A quiz on dogs

On this day in 1873, the first ever kennel club was formed in Piccadilly, London. To honour that momentous occasion, this quiz has literally gone to the dogs.

1. Which famous leader had a dog named Peritas, and also has a city named after him close to the Jhelum river?

2. This dog was so named because he would bite the back of visitors’ legs. His owner painted a portrait of him in 1898, which became famous a couple of years later after the artist had made a few modifications to the original painting. Name the dog, and what changes were made to the painting?

3. Easy enough. What would you be trying to recover from if you took recourse to a ‘hair of the dog’?

4. Frederick Forsyth’s bestseller The Dogs of War was based on his personal experiences during the 1970 conflict between Biafra and Nigeria. From where did he borrow the title?

5. When the breed was first created in the early 17th century, hunters were trying to create a fearless animal that could dig its way into a badger’s hole. Name the breed, whose name literally translated means ‘badger dog’?

6. Which famous writer wrote a bestselling travelogue about his 1960 road trip with his poodle, Charley?

7. In the Star Wars series, the character of Chewbacca the Wookie was inspired by George Lucas’ dog when it sat upright next to him on the passenger seat of his car. The question is — what was the name of the dog; it has also featured in another film franchise?

8. Which company valued at over a billion dollars is named after the owner’s late American bulldog?

9. All hounds are categorised into three varieties, the third being a combination of the first two varieties. What are the first two varieties. This can be worked out.

10. Whose dogs, and there are quite a few of them, though Druzhok is the best known, are commemorated in a monument at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St Petersburg, Russia.

Answers

1. Alexander the Great. Plutarch mentions the story along with the account of Bucephalus, Alexander’s legendary horse

2. Nipper, the dog featured on the HMV Records logo. The original painting had him listening to an Edison Bell phonograph, which was replaced with a Berliner disc gramophone as Berliner purchased the painting for HMV and Victor to use

3. You would be having a drink to recover from a hangover. Still not figured out how that works!

4. William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar ; “Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war”

5. The Daschund

6. John Steinbeck; released in 1962 just a few months after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature

7. Indiana; that’s where Indiana Jones gets his name from

8. Zynga, named after Mark Pincus’ pet Zinga

9. Sight hounds, who hunt primarily using their vision, and scent hounds, who rely on their sense of smell. Whippets and Salukis are examples of sight hounds, who are usually fast runners. Beagles and Basset hounds are scent hounds, much slower but with greater endurance

10. Ivan Pavlov, whose experiments with them led to his path-breaking concept of the ‘conditioned reflex’ and a Nobel prize in 1904

( Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster and Project Director, FIFA U-17 World Cup )

Follow Joy on Twitter @joybhattacharj

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