Members of the animal kingdom play an integral role in the Holmes tales, from snakes to unknown worms to luminous hounds. As such, they provide a rich source of study for the interested connoisseur of Sherlockiana. The credit for the most frequent appearance of any animal in the canon must go hands down to the dogs. Dogs are involved in the canon from the very first case in Holmes' career ("The Gloria Scott") to the last ("The Lion's Mane"). In the former, Holmes is bitten by his college friend's dog. In the latter... well, we'll get to that shortly.

With this paper, I intend to demonstrate that despite Doyle's real- life love for dogs, his writings reveal a dark and sinister aspect of his psyche. In short, I hope to demonstrate that as Doyle's writing career (and concommitant hatred for Holmes) progressed, the use of dogs in the Sherlockian canon takes on special significance. With the exception of Toby, and later Pompey, all major appearances of dogs in the Sherlock Holmes stories involve cruelty or death. Scenes involving dogs (particularly scenes involving the death or mistreatment of, or cruelty towards, dogs) can be interpreted to represent Doyle's relationship with his most famous creation.

My equation of Holmes with dogs is not pure fancy. In many stories Holmes is compared to dogs. In "The Priory School," for example, Holmes describes himself and Watson as "old hounds." In "A Study in Scarlet" Holmes is described by Watson as both "a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound" and an "amateur bloodhound." In the same story, Holmes claims, "I am one of the hounds and not the wolf." I shall proceed through the canon, in chronological order of publication, discussing each incident in turn.

First, in "A Study in Scarlet," Part I, Ch. 7 ("A Light in the Darkness"), Holmes demonstrates the effectiveness of a suspected poison on an unsuspecting dog:

      "Now would you mind going down and fetching that
   poor little devil of a terrier which has been bad so long,
   and which the landlady wanted you to put out of its pain
   yesterday?"
      I went downstairs and carried the dog upstairs in my arms.
   Its laboured breathing and glazing eye showed that it was not
   far from its end. Indeed, its snow-white muzzle proclaimed
   that it had already exceeded the usual term of canine    
   existence. I placed it upon a cushion on the rug.

   [Later]

      With a perfect shriek of delight he rushed to the box,
   cut the other pill in two, dissolved it, added milk, and
   presented it to the terrier. The unfortunate creature's
   tongue seemed hardly to have been moistened in it before it
   gave a convulsive shiver in every limb, and lay as rigid and
   lifeless as if it had been struck by lightning.

In this, the very first Holmes tale, Doyle was enthusiastic about his characters and had no desire to dispense with them. Note also that the dog in question is killed not out of cruelty or hatred, but rather as an act of kindness, even though Holmes' methods are questionably painful. Similarly, Toby in "The Sign of the Four" is presented very positively, and nothing untoward befalls him. Later in the sequence, however, things take a turn for the worse.

At about the midpoint of the canon, we find that Doyle becomes tired of his creation. He goes so far as to attempt to kill him off ("The Final Problem") by having his creation plunge to his death in the Reichenbach Falls. Doyle was cajoled by his admiring fans, his own mother, and even death threats to resurrect Holmes from his watery grave. In time, he relented and brought us "The Hound of the Baskervilles," albeit grudgingly. It can be assumed that the author bore his creation little love after this point.

With "The Hound of the Baskervilles," Doyle's treatment of canonical dogs takes a more sinister turn. To this point, canine deaths had been the result of mercy or justice, but with "Hound" treatment of dogs turns into blatant cruelty. Is it any coincidence that it is at the precise point when Doyle becomes tired of his creation that we see peculiar things begin to happen to dogs? I make the claim that dogs become Doyle's secret symbol for Holmes, and that the author's treatment of fictional dogs demonstrates the hatred he bore his most popular character. Whether this symbolism was conscious or unconscious, we will never know, but it is present nonetheless.

Consider "The Hound of the Baskervilles." In this tale we are informed that a gigantic, luminous hound of local legend is stalking the moors for Baskerville progeny. Throughout most of the novel, we are led to believe that the hound is evil, a vessel of supernatural vengeance for a sin perpetrated generations earlier. Later we learn that this satanic slander is false--that the hound is no more than a poor, starved beast kept on a lonely isle in the middle of Dartmoor in much the same manner as the Rucastles' hound in "The Copper Beeches" (which by the way, had its brains blown out by Watson). Is it any fault of the dog's that he was kept so? Can we really fault the poor beast, after such ill-treatment, for killing Seldon and attempting to kill Sir Henry Baskerville? I think not. If you or I had been kept under similar circumstances, we might have behaved just as the hound simply out of hunger.

Holmes knows all about the hound at the point when Henry is attacked, but does he even attempt to find and restrain the dog? No. In his pride, Holmes tells no one his theory. Holmes did not steal off quietly in the night, even though he had ample opportunity, to feed the dog, which would have been a much simpler and more effective means of bringing its reign of terror to an end. Thus, bullets had to serve where a simple act of kindness would have sufficed, and the canine agent of terror was brought to a cruel and undeserved end.

Gentle reader, it gets worse.

In "The Abbey Grange" we learn that Sir Eustace Brackenstall, the murder victim, had a mean streak. Says Hopkins:

      "There was a scandal about his drenching a dog
   with petroleum and setting it on fire--her ladyship's
   dog, to make the matter worse--and that was only hushed
   up with difficulty."

Doyle could have chosen an inanimate object for the victim to have set on fire. He could even have chosen a different animal (a parrot or cat, for instance), but he chose a dog. Why?

In "The Sussex Vampire," Holmes investigates the strange behavior of Mrs. Ferguson. In the course of the investigation, Holmes has occasion to note the odd behavior of their dog, Carlo:

      A spaniel had lain in a basket in the corner.
   It came slowly forward towards its master, walking with
   difficulty. Its hind legs moved irregularly and its tail
   was on the ground. It licked Ferguson's hand.
      "What is it, Mr. Holmes?"
      "The dog. What's the matter with it?"
      "That's what puzzled the vet. A sort of paralysis.
   Spinal meningitis, he thought. But it is passing. He'll be
   all right soon--won't you, Carlo?"

It would be bad enough if Doyle had made the dog the victim of such a horrible and debilitating disease, but such was not the case. We learn later that poor Carlo has been the victim, of all things, of curare poisoning! Young Jack, in testing his murderous darts, used the family dog as a guinea pig. Is nothing sacred?

      "If the child were pricked with one of those
   arrows dipped in curare or some other devilish drug,
   it would mean death if the venom were not sucked out
   . . . And the dog! If one were to use such a poison,
   would one not try it first in order to see that it
   had not lost its power?"

Thus, a dog becomes the subject in a premeditated murder attempt. Sir Arthur gleefully adds another item to his growing list of crimes against dogs.

In "The Creeping Man" we see a dog being provoked beyond all reason by Professor Presbury:

      The wolfhound was out now, barking furiously,
   and more excited than ever when it actually caught
   sight of its master. It was straining on its chain
   and quivering with eagerness and rage. The professor
   squatted down very deliberately just out of reach of
   the hound and began to provoke it in every possible
   way. He took handfuls of pebbles from the drive and
   threw them in the dog's face, prodded him with a
   stick which he had picked up, flicked his hands about
   only a few inches from the gaping mouth, and
   endeavoured in every way to increase the animal's fury,
   which was already beyond all control. In all our
   adventures I do not know that I have ever seen a more
   strange sight than this impassive and still dignified
   figure crouching frog-like upon the ground and goading
   to a wilder exhibition of passion the maddened hound,
   which ramped and raged in front of him, by all manner
   of ingenious and calculated cruelty.

Can we really blame the dog when, for the third such incident in the canon, it rips the man's throat out?

The reader may doubt what Sir Arthur had in mind, but the evidence compounds itself soon enough. In "The Lion's Mane," the prime suspect is said to have had a ferocious temper:

      On one occasion, being plagued by a little
   dog belonging to McPherson, he [Ian Murdoch] had
   caught the creature up and hurled it through the
   plate-glass window, an action for which Stackhurst
   would certainly have given him his dismissal had
   he not been a very valuable teacher.

It would have been bad enough if the dog had bounced off the window, but it explicitly went through it, perhaps landing on broken glass, who knows how many floors below, injuring itself further. Yet this unforgiveably violent episode went completely unpunished. Later, Stackhurst even indicates that, despite delivering an injury that must surely have jeopardized the dog's life, Murdoch was forgiven by the dog's owner:

Holmes:      "I seem to remember your telling me once
             about a quarrel over the ill-usage of a
             dog."
Stackhurst:  "That blew over all right."
Holmes:      "But left some vindictive feeling, perhaps."
Stackhurst:  "No, no, I am sure they were real friends."

The astute reader can surely not dismiss this evidence, particularly when grouped with all of the other aforementioned atrocities. However, Doyle did not limit himself to one instance of cruelty to canines in "The Lion's Mane." Later, we learn that the victim's dog shares his painful fate at the hands (tentacles?) of the Cyanea capillata:

      "I saw the faithful little creature, an
   Airedale terrier, laid out upon the mat in the hall.
   The body was stiff and rigid, the eyes projecting,
   and the limbs contorted. There was agony in every
   line of it."

Will it surprise the reader to learn that, in the first draft of "The Lion's Mane," Doyle had intended to embarrass and discredit Holmes by having him ironically outsmarted by a doctor and defeated by a jellyfish? No more appropriate place can be found in the canon for an expression of Doyle's antipathy to his creation, and here we find two such instances.

In "Shoscombe Old Place" Sir Robert Norberton gives away his sister's dog:

      "When did Sir Robert give away his sister's
   dog?"
      "It was just a week ago to-day. The creature was
   howling outside the old wellhouse, and Sir Robert was
   in one of his tantrums that morning. He caught it up,
   and I thought he would have killed it. Then he gave
   it to Sandy Bain, the jockey, and told him to take the
   dog to old Barnes at the Green Dragon, for he never
   wished to see it again."

As this was the penultimate Holmes story, I rather think Doyle is referring to himself and Holmes rather than to Sir Robert and a spaniel. Surely, at this point in his life and after four novels and fifty-three short stories about his most hated character, Doyle "never wished to see it again." Undoubtedly Doyle had devised many horrible schemes for disposing of his main character, perhaps involving petroleum, plate-glass windows, or curare, but found he would not be able to confront his reading public if he pulled another "Final Problem" trick. So, Doyle had Holmes quietly withdraw to the Sussex Downs to raise bees rather than meet a tragic end, and was satisfied to play out his murderous desires on fictional dogs.