For the Love of Animals by Victoria Chatham

 

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Anyone who knows me knows I love animals. Even the little critters that give me the creeps - hello, frogs - fascinate me, but my favourite animals are horses, dogs, and cats.  

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Animals have long had their place in literature. Think Bolingbroke’s horse Barbary from Shakespeare’s King Richard II or the grey Capilet in Twelfth Night. There is the ubiquitous Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Don Quixote’s Rocinante, and Marguerite Henry’s Sham from her book King of the Wind. Zane Grey named many of the horses in his western novels, as did Louis L’Amour. Smoky, Ginger, Merrylegs, Artax, The Black, and Joey are names I have known and love from the stories in which they appeared.

Who can forget Buck from Call of the Wild, or Bulls Eye, Bill Sikes’ dog from Oliver Twist, and didn’t we all love Perdita and Pongo, the Dalmatians from 101 Dalmatians? Stephen King’s Cujo might have given some of us nightmares, as did The Hound of the Baskervilles, but I don’t mind betting cute little Peg from Lady and the Tramp had you smiling again. Cats also have their place in literature, such as Tab from Watership Down and all those marvellous cat characters, Old Deuteronomy, Rumpleteazer, Grizabella, and Macavity from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

I write historical and Western novels, so it becomes almost impossible not to have animal characters. How did my Regency Lord get from his London residence to his country estate? He either drove his team himself or may have had a coachman. Even in the Regency era, a horse was relatively no less expensive than it is today. Stabling, feeding, shoes, and harnesses all took a toll on the pocket. The more animals there were, the more significant the expense. A team of four horses, plus a couple of park hacks in town and hunters in the country, added up to a minimum of a stable of eight horses.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

What I try to bring to my pages when I write horses into my novels is how that particular animal
impacts my hero or heroine. They usually have a part to play in showing off my characters’ skills, as they do for Emmaline in His Dark Enchantress. In Shell Shocked, set at the end of World War 1, the dog, Bella, helps her master recuperate from his experiences at the front, and what cowboy does not have a horse, and often a dog, both for work and company?

Animals, real or imagined, help ground us humans with their sense of immediacy, of being in the here and now. I not only write but also house and pet sit. Whether I’m checking on horses, walking a dog, or corralling cats, they will always carry over into my writing. Animals add so much to my life that I can’t imagine not having animals in my characters’ lives.

 

Victoria Chatham

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