Abstract
Seasons form part of changing sensory experiences of urban environments. But it is important to note that, at times, urbanites broke down seasons into smaller slices. The “Dog Days” are a case in point. This term has now passed into urban myth, but the linking of Sirius with the heat of the summer and canine madness during the dog days stretches back to at least the Romans, and was still widely feared and discussed in the nineteenth century. This roundtable intervention aims to recover the meaning and experience of this season within a season using nineteenth-century New York City as a case study. Drawing on newspaper articles, medical reports, and other sources, it will discuss how the dog days were framed as a louche period of sultry heat and canine madness, a time when tempers and the fabric of urban life frayed. Situating itself within urban environmental and sensory history, this essay also aims to bring together climate and animal history. Before the widespread acceptance of germ theory at the end of the nineteenth century, the theory that the heat of the dog days and the strange influence of Sirius caused rabies was hotly debated in the press and among doctors. It also stoked vivid fears of the dog days, which led to material changes in the lives of dogs: muzzling, impoundment, and death. The dog days was a time when the nonhuman agencies of climate and canine seemingly combined in ways that threatened the physical and emotional health of New Yorkers. As such, the dog days stood for the sinister side of summer that was only broken with the arrival of autumnal freshness.
The so-called dog days of summer, which generally occurred at the end of July and early August, were an anxious time in nineteenth-century New York. The oppressive heat associated with the dog days ushered in a febrile atmosphere. The city seemed to warp under the sun, its citizens becoming lazy, louche, and tetchy. The dog days signaled feelings of discomfort and delirium, neatly encapsulated in a wry poem from 1850, penned by George P. Morris, editor of My brain is parched and erring The pavement hot and dry, And not a breath is stirring Beneath the Burning Sky.
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During this torrid time, mad dogs were said to stalk the streets. A dog who looked mad—or who was at least acting a bit strange—faced a policeman’s bullet, the net of a dog catcher, or an alarmed and potentially violent crowd that might give chase. Before the widespread acceptance of germ theory at the end of the nineteenth century, the theory that the heat of the dog days and the strange influence of Sirius the dog star caused rabies was hotly debated in the press and beyond. For those who believed that the dog days were an especially rabid time, public health seemed inextricably bound to seasonality. 2
Those nineteenth-century doctors and veterinarians who believed that hot weather and Sirius had
Dog days panic was not confined to nineteenth-century New York. It was no coincidence that the British cull of street dogs in colonial Bombay in 1832 took place during the height of summer, nor that the Parisian police authorities always published the rules of their anti-rabies dog control measures in summertime.
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To the exasperation of skeptical doctors and veterinarians, the burgeoning newspapers of nineteenth-century metropolis helped keep the dog days in the minds of their readers. Journalists repeatedly stoked fears of the dog days by highlighting the link between heat and rabies and breathlessly reporting how crowds chased mad dogs through the streets under the punishing sun. Yet they also bemoaned how this time of year also saw heightened cruelty toward dogs. The “unreasoning terror which seize upon certain classes of people as summer approaches” constituted “caninophobia,” according to the
The dog days still feature in book or song titles: Florence and the Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over” is perhaps the most famous. But they have largely faded from popular memory. Yet they remain good to think with. They remind us that although we now split the year into four seasons in temperate Global North countries, historical actors sometimes broke down seasons into smaller segments. Framed as an emotionally and sensorially tense period of sultry heat and canine madness, a time when tempers and the fabric of urban life frayed, the dog days were treated as a distinct period of summertime from at least Ancient Greece onwards: a season within a season.
In our current era of climate breakdown, summer is becoming a fear-inducing season. Heatwaves, wildfire smoke (a “smokepocalypse” hit New York in July 2023, according to
The dog days also allow us to bring together climate and animal history. These two growing fields of scholarly enquiry have, over the last couple of decades, responded to the climate crisis and a desire to destabilize human and nonhuman species boundaries. Yet the historical relationship between climate and animals deserves more consideration. In particular, while climate historians have investigated the real and perceived impact of climate, weather, and seasons on human bodies and minds, they have yet to consider how climatic and seasonal change influences animals and their historical roles. 8 And while historians have demonstrated that horses, dogs, rats, pigs, and flies (among other animals) have shaped, to greater or lesser extents, human affective and sensory experiences of modern city life, the role of climate in these histories has been largely ignored. 9
With this in mind, I argue here that the dog days were a time when climate and canine nonhuman agencies seemingly combined in ways that threatened the physical and emotional health of New Yorkers. Not only did high temperatures create conducive conditions for the proliferations of flies, rats, and cockroaches, and turn the copious amounts of horse manure that littered city streets into windborne dust, they were seen as creating emotional disturbances in dogs that could trigger rabies. In other words, there was a perceived seasonality to animal agency: animals did different things at different times of the year. This dovetails with models of animal agency that move beyond treating it as an ahistorical monolith. For it is more productive to pay attention to the
In the history outlined here, the stifling mini-season of the dog days combined with theories that rabies was an emotional disease triggered by high temperatures, to turn dogs into diseased and dangerous animals that threatened New Yorkers’ well-being. Although rabies was—and is—an issue in the countryside, booming populations of street and pet dogs in New York (and other cities) made it a particularly potent problem for urban dwellers and authorities. 11 Press-induced fear led to calls for this season-specific canine agency to be curtailed, resulting in muzzling, impoundment, and death.
The Dog Days: A Brief History
A long-standing belief contended that rabies was seasonal and was most prevalent in hot weather. This rested on two assumptions: that dogs were under the sway of Sirius the dog star; and that heat disturbed dogs’ fragile emotional states and thereby triggered rabies. What dogs did—and the dangers they posed to humans—was seasonal.
The linkage of Sirius and the heat of the summer has a long pedigree in the northern hemisphere. The dog days of summer were when Sirius, a star within the Canis Major constellation, appeared on the eastern horizon just before the rising of the sun. As the ancient Greeks observed, Sirius’ brightness and prominence normally coincided with the hottest days of the summer. Generally taking place between mid-July and mid-August, the dog days heralded drought, fevers, and sweltering heat. Crops and humans wilted. Men became weak, and women were subsumed with desire, according to Greek commentators. Animal behavior also changed: goats turned toward Sirius and let loose a strange cry. Dogs, the Greeks believed, suffered particularly in the heat. Overheating and panting, they might become rabid. The Romans absorbed these ideas, calling this period of summer the
The identification of the dog days as a period of uncomfortable heat lingered on, with some authorities giving the specific dates of July 3 to August 11. 13 In early modern England, despite some observers noting that the dog days could be “cold and rainy,” 14 they became a time when extra care needed to be taken to avoid physical or emotional harm. Nathaniel Merry, a purveyor of medicines attacked, in an 1682 advertisement, the “false myth” that purported that “it is not safe to take Physick in the Extreams of Heat and Cold, or in the Dog days” (claiming of course that his remedies could be taken safely at any time of the year and in all weathers). 15 Just under a century later, the Reverend James Penn, vicar of Clavering cum Langley in Essex, offered advice and a model sermon to his fellow clergymen on how to stop their congregations becoming “drowsy” during the “sultry Season” of the dog days. 16
Rabies, a rare yet incurable disease with horrific symptoms, became even more anxiety-provoking though its strange linkage with the celestial mystery and humid haze of the dog days in the charged environments of expanding nineteenth-century cities. Many nineteenth-century experts dismissed the link between heat, rabies, and the dog star. William Youatt (1776-1847), a leading British veterinarian and authority on rabies, led the charge, declaring that “no one will affirm that rabies is caused by a particular state of the atmosphere.” 17 Other European and American observers offered the observation that heat did not cause rabies because the street dogs of hot cities, such as those that lived in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, were apparently free of the disease. 18 But the fact that Youatt and others felt required to repeatedly refute the link between dogs, rabies, and heat, in often exasperated tones, suggests that the claim that the dog days were a dangerous time circulated widely in the first half of the nineteenth century.
At this time, veterinarians and doctors debated how rabies emerged and spread. Was it caused by some kind of harmful agent transmitted between dogs and humans through bites and licks, or did it emerge spontaneously in dogs, triggered by emotional disturbances, too much or too little sexual activity, or high temperatures? For adherents of the theory that rabies generated spontaneously, an overheated dog was a public health risk. Leaving aside the link with Sirius, as most veterinarians did by the mid-nineteenth century, summer did seem a dangerous time for dogs. Heat could cause them to dehydrate and pant excessively, which sometimes resulted in salivation and showing their teeth. As Michael Worboys and Neil Pemberton note, this led some to believe that “rabies might be perverted, pathologized panting.” Furthermore, as some veterinarians fretted, heat might cause canine blood to “putrefy and become poisonous.” Hot dogs were potentially rabid dogs. 19
Canine emotions also posed a risk. British veterinarian Edward Mayhew presented dogs as irritable creatures with highly sensitive brains and nervous systems. Rabies was a disease of “nervous excitability.” New York physician Thomas Blatchford brought such ideas to America, arguing in 1856 that dogs were extremely highly strung and very prone to anger. Their heightened affective state was fertile ground in which rabies could take hold. 20 Canine emotions were a public health risk that needed to be managed.
Hot Dogs in New York
Blatchford believed that canine emotional excess could cause rabies, but he was skeptical about the role of heat. In 1856, he headed up a special committee of the American Medical Association (AMA) to investigate the links between heat and rabies. He sought to debunk the dog days myth as “an utter fallacy.” Neither astrology nor heat had any impact on rabies: “Laws based upon such a hypothesis are a reproach to the nineteenth century.” As well as affronting progress, they were also harmful, as Americans dropped their guard against rabies in the non-summer months. 21 Blatchford’s report was approved by the AMA and sent to State governors, representing an official attempt to debunk a traditional belief that was an embarrassment to modern science.
But the dog days myth died hard. Concerns about overheated and affectively overwhelmed dogs in summer dovetailed with wider anxieties about urban heat in summertime New York. Summer was a time of suffering for those residents, often the city’s poorest, who were unable to seek shelter from the heat due to their work and/or living in airless tenement housing. Newspapers printed grim lists of those who died from heat and recorded how the urban environment exacerbated the heat: “the pavement and the brick and iron buildings had all become surcharged with heat.” 22 The high temperatures sparked concerns about dogs overheating and falling under the influence of the dog star, with the press reporting frequently on instances of seemingly mad dogs roaming the streets and causing chaos. Pet dogs were just as likely to become rabid, but the close associations of street dogs with dirt, disorder, and disease framed them as the canine counterpart to the so-called human “dangerous classes,” making them the particular target of anxieties as well as violence from passers-by and policemen. 23 Throughout, newspapers kept alive the association between rabies and the dog days, with historian Jessica Wang noting that they accelerated their coverage of mad dog scares during summer months. 24
Commentators identified certain dogs as particularly unsuited to the sultry New York summer and therefore particularly dangerous during the dog days. Alongside street dogs, spitzes received a particularly bad press. There was no watertight definition on what constituted a spitz, but there was some consensus that their muzzles, pointy ears, and presumed northern origins made them closely related to wolves and savagery. Vero Shaw identified the spitz as the American name for the Pomeranian, which probably came from north-west Europe, but certainly resembled the “Esquimaux” dog. Whatever its name or origins, these dogs were noted for their “snappish temper and lack of affection.” 25
The condemnation of cross-breeds and dogs of no discernible breed reflected and reinforced the wider condemnation of racial mixing and miscegenation. Neurologist William A. Hammond joined the chorus of voices attacking spitz dogs in New York, daubing them violent spreaders of rabies. In 1877, he stated that “the Spitz is a cross between the Pomeranian hound and the Artic fox . . . all hybrids are bad. The mulatto is neither as good as the white man nor the negro [sic].” New York physician L. L. Dorr argued along similar lines. He contended that hybridity led to degeneration and criminality in humans and rabies in dogs. 26
The spitz’s northern heritage made them seem particularly unsuited to the steamy New York dog days and thus a particularly threatening breed. A bite from one could stir anxieties. An “anxious father” wrote to the
Two years later, the
Other newspapers and observers spread the word that the spitz was dangerous because their Arctic natures were unsuited to New York’s warmer climate. “It seems to be a well established fact that this dog is far more liable to cause this malady by his bite than any other dog . . . for the change of climate to which his animal has been subjected is sufficient to account for such disease.”
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George B. Taylor, in
Apparently ill-adapted to the New York’s climate and tainted by savagery through its northern origins, the spitz threatened the modern city dweller.
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The police mobilized against their seasonal agency. For instance, at the tail end of summer 1882, a policeman shot Puck, a spitz who had bitten a four-year-old boy.
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Dog catchers also sprang into action. In 1886, in New York’s Lower East Side, a loose spitz dog belonging to fishmonger Nathan Weissbaum escaped the clutches of three dog catchers, James Flanagan, Joseph Kelly, and James Murphy, by darting between barrels and carts before running into a house and up the stairs to the top floor. The dog catchers chased after him, but the door was slammed in “their faces.” On venturing back down to the street, Flanagan, Kelly, and Murphy found that “several hundred Polish Jews” of all ages had unhitched their horses from the dog cart and set the dog free. Kelly, Murphy, and Flanagan were “jostled,” and in their rage, pulled out their pistols. In the
Looking back on the popularity of spitz dogs in New York and the subsequent we never believed so much bad of him. If he had been shorn of his long hair in summer and kept cool, he would have remained as sane as any other dog; certainly he had a peculiar disposition, and one it was not worthwhile to encourage with so many idiosyncrasies.
The spitz had a spiky temperament: “jealous, attaching himself to one person and disliking others.” 38 Even this partial defender of the spitz believed that they needed careful management to keep them calm in the summertime.
As well as stoking fears of spitzes and other dogs in summertime, the press at times mocked those who feared the dog days. In 1857, the
There was a distinct seasonality to dog control legislation: summertime muzzling accompanied impoundment. The city authorities passed ordinances against unmuzzled dogs since at least the 1830s that only applied in the summer months. With the opening of the pound each summer, unmuzzled dogs found themselves liable to impoundment as mayors reissued anti-straying and anti-muzzling ordinances each May or June. The creation of New York’s Board of Health in 1866 gave fresh impetus to attempts to regulate nuisance animals. An 1867 law banned unmuzzled dogs roaming the streets, and one in 1869 allowed the police to shoot any dog who looked rabid.
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The press was aware of the physical and emotional hardships that muzzling brought to dogs. The
The Dog Days in the Time of Pasteur
Germ theory and Louis Pasteur’s breakthrough in the understanding and treatment of rabies from the mid-1880s assaulted the associations between heat and the disease. In October 1885 Louis Pasteur announced, with much fanfare at a meeting of the National Academy of Medicine in Paris, that his work on rabies over the last five years had resulted in a breakthrough. The year before, he revealed the creation of a laboratory strain of rabies, which he and his collaborators had passed through monkeys to make an attenuated virus. They had then turned this into a vaccine to immunize dogs against rabies. He now announced the development of a rabies vaccine for humans, this time achieved by injecting rabid brain tissue from a dog into a rabbit and then passing the virus through rabbits to make it more stable and pure. His team had then removed the rabbits’ spinal cords, dried them to weaken the virus, and then mixed them with liquid to create the vaccine. Pasteur began treating people who had been bitten by dogs suspected of carrying rabies at his laboratory and, from 1888, at the Pasteur Institute. His breakthrough was heralded as a success in New York, especially once New Yorkers initially traveled to Paris for treatment before Pasteur Institutes opened in their city (a short-lived one in 1897 and a long-term one from 1890 to 1918). 44
But mad dog scares continued, especially in summer. In 1902, almost twenty years after Pasteur’s 1885 announcement, the
Further knowledge about the pathology of rabies emerged, yet still the dog days myth persisted. In 1903, pathologist Adelchi Negri identified what came to be known as Negri bodies in infected brain tissue, which offered further proof that the disease was spread by a virus rather than generating spontaneously. Then, in 1904, Anna Wessels Williams, from the New York Department of Health’s Research Laboratory, devised a new technique for identifying Negri bodies in brain tissue, allowing for a far quicker diagnosis of rabies under a microscope. But the dog days myth persisted. The New York Municipal Health lab may have spearheaded research into the science of rabies, but Dr. Darlington, a city Health Commissioner, still called, in 1907, for the removal of dogs from the city streets in summer: “In the city, especially in hot weather, dogs should never be allowed to run at large.” His calls for dogs to be removed were echoed by the
In an echo of Youatt and Blatchford, scientists continued to attempt to debunk the link between rabies and heat. George G. Rambaud of the New York Pasteur Institute, interviewed by the
Conclusion
New York’s dogs became suspect during the torrid summer. The presence of large numbers of street dogs (a tiny majority of whom actually displayed symptoms of rabies), combined with long-standing apprehensions about the dog days and wider anxieties about hot weather, served to stoke fears of dogs in summertime. To restrain this seemingly heat-crazed rabid nonhuman agency, New York’s authorities, egged on by the press, introduced public health measures, such as impoundment, muzzling, and killing. The spitz, considered to be an irritable northern dog that was out of place in summertime New York, was particularly targeted by the police. The furor surrounding the dog days—a season within a season—demonstrates the persistence of long-standing beliefs about health and seasonality and how they survived—and thrived in—the modern metropolis.
The dog days are now largely forgotten, but recovering their fraught history serves a purpose. It underscores the shifting and contested relationships between animals, public health, and seasonality. They also speak to increasing anxieties about summer as climate breakdown intensifies. Mad dogs may no longer capture summertime headlines, but the notion of the dog days might now stand for the febrile and potentially unhealthy summers of the twenty-first century and, in challenging the model of four distinct seasons, help us confront the destabilization of seasons in the Anthropocene.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kara Schlichting and Avi Sharma for their editorial insights, as well as Stephanie Rutherford and Victoria Shea for their comments on an earlier draft.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (225843/Z/22/Z).