Episode 35: Dogs Behaving Badly

Carole Lambert’s extensive collection of dogs smoking pipes is a delight. She has a popular Instagram profile devoted to it, as well as a website, which says:

‘Follow my regular postings on Instagram about my fifteen-year obsession that has taken me through museums, libraries, historical societies, church bazaars, flea markets, yard sales, friends’ attics, online—anywhere I might find clues about a cultural anomaly—Smoking Dogs. These images are historical documentation that should be considered in their own time, and not by today’s standards concerning tobacco and animal rights.’

She asks if this illustration could be, in fact, the first smoking dog? It’s an illustration from “Old Mother Hubbard,” published in 1805. She astutely notes that the fourth stanza clearly notes the dog’s behavior:

“She went to the butcher’s

To buy him some tripe;

And when she came back,

He was smoking his pipe.”

I love Carole’s observation about pipe smokers: ‘Pipe smokers are often intellectuals—reserved, content, and live in an ambient world of their own. They observe without judgment, and sometimes they radiate an air of a dark, atmospheric library.’ Therefore, if we transfer those characteristics to a dog, we can humorously imagine them to be little gentlemen.

And here, of course, is the painting that made smoking dogs famous: Poker Game, 1894, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge: