A little fun for Robbie Burns Day!

Fair fa’ your honest, pebbled face,
Great chieftain o’ the dog food race!
Aboon a’ treats ye tak your place.
In nourishing sustenance ye dinna fail.
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my tail.

My groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your heaped up nuggets like a golden hill,
You warm my belly against the chill
In time o’ need.
While thro’ your pores aromas fill
My nose and heid.

I bend my heid an’ tak a bite
And chomp ye up wi’ ready slight
Chewing your crumbly entrails bright,
My nose thrust deep to trench a ditch;
O ye are such a glorious sight
Crunchie-munchin’ rich!

Then, paw for paw, they stretch an’ strive;
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld guid doggie, maist like to rive,
“Bethankit!” hums.

Is there that owre his mishmash stew,
Or withered bone he canna chew,
Or tasteless mush wad mak him spew
Wi’ perfect sconner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Bedevilled mutt! See him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither’d rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash
His sma’ paw a nit;
Thro’ bluidy flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the doggie, kibble fed,
The trenbling earth resounds his tread,
His waggly tail waves like a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle;
An’ mane, an fur, an’ ears will sned
Like taps o’ thrissle.

Ye Pow’rs, wha mak canines your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
The doggie world wants nae skinking ware,
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish a gratefu’ prayer,
Gie us oor kibble!

Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796) (also known as Rabbie Burns, Scotland’s favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard) was a poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland.

A pioneer of the Romantic movement, he became an important source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism. A cultural icon in Scotland and among Scots who have relocated to other parts of the world (the Scottish Diaspora), celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries.

His themes included republicanism (he lived during the French Revolutionary period) and Radicalism which he expressed covertly in Scots Wha Hae, Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, commentary on the Scottish Kirk of his time, Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising (carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs, and so forth).

Burns and his works were a source of inspiration to the pioneers of liberalism, socialism and the campaign for Scottish self-government, and he is still widely respected by political activists today, ironically even by conservatives and establishment figures because after his death Burns became drawn into the very fabric of Scotland’s national identity.

Read Robert Burns’ “Address to a Haggis” and its English translation. Haggis recipe, history and cultural significance included.

Read “The Complete Works of Robert Burns” at Project Gutenberg

Find out what’s really in pet food. The Red Star Café reviews a startling CBC/Yap Films documentary: A Dog’s Breakfast.

My name is Beautiful Joe, and I am a brown dog of medium size. I am not called Beautiful Joe because I am a beauty. Mr. Morris, the clergyman, in whose family I have lived for the last twelve years, says that he thinks I must be called Beautiful Joe for the same reason that his grandfather, down South, called a very ugly colored slave-lad Cupid, and his mother Venus.

I do not know what he means by that, but when he says it, people always look at me and smile.

In 1892, Halifax novelist Margaret Marshall Saunders travelled to the small lakeside town of Meaford, Ontario to visit her brother and his fiancée, Louise Moore.

The Moores had adopted a mistreated dog. Louise’s father had found him malnourished and bleeding, with his ears and tail chopped off, and although he looked pathetic, the Moores named him Beautiful Joe.

On her return to Halifax, Saunders heard of a contest sponsored by the American Humane Education Society. It challenged entrants to write a novel based on the 1877 bestseller Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell, in which a horse recounts tales of cruelty and kindness to inspire humane treatment of horses.

Saunders wrote Joe’s story. In her manuscript, she renamed the adoptive family Morris and, following contest rules, set the tale in the United States – in the fictional town of Fairport, Me. She won.

The wonderfully successful book, entitled “Black Beauty,” came like a living voice out of the animal kingdom. But it spake for the horse, and made other books necessary; it led the way. After the ready welcome that it received, and the good it has accomplished and is doing, it follows naturally that some one should be inspired to write a book to interpret the life of a dog to the humane feeling of the world. Such a story we have in “Beautiful Joe.”

The story speaks not for the dog alone, but for the whole animal kingdom. Through it we enter the animal world, and are made to see as animals see, and to feel as animals feel.

~~ From the introduction to the Phoenix Edition

Beautiful Joe: An Autobiography appeared in 1894. By 1900, its sales stood just shy of 1 million. By 1939, it had sold 7 million copies in more than 10 languages. Around 1914, Saunders settled to Toronto and went on to write more than two dozen books. She died in 1947, at 85.

The book was out of print but, over the years, the dog’s grave had been located and a cairn built. A municipal Beautiful Joe Park had also been founded on the property once owned by the Moores.

In 1994 – the novel’s centenary – the Beautiful Joe Heritage Society was formed, and it got the book republished. The society held dog-oriented parades and put up statues in the park. One was a sculpture of Beautiful Joe, another a police K-9 memorial.

In 2002, the society also built a memorial to Sirius, the one police dog killed in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His partner, New York Port Authority officer David Lim, attended the unveiling with his superior officer.

Attached to the statue is an iron cross, forged from a fallen World Trade Center beam.

In the fall of 2007, vandals took a chisel to the memorial, in an attempt to remove the cross. They failed.

And, like Beautiful Joe, the statue has since been lovingly restored.

.

K-9 Sirius, Badge #17 was a yellow Labrador Retriever, born in January 1997. He became an Explosive Detection Dog upon graduation from the Port Newark K-9 Center on July 15, 2000.

Sirius and his handler, Police Officer David Lim, Badge #1219, were assigned to the World Trade Center. Their duties there included searching vehicles entering the WTC Complex,
clearing unattended bags and sweeping areas for V.I.P. safety.

Toronto Star

Beautiful Joe Heritage Society

Read Beautiful Joe online

Meaford Museum