Dog

The dog is a four-legged and usually single-headed mammal.

Not to be confused with cats.

History
1800s 

In the 1800s, whore dogs were a fashionable feature of London. Young men would routinely lose their virginities to such dogs, and high society figures including Prince Albert and Charles Dickens openly made use of the service (BE E1).

1940-41

As many of London's clocks were destroyed during the Blitz, the city's time-telling was maintained by way of a dog jumping into a swimming pool every sixty seconds (BE E1).

1991

In 1991, exceptions were made to the restricted ownership of dangerous dogs. It became legal to keep an unregistered Pit Bull Terrier if it was less than eight inches long, though full-sized Pit Bulls were permitted if fitted with rubber skulls. At the same time, experts set out hoping that they might teach dangerous dogs to eat through a straw (OtH S1E2).

In the same year, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher shot all of the Queen 's 'hundreds of thousands' of pet dogs (OtH S1E3).

1992

In April, an 'embarrassed' dog was found sniffing the wreck of the RMS Titanic (OtH S2E2).

On 12 December, farmer Chester Johnson was knocked unconscious whilst piloting his helicopter over fields. Fortunately, his sheepdog Lindsay - for whom the flight had begun as a birthday treat - took control of the aircraft, avoiding impact with a field of children and an old woman up a stick.

1994 

1994 was a particularly heavy year for dogkind. In January, Richard Branson's clockwork dog completed its journey across the Atlantic floor (TDT E1), and in February an experiment found that a 'boiled dog could do maths' (TDT E3).

On the ninth day of that same month, an explosive 'bombdog' wreaked carnage on Oxford Street, London, fulfilling threats doled out by the IRA in January. Sinn Féin Deputy Leader Rory O'Connor denied that his group were backing the campaign, but argued that exploding dogs were 'inevitable given the position of the British government.' Amid the heightened tensions, an innocent dog, Spider, and three human bystanders were shot dead by police (TDT E4).

Several days later Mothercare publicly admitted that featuring crazed wolves instore was a 'bad mistake' (TDT E5), and, on 23 February, tragedy struck as British-American rock band Fleetwood Mac were buried in a dog avalanche (TDT E6).

Towards the final quarter of the 1990s, dog-owner Granita Rocksend spent her life savings 'plastic surgeoning' her pet to look like Ralph Fiennes, and, in 1997, a Tokyo television channel was found to be advertising a method of ingesting cannabis through the body of a live dog, as reported by Brass Eye to the disgust of agonist Claire Raynor (BE E1).