This book and all my work on dogs would never have existed without Snuffie and so a great debt of thanks is due to her. To Gypsy, who has striven so wilfully to fill the space left in my life by the death of Snuffie, an equally large ‘thank you’ is in order. Between them, these two dogs continue to help guide my research and impressions of the non-human world. My long-suffering wife (Sarah) and children (Ben, Tat and Gus) also deserve thanks for always being there for me and putting up with the fact that my brain rarely seems to be able to leave its work alone and as a result has subjected them to some weird and obscure holiday and leisure experiences. While I recognize this problematizes definitions of leisure and tourism, my own debate on this issue will have to wait for another day.
A wide variety of people have helped to make this book possible by giving their time freely to provide me with a vast array of information. I would love to name them all personally yet I am also keenly aware that doing so may be, despite my best intentions, a disservice. So instead I offer thanks to the folk at Guide Dogs for the Blind, UK; the Dogs Trust, UK; a range of hotels and other organizations in Whistler, Canada; and the Greyhound Board of Great Britain. In particular, I would like to thank the staff at the New South Wales State Library for coping with me and aiding me as much as possible. Similarly, I owe a debt of thanks to a range of people at the Kennel Club in the UK but special mention must go to the librarians at the Club who offered me so much help and never complained about my reluctance to leave the library. I would also like to give thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this book; your comments made me look again at my conceptual foundations and dig a little further down. As with virtually all review comments it was not a painless process to react to them, but it was a beneficial one (for me personally and hopefully also for the book) and for that I am very grateful. For everyone else who has helped to make this book possible you know who you are and I offer you my heartfelt thanks. If I have missed you from my list of thanks I am of course only human (as opposed to canine) and can only offer my apologies and still reassure you that I do fully value your help. Finally, as ever, as the author I take full responsibility for any mistakes or errors.
Neil Carr
Why a Book on Dogs in Leisure?
The dog, Canis familiaris, has played and continues to play an integral role in the lives of many individual humans and societies throughout the world. This has been an evolving relationship since at least the Neolithic era (Herzog, 2010; Bradshaw, 2011; Power, 2012), with dogs being defined as the first domesticated animal (King et al., 2009; Holmberg, 2013). These first dogs are actually more accurately defined as wolves. While debate continues about the exact time of the split between the wolves and dogs, according to Bensky et al. (2013) it began approximately 100,000 years ago. Today, there is a huge array of types of dogs yet they all have one thing in common: their relation with humans. The willingness of the wolf to share its space and time with early humans has been identified as a central reason for the evolution of the dog and this willingness is clear today in virtually all dogs, be they pets or working animals. It is the closeness between dogs and humans in general, and particularly between me and my dogs, that is the driving force behind this book.
Despite the apparent closeness between humans and dogs, it is clear that this relationship and indeed the dogs themselves have existed at best at the margins of academic interest and research (Budiansky, 2000; Coppinger and Coppinger, 2001; Wise, 2002; Csanyi, 2005). This view is supported by Westgarth et al. (2010: 38) who stated: ‘It is surprising how little we know about the domestic dog’. More generally, as Herzog (2010: 16) pointed out: ‘the study of our interactions with other species has, until