AKC Gazette Article

March 1969

SALUKIS March 1969

"Tinker, the Saluki" by Major Jarvis (England) strikes a responsive chord in those of us who enjoy Salukis. An extract follows: "Tinker-a most inappropriate name for a stately and immaculate pure white oriental gentleman--came of a long line of aristocratic hunting dogs. Their position in the Berouin encampments has always been on a very much higher plane than that of the ordinary pi-dog on account of their ability to provide gazelles and hares for the pot, and because a wellbred Saluki is as much an adjunct to the dignity of an Arab as a blood horse. The Saluki, therefore, knows that he comes of good stock and his deportment at all times is definitely exclusive, not to say haughty, so far as other dogs are concerned. With human beings he is at a disadvantage, as it is very difficult for him to understand that he is expected to be anything but a dog, and that the human whose sovereignty he admits, desires to make a friend of him is quite beyond his ken.

"It was rather hard on Tinker, therefore, that he had to share our companionship with a Scottie-- a breed that is definitely certain of his place in the family circle and insistent on the right to be treated as an entity on all occasions. Wattie was all this and more, with the result that in the house Tinker suffered from an inferiority complex, and beyond demanding his right to his dinner and the best chair in the room--till we provided him with a bed of his own-e was content to live his own life. This consisted in lying in a sheltered spot in the full blaze of the sun most of the day and, if the weather was cold and the house chilly, he would frequently refuse to come in for lunch but would order it to be taken out to him in the yard. In the evening when the warmth had gone out of the sun he would race into the house with the air of someone engaged on the most important and urgent business, shoot across the room, and throw himself onto his bed with a deep sigh."

Salukis can indeed be set in their ways! I have one that seems to be Tirfker's opposite. He finds the great out-of-doors boring, and summer or winter finds him rapping imperiously on the door to come back in, after the briefest of exercise runs. He skids across the kitchen floor and around the corner-scatter rugs aflying-into his room where he is quite content to snooze indefinitely-or until I make the time to play with him, elsewhere. He has appointed himself my houseman, Ahab, and charms everyone witb his mischievous "dignity!"-Mrs. Esther Bliss Knapp, Pine Paddocks Farm, Valley City, OH 44280