‘bulldog’ would not have
been eligible for show since he has no testicles-
this absence is clearly displayed given the angle
of the image. Despite his firm four-footed stance
and iconic status this great British bulldog has no
balls, rather like the depiction of the former
deputy prime minister John Prescott in Steve
Bell’s The Guardian cartoons. In the image of an
emasculated bulldog ‘full of sound and fury and
signifying nothing’ with collar but no balls -
Prescott’s crucifixion on croquet mallets was a
particular delight- I always knew I was reading a
stand-in for a blustering man. [v] But here the
bulldog is not intended to represent a particular
human.
The querulous complaint of the puppy
plays upon a war rumour. In 1940 measures were
taken to regulate food for non-human animals. In
Britain a Waste of Food Order obliged animal
keepers to act reasonably, while stressing that