Big Cats - Facing Britain's Wild Predator - book review

Big Cats – Facing Britain's Wild Predator by Rick Minter, Whittles Publishing, 2011, £18.99, paperback, 214 pages, colour photographs

This review first appeared in Fortean Times magazine, issue FT289 , June 2012

They used to be Alien Big Cats (ABCs), although author Rick Minter's point is that they're no so alien anymore, and our acceptance of big cats as part of Britain's established natural fauna may be imminent. In view of all the evidence presented here and elsewhere, Britain's failure to accept there are big cats among us is a bigger mystery than the mystery big cats themselves.

Facing explains how extraordinarily hard it is even to photograph big cats in the wild. Most leopards you'll see in photos live in sanctuaries and are used to seeing humans. And it was only on its second Himalayan expedition, part of an effort costing as much as 'a small house in England,' that a film crew recently managed to shoot the first ever footage of snow leopards in a genuinely wild environment.

Never mind the photos, there's plenty of other evidence. Big cat poo apparently isn't that hard to find in the British wilderness, and there are numerous signs of cat kills and traces of their meticulous dismemberment and fussy eating of deer and sheep carcasses.

But Facing Big Cats isn't just about cats, it's about us humans and how we'd deal with an official admission that big cats are out there, and what are we going to do about it? Minter examines the implications of British big cats for conservation (his day-job), agriculture and other areas of policy.

Particularly striking among the book's numerous colour photos is the one showing Fairfax, an 'extraordinary specimen' of a black domestic cat 'from feral stock', sitting on an antique writing desk, his tail and paws protruding over both ends. Fairfax measured four feet from head to tail.

While feral moggies could somehow be reaching gigantic proportions, Minter suggests any next-generation black leopards loose in Britain could be getting smaller. He explains that the 'open savannah' leopards 'popular in zoos' tend to be the bigger ones, while 'wild tropical leopards from Asia are often small animals… under selective pressure to be small,' some only 70cm long, about right for the 'large Labrador-sized' big cats witnesses usually describe.

Minter doesn't just quote Britain's big cat experts - some will be familiar to FT readers: Chris Moiser, the CFZ's Jonathan McGowan, Big Cats in Britain's Mark Fraser – he takes the brave step of giving them two or three pages each to have their say, which works well. (See here for my write-up of talks by McGowan and Moiser on ABCs in Britain from 2007.)

Big Cats - Facing... is beautifully written with much love for the subject and lots of 'Wow! I never knew that' surprises. For example, Minter notes how Britain's otter population crashed almost to extinction in the early 1980s. After that, people reporting otter sightings to the wildlife authorities tended to be ignored, until they gave up reporting otter sightings altogether. Years later, surprised conservation managers announced otter numbers had 'suddenly' recovered. A similar phenomenon may be at work with big cats.

There's no index, but the layout and organisation of the coloured-ink sub-headings, checklists and bullet points means you hardly need one, and make this book ideal for 'dipping' into.

Jonathan McGowan's display of kills he found that were made by an "Alien Big Cat". Apparently the teeth-marks on these bones could only have been made by a Big Cat. Author's photo from McGowan's display at Weird Weekend 2009, the bones are of deer, sheep, etc.

VERDICT:10/10 – ALL BOOKS ON MYSTERY ANIMALS SHOULD BE LIKE THIS

© Matt Salusbury

“Wars are very easy to get into and very hard to extract yourself from”

Report from Veterans for Peace UK launch on 9 April 2012

Now even the UK political mainstream is beginning to admit that a going to war in Afghanistan was - after all - a really stupid idea. (We told you so, didn’t the word “Afghanistan” ring any alarm bells?)

Meanwhile, war is glorified certainly more than even before in my lifetime, with all UK soldiers automatically labelled as “heroes” in the tabloid press. While their bravery is beyond doubt, the blanket use of subjective terms like “hero” really has no place in a newspaper that claims to report facts. Anyone who questions the wisdom of sending “our boys” (and girls) to Afghanistan finds themselves marginalised, lumped together with the jihadi nutters and their poppy-burning stunts. Compare this with civilian attitudes to the Army’s deployment in Northern Ireland during “The Troubles,” when a fairly big cross section of mainland UK opinion (especially in London, which bore the brunt of Troubles-related bombings in the UK,) weren’t afraid to say they felt their Army’s continuing presence in the Province was a bad idea.

So the time seems right for the launch of Veterans for Peace UK (VFP), an association of veterans who’ve had enough. Veterans are important in the anti-war movement, because in the words of American veteran Barry Ladendorf, they can “get their foot in the door” and convince people they are “not some crazy peacenik.”

Barry described how he flew home home from Vietnam on a military transport plane, together with five other living soldiers and “250 caskets” containing America’s war dead. He said “war is nothing but chaos and destruction – even to the perpetrators”, adding that “militarism is an ideology… Wars are very easy to get into and very hard to extract yourself from.”

Now an activist with Veterans for Peace in the US, Barry estimates there are 3,000 veterans living homeless in the streets in the county of San Diego in southern California. “The homeless are victims of war… we’ve taken money away form them for war.” California’s state budget is $ 25 billion a year, but its citizens are paying $150 billion a year in federal income tax just for their country’s deployment in Afghanistan. “They do have the money for education… but it’s all gone on the war,” the Afghan one has cost somewhere between one and two trillion dollars so far.

US Army veteran Gerry Condon went underground in Canada and Europe after refusing deployment to Vietnam. He’s an organiser in VFP US and in the Bradley Manning Support Group. Gerry says that since the wars in Afghanistan and Iran started, well over ten thousand have deserted from the US Army and Marines. Some have returned or are in jail, but most are AWOL and “living surprisingly openly… with family and friends,” and risking arrest.

“Several hundred” AWOL armed forces personnel have gone to Canada, usually after serving one term in Iraq, none have yet been granted refugee status there, and “three or four have been deported back to the US” to be jailed.

Gerry has heard of “search an avoid” missions in Iraq, in which the crew of an armoured vehicle will go out on a mission, park under the nearest motorway flyover, and - through notes sent out via “small kids” - let it be known to insurgents that they “don’t want contact” with them, and that “we hope you don’t want contact with us.” There’s been some ingenious tampering with the vehicles’ tracking devices to give commanders the impression they are elsewhere than parked under a flyover.






VFP UK founder Ben Griffin, formerly of the SAS


Ben Griffin served with the SAS in Northern Ireland and Iraq, and left the army after refusing to continue serving in Iraq, after which the Ministry of Defence put a life-long injunction on him specifying what he could and could not reveal about his service with the SAS – details of “special rendition” arrangements in particular. He’s the founder of Veterans for Peace UK, whose launch was seven years to the day since he went to his commanding officer and refused to be sent back to Iraq.

Ben listed the increasing “repetitive indoctrination” habits that are encouraged to militarise Britain’s youth and to make them believe “war is noble” - computer games, parades, soldiers coming on the pitch at the beginning of football matches.

Matthew Horne, ex-Scots Guards, fought in Iraq at the Battle of Basra in 2003, and spent over 100 nights at Occupy St Pauls.







Matthew Horne, veteran of the Battle of Basra and of Occupy St Pauls



He regrets what the government “trick us into doing,” and referred to an old Army saying, “bullshit baffles brains.” Soldiers go to war with “no idea who they’re fighting, no history,” adds Matthew. In Iraq, he asked his commander, Viscount Martin, “who are we fighting?” and his commander couldn’t tell him, he “diverted the question like on Parliament TV.”

Racist terms were used to dehumanise the Iraqis, they were known as “the choccies” during his deployment. More and more Army and Navy kills are long distance, via an “out of touch” infra-red screen view through which you can just see “a figure.”

Basra Shia leader Muqtada al- Sadr was, in Matthew’s opinion, “eliminated from the political system in Basra, not allowed to be part of the reconstruction.” Had he been so, believes Matthew, it “would have shaved seven years of the war.” He and his followers were, he believes, “pushed into resistance.”

Matthew met many soldiers who “sank into the ground” after their experiences. “Private Lindsay from the Scots (Guards)” was the fifth he’d known from Iraq to have since killed himself.

Jim Radford, believed to be the youngest living D-Day veteran, served with the merchant navy in World War Two and then the Royal Navy in the British mandate of Palestine, where his job was to deport shiploads of Jewish immigrants arriving in the territory to Cyprus. He was one of the first members of the Committee of 100 and Ex-Services CND.

“Abused children often end up as abusers,” says Jim, who noted that the Israel, founded by Holocaust survivors, later came to treat its Palestinian residents appallingly, that many French resistance fighters tortured at the hands of the Gestapo became commanders supervising the torture of Algerians during that country’s war of independence, and that the US armed forces - with their considerable sacrifices in the fight against fascism in Europe - went on to perpetrate the My Lai massacre and Guantanamo.





Michael Lyons, former Navy medic



Michael Lyons, who joined the Royal Navy medic, was 18 when he refused to deploy to Afghanistan and declared himself a conscientious objector after reading WikiLeaks disclosures on Afghanistan. He had no religious grounds for his objection, which made his case harder, just “my own moral compass.”

His conscientious objection was denied – and while awaiting an appeal, he refused to do a rifle course. He hadn't handled a rifle since basic training, he was, after all, a medic. He also recalls being shouted down by a doctor on the “Who deserves care?” course in preparation for Afghan deployment, for suggesting that civilian babies he came across in that theatre deserved medical attention just as much as combatants, whatever the babies’ chances of recovery.

The High Court judge at his appeal “seemed to think the Afghan government had asked for an invasion” in 2001. Michael was court-martialled and told by his defence that in such cases he could normally “expect two weeks” in a military prison. He was sentenced by a presiding jury of Naval officers to seven months in Colchester military prison, with a pre-trial threat from some Marines that he would “get his head kicked in” while inside.

Ciaron O’Reilly of Catholic Worker and others raised funds to stop Michael’s wife getting evicted from her accommodation while Michael was in prison. What sustained Michael inside was the huge number of messages of support he got, although the guards told him to take down some of the many “peacenik” postcards he was sent, as they said the symbols on them might “cause offence.”







Former Navy intelligence officer Robert Green with a copy of A Thorn in the Side

Rob Green, a naval intelligence officer at the command bunker at Northwood (on the outskirts of London) during the Falklands War, thanked VFP’s founders for “giving people hope.” Objecting to Britain’s wars, he said, is “lonely… it’s easier in a dictatorship, you know where you stand.” Bob came out against the war after his aunt, peace activist Hilda Murrell, was “assassinated.” Her death was “to do with the Belgrano” (the Argentinian battleship sunk by a British submarine, despite being outside the Falklands exclusion zone).

After speaking out against his aunt’s death, Rob emigrated and started a new life, where he claims he’s “still being harassed by the British state, even in New Zealand,” where his newly published book on the Hilda Murrell case, A Thorn in the Side, was printed “in great secrecy”.


© Matt Salusbury

Twitter for journos for beginners; The Authorisation of Trafalgar; Report policing incidents

From Freelance, April 2012.

My articles include:


Tweeting meeting - journalists get to grips with Twitter
(report on a how-to session with NUJ London Freelance Branch)

The Authorisation of Trafalgar
A letter to wave at awkward squad "Heritage Wardens"

Report policing incidents
an appeal


Pitch your photos
Mojo art editor Mark Wagstaff on how to pitch photography (co-written with Padraig Belton)

A Short History of Dog-headed Men

This feature first appeared in Fortean Times 286, April 2012










In the deserts of Western Libya, on cliffs and boulders along the edge of a dry riverbed called Wadi Mattendush, are rock carvings cut by a culture making the jump from hunter-gathering to nomadic pastoral farming around 4,000 years ago. Possibly re-cut many times, their carvings show animals in a Libya before the Sahara arrived – giraffes and elephants are accurately depicted. One carving shows two dog-headed men dragging away the body of a rhino, or possibly using magic to control it.

Wadi Mattendush is just one rock-carving site featuring dog-headed men scattered around Libya’s Messak (“plateau”) region. David Coulson of the Trust for African Rock Art says these dog-headed figures are “quite common” at five different sites around Messak and just over the Algerian border at Tassili n Ajjer. One shows a dog-headed human carrying a club, with a dog-headed baby at his feet. Another Messak dog-head is carrying away an aurochs on its shoulders.

Archaeologist Tertia Barnett says of Libya’s dog-headed carvings, “we still don’t know much about the people who created them.” It’s even unclear whether the dog-headed men depicted are just humans wearing masks – Messak also depicts elephant-headed humans, one of whom is revealed as a human removing a mask. (1)

Since this earliest appearance, dog-headed men have been with us ever since, appearing as illustrations on world maps well into the sixteenth century, and in many of the medieval world’s most widely read books.

While some came to imagine dog-headed cohorts among the armies of the Antichrist, there were also dog-headed Christian saints. The dog-headed races - or cynocephali to use their scientific name – were the subject of debate by Christian theologians from St Augustine onwards. (2) Dog-headed men get a mention in some of the oldest Arthurian poetry and in the (mythical) deeds of Alexander the Great. Conquistadors expected to encounter them, and the world ‘cannibal’ may have come from the man-eating cynocephalic peoples.

Dog-headed men are now regarded as the stuff of folklore, the product of misidentification. But this hasn’t prevented clusters of sightings from modern times of dog-headed entities that shouldn’t exist but are nonetheless reported. And within the rich modern mythos of ufology there’s a sub-genre of impossible close encounters with extra-terrestrial ‘dog-like’ humanoids.




Anubis tea light holder from a Dalston poundshop, author's "Egyptology for under £5 a piece" collection


The ancient Egyptians bequeathed a mini-pantheon of cynocephalic deities; the best-known being the canine-headed god is Anubis (aka Anpu). There was also the jackal-headed Duamutef, protector of the stomach, whose head is found on canoptic jars protecting organs removed on mummification. Anubis was often depicted as a warrior, as was the more ancient jackal/wolf-headed Upuaut (‘he who opens the way’), who featured in battle standards in the earliest armies of ancient Egypt and who shared many honorific titles with Anubis. Anubis was imported into the Roman Empire, and merged with aspects of Roman gods. In Persian miniatures and some medieval illustrations, dog-headed men are depicted – like Anubis - as black-skinned and wearing loincloths. Furthermore, the early Eastern Orthodox dog-headed version of St Christopher seems to have come out of Christian Egypt.





Anubis statue. author's "Egyptology for under £5 a piece" collection

Dog-headed men re-emerged as ‘cynocephali’ in the Classical world. Probably the oldest known Classical cynocephali source is Herodotus, writing between 450 and 420 BC. He located dog-headed men in Libya, home of the Messak dog-head carvings. His Histories states (4.191) “For the eastern side of Libya, where the wanderers dwell, is low and sandy, as far as the river Triton; but westward of that the land of the husbandmen is very hilly, and abounds with forests and wild beasts… Here too are the dog-faced creatures, and the creatures without heads, whom the Libyans declare to have their eyes in their breasts.”

It was Herodotus who first associated the dog-headed men with headless men (acephali) and Cyclopses. Henceforth they were frequently lumped together, sometimes assumed to be one and the same.

Then came Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek doctor at the court of the king of Persia in the last years of the 4th century BC. His works – including probably the earliest travelogue of India – are lost, but are quoted extensively by others. Byzantine scholar Photius plagiarises Ctesias in his eighth-century AD Indica:

“On these mountains there live men with the head of a dog, whose clothing is the skin of wild beasts. They speak no language, but bark like dogs, and in this manner make themselves understood by each other. Their teeth are larger than those of dogs, their nails like those of these animals, but longer and rounder. They inhabit the mountains as far as the river Indus. Their complexion is swarthy. They are extremely just, like the rest of the Indians with whom they associate. They understand the Indian language but are unable to converse, only barking or making signs with their hands and fingers by way of reply, like the deaf and dumb. They are called by the Indians Calystrii, in Greek Cynocephali. They live on raw meat. They number about 120,000. (Indica, chapter 72.)

Claudius Aelianus, a philosopher writing sometime between 175 and 235 AD, described the dog-headed men of India in his On the Nature of Animals as “honest and harmless creatures” who “are righteous and harm no one.” They eat the raw, sun-dried “flesh of wild beast”, but also raise sheep and goats.

C. Plinius Secundus (Pliny) in his Natural Histories, appearing around 79 AD, has a description of dog-headed men almost identical to Ctesias. Pliny says (book 7, ch. 20) they are ‘with heads like dogs’ and ‘sharp and trenchant nails… They live on prey which they get by chasing wild beasts and fowling.’ Unlike Ctesias, Pliny places dog-headed men in Ethiopia. The land of the Ethiopians, (literally any “people with burnt skin”) and India were to the Greeks all part of the same vast and impossibly exotic region.

Believed to be the most translated and one of the most widely circulated works of medieval literature in its numerous manuscript versions, the Romance of Alexander was regarded as historical throughout the Middle Ages. It featured dog-headed men as warlike man-eating giants, who appear in the book’s list of up to 24 “unclean races,” which also came to include the Amazons, the Biblical peoples of Gog and Magog and the “people who eat moles and mice.”




"Made in Egypt" Anubis bust from the Crouch End RSPCA Shop, author's "Egyptology for under £5 a piece" collection






Person-sized Anubis statue in the rather crowded window of The Nine Doors tattooists, Fashion Street, Shoreditch. Photo: Matt Salusbury



As if the real deeds of the historical Alexander the Great weren’t spectacular enough, one version of Romance has him capture numerous dog-headed cannibals following a pitched battle with a 40,000-strong dog-headed army, which “barked wildly” and fled when Alexander set the surrounding scrubland on fire. The Romance ends with Alexander “walling up” the remaining dog-headed men along with the other unclean races beyond the mountain peaks of the Caucuses at the edge of the earth. Here they were said to lie in wait, poised to sweep across Christendom in the armies of the Antichrist. In later versions, dog-headed men came to resemble Turks, Mongols or whoever posed the latest threat from the East. Franciscan Monk Juan de Pian de Cipriano even reported seeing dog-headed men on a visit to the court of the Mongol “Great Khan” in 1246.

In thirteenth century Wales, all manner of legends were attaching themselves to the name of a King Arthur, whose heroic followers were being named for the first time. The contemporary Welsh language poem Pa Gur (“What man..?”), from the Black Book of Carmathen, may be based on much earlier sources, and introduces the Arthurian knight Sir Kei. Kei’s epic deeds are listed, he “slaughtered adversaries three at a time, killed a witch in the hall at Awarnach… He killed Cinbin (“dog-heads”) at Minit Eiden” (Edinburgh). “Dog-heads” could have been a derogatory term for a local ethnic group or band of outlaws.

St Isadore of Seville’s Etymologies (some time around 636 AD) attempted to merge Classical learning in a Christian allegorical tradition. The Etymologies section “On human monstrosities” says “The Cynocephali are so-called because they have dogs’ heads and their very barking betrays them as beasts rather than men.” Works like Etymologies led to the bestiaries and allegorical maps of the world, always with Jerusalem or the Garden of Eden at the centre. Naturally, the usual repertoire of dog-headed men, cannibals, headless men, huge-eared humans and so forth found their way onto allegorical world maps.

In Medieval maps like the fragmentary Duchy of Cornwall Map and Hereford Mappamundi (where dog-headed men are labelled ‘Gigantes’) they were normally slotted in along with the Cyclopses and acephali in panels in East Africa – the furthest landmass in Medieval cosmology from the Garden of Eden and therefore the furthest from God. Among the hierarchy of the blessed and the damned, dog-headed men were somewhere between beasts and men, creatures created along with humans on the sixth day of creation, but not quite human.

Some dog-headed men – as in the tiny 1265 Westminster Psalter World Map, are shown chewing on severed human limbs. The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1492 includes a World Map which has dog-headed men in a side panel, and the Ottoman Turkish 1513 vintage Piri Reis Map of World puts dog-headed men in the recently discovered South America, along with men with no heads. Long after it became obvious the New World had no such creatures, Pierre Descelier’s world map of 1550 depicted dog-headed men in an elaborate human sacrifice scene in a vague Southern supercontinent of “Australle”.

Dog-headed men turn up in Christian devotional art throughout Medieval Europe, found among choruses praising the Lord, among the “nations of the world” receiving the Gospel in representations of the Pentecost, bringing Christianity to the corners of the world, or ascended to Heaven.

Around 825AD, Frankish theologian Ratharamnus wrote his Epistola de Cynocephalis to his fellow monk Rimbert, in response to his query about “what you should believe about the Cynocephali.” Ratharamnus concludes the apparent capacity of the “dog-heads” to make laws, practice agriculture and “cover the privates” is evidence that they are the are “sons of Adam” and rational beings with minds and souls, capable of salvation. (4)

The monks at the Greek Orthodox monastery complex at Mount Athos are said to be reluctant to show to visitors the St Christopher dog’s tooth relic, and one fresco of a fully human St Christopher at Mount Athos appears to have been painted over an earlier dog-headed version. It seems the current Western Christian version of St Christopher, as a child-carrying human giant, arose in the twelfth century and over the next two hundred years pushed out the prevailing dog-headed version of the saint. Walter Loeschke’s 1965 study of a “Tieköpgigen Christophoros” found 70 examples of dog-headed St Christophers in Christian iconography from Russia to Ireland.

The Earliest known dog-headed St Christopher reference was the fourth century Coptic Egyptian Acts of St Andrew and St Bartholomew among the Parthians, in which the saints convert a dog-headed cannibal ogre Christoianus, who joins them in missionary work in Parthia. In the Ethiopian version, St Christopher is the only dog-head among a City of Cannibals to which Bartholomew and Andrew are magically transported. Often Christopher is given that name (and the power of speech) on his conversion, and had the name “Reprobus” (Abominable) before he converts. Christopher first appears in his own right in eighth century Spain. In another version of the legend, Reprobus is a handsome youth who is “granted” an ugly dog’s head after praying for a way to avoid the temptations of the flesh.

Nor was St Christopher the only dog-headed saint. The Syrian Coptic St Mercurius – like St Christopher, martyred by the Roman Emperor Decius - has two faithful dog-headed retainers who were converts to Christianity. Mercurius and Christopher were often depicted as a warrior saint standing to attention, not unlike the soldierly Anubis. In parts of Austria, on St Thomas’ Night, St Thomas is said to appear in the form of a barking dog-headed man.

Anubis statue (left) in the British Museum

Dog-headed men began to feature in “serious” secular travelogues. Published around 1300 as Description of the World (aka Book of the World’s Marvels), the travelogue of Marco Polo said of an unnamed island in “The Indies” that “all the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes like dogs; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastiffs. They are a very cruel race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour him." Odorico de Pordenone reported in 1327 that dog-headed men dwelt in the “Nicuneman Islands” (1327) although neither author claimed to have actually seen them.

English author John Mandeville’s pre-printing “bestseller” The Travels (between 1357 and 1371) had accurate, first-hand information on sites in the Holy Land, but also included descriptions of “folk of diverse shape and marvellously disfigured”, among them the dog-headed men of ‘the island of Nacumeran’ (the Nicobar Islands of the Indian Ocean?) and says they “worshipped the ox” and were led by a king who wore a huge ruby on a chain round his neck.

French inquisitor Cardinal Pierre d’Ailley’s Ymago Mundi (written 1410) compiled ancient writings on what we’d now call natural history. D’Ailly located some cynocephali in India, where “they bark like dogs” and mentioned another dog-headed race that have “but one eye and are called Carismaspi.” Christopher Columbus carefully noted in the margins of his copy of Ymago d’Ailly’s assertion that it was difficult to determine whether “men with monstrous features and horrible appearance” inhabiting the “extreme regions” are humans or beasts.

So Columbus expected to encounter dog-headed men and other “monstrous races” in the New World. Landing on Bohio (Haiti) he wrote that, “Everyone I have met so far has said he is very frightened of the Caniba or Canina who live in the island of Bohio”, and noted the terror in his Indian guides at the mention of Canina. Columbus’ diary for 23 November 1492 recorded eyewitness accounts that the cannibals “have one eye on the forehead and the head of a dog,” and he added, “I also understand that, a long distance from here, there are men with one eye and others with dogs’ snouts who eat men.” He and his expedition had almost no knowledge of the local language, with guides probably telling him what they thought he wanted to hear, and it gradually dawned on Columbus that the Caniba and Canina were one and the same, and might not actually be cyclopean or dog-headed.

However, Columbus’ perfectly rational explanation was equally bizarre: “the Caniba are none other than the people of the Great Khan (the Emperor of China), who must be very near here. They have ships that come to these lands to capture these people and take them away. Since the people never return, it is believed that they have been eaten.” It’s possibly from Columbus’ legendary Caniba (“canine”) tribe that the word “cannibal” is derived.

Sponsors of conquistador expeditions continued to take dog-headed men seriously. Possibly the last example of this was instructions from Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, Spanish governor of Hispaniola (Cuba) to conquistador Hernan Cortes on the eve of his 1519 expedition to Mexico, including instructions to find the “whereabouts” of Amazons and to confirm reports “of people with huge ears and even some with the faces of dogs.” Columbus in a 1493 letter to Queen Isabella admitted, “In these islands I have so far found no human monstrosities, as many expected,” and it was soon clear that the New World has no cynocephali.

So what accounted for such widespread belief in dog-headed men for so long? Misidentified baboons seem the most likely explanation. In modern French, un cynocéphale just means a baboon. Papio cynocephalus is the scientific name of East Africa’s yellow baboon, while another species is officially designated the Anubis baboon, living in the Sahara. Both Ethiopia and Western Libya, identified as the home of dog-headed men by Pliny and Herodotus respectively, are still the habitat of at least one baboon species. The thirteenth century Bodleian Bestiary puts “dog-headed men” in the same section as apes and monkeys, along with the “sphinx” – Mandrillus sphinx is a species of the baboon’s close relative, the mandrill.

“Father of cryptozoology” Bernard Heuvelmans offered the lion-tailed monkey or wanderoo (Vetulus silenus) of India’s Western Ghats mountains as a possible inspiration for dog-headed men while David Attenborough suggested Madagascar’s rare giant lemur or babakoto (Indri indri) which he notes “has a head very much like a dog and a body which is extraordinarily human in shape”. And there are cases of disabled or deformed animals walking upright. Natasha, a black macaque monkey at Jerusalem zoo, has walked exclusively on two legs since recovering from a near-fatal bout of stomach ‘flu in 2004, while Faith, a dog born in the USA with no front legs, has learned to hop upright. (5)

Ctesias said dog-headed men lived in India, and Herodotus reported many Indian dog-handling troops in the Persian army, while both Pliny and Ctesias refer to Indian ‘dog-milkers,’ probably a variation on the Svapaka (“suckled by dogs”) “untouchable” caste. Other “untouchable” groups in India include the Nishada ‘dog-cookers’ caste or ethnic group, relegated by caste law to the edges of towns. People given “doggie” attributes are often the lowest of the low in society, and it could be that Greek authors transmitted garbled accounts of low-caste groups in ancient India that were referred to in this way, or that traditionally performed “unclean” tasks such as breeding or handling dogs.

In Northern India in particular, marrying outside your caste was seen as something that could give rise to “monstrous races”, with some “untouchable” groups said to have originated from forbidden mixed-caste unions. Such racial anxieties are by no means unique to India – horror stories of “changelings” and “unnatural” unions with strange women on the fringes of the civilised that would result in “monstrous births” were common the world over.

But where were the dog-headed women? On the outside of a Medieval abbey church in Vézelay, France there’s a rare depiction of a dog-headed woman and her male dog-headed partner on the road to redemption. John Mandeville’s Travels says that in the Nicobar islands “Men and women of that isle have heads like dogs, and they are called Cynocephales.” Over time, the dog-headed men became closely associated with the Amazons. The Romance of Alexander gradually turned the Amazons into the sexual partners of the dog-headed men, stating that female Amazon/dog-headed men offspring are indistinguishable from “normal” women and are assimilated into Amazonian society, while their male offspring are born with dog-heads and are inducted into the dog-headed hordes. One later version of the Romance of Alexander has dog-headed men living by the ‘eastern Ocean’ beyond the Taurus mountains with a race of women.

Explanations aside, modern reports suggest that some dog-headed men resolutely refuse to cease existing, at least in the Mid-Western USA. Linda S. Godfrey in Hunting the American Werewolf catalogues numerous modern sightings from the Mid-West state of Wisconsin and beyond, of “Indigenous Dogmen”, “manwolves”, upright “bear-wolves” and the “Beast of Bray Road”, a creature answering the dog-headed men description frequently seen around Elkhorn and Kenosha County. (6)

There was a “bulge” in nocturnal “indigenous dog-man” encounters – usually reported anonymously to Godfrey by email – throughout the early 1990s, although Godfrey found reports going back as far as 1936, when a Mark Schankelman saw a 6ft black and hairy foul-smelling pointy eared creature “somewhere between a dog and an ape”, digging at an ancient burial mound. Among the numerous sightings that Godfrey lists – including two different encounters with a group of four “manwolves” – was the sighting of a “manwolf” by several guards at Chicago’s Great Lakes Naval Base in 1994.

And Fortean Times’s Malaysian correspondent Ajad Jamalidom back in 1979 sent reports of several sightings of a vanishing dog-headed man at Pekan, on the country’s mainland east coast (FT 254;80).

Far-fetched even by the standards of dog-headed men accounts are those involving contact with dog-headed extra-terrestrials, associated with flying saucers. Skinwalker Ranch, Nevada, a “window area” for all manner of weirdness – some of it UFO-related ¬– wouldn’t have been complete without a sighting of a “huge hairy biped with a dog’s head” seen on the ranch in 1999, which vanished into thin air when shot at. (7)

Hunting the American Werewolf author Godfrey described her email correspondence with “Noah”, who claimed to be a remote viewer who had “viewed” the Bay Road, Wisconsin “manwolf” cluster area. This allegedly revealed to him that a “scout caste” of subterranean seven-foot tall extra-terrestrial Anubis-type cyborg warriors with bio-engineered armour under their fur had been left behind after a war with another cyborg race for control of the Earth many aeons ago. Godfrey concedes there is an absence of “tangible proof for Noah’s claims.”




Cover of Buitenaards Beschaving (Alien Civilization), Stefan Denaerden's account of his alleged encounters with "dog-like" aliens from the planet Iagra. (Copyright Act 1988, front cover image for the purposes of a critique or review)


There was even a contactee with the dog-headed extra-terrestrials. Stefan Denaerden alleged in his 1969 book Buitenaards Beschaving (Alien Civilization) that two years earlier, while sailing on the Dutch coast, he encountered a submerged UFO. This was piloted by short aliens with dog-like faces and grey skin, from the planet Iagra. “Instruction sessions” by the dog-headed Iagrans followed, in “the language of all living species in the universe” which seemed remarkably like Dutch. The Iagran dog-heads had a single collective mind rather than individual minds, and values echoing the missionary dog-headed saints of medieval theology – their belief system included “chosen ones who by the purity of their lives would combat the evil of Satan on other worlds.”

Exploration of much of the earth’s surface and advances in our understanding of evolutionary biology would seem to have exiled dog-headed men to outer space!

© Matt Salusbury 2011, line drawings by the author

See also cryptozoologist Dale Drinnon's recent blog post on "dog-men" in North America, and possible explanations.


See also an account of a late 1960s childhood encounter with three dog-headed men in suits, in the streets of Crewe! (It's from the Fortean Times "It happened to me!" forum back in 2001.)



See also an alleged dog-headed man of Tuddenham St Martin, Suffolk, as well as a Dog's Head Lane in Ipswich, a possible dog-headed man on the roof of All Saint's Church, Blythburgh and a ginger East of England werewolf, all from Mystery Animals of Suffolk.





This article was last updated on 13 12 24 to add a link to an account of an encounter with three dog-headed men in suits in the streets of Crewe.

Dog Man and his partner Rabbit Lady, from a sculpture in Paternoster Square in the City of London, with a human for scale.

Dog Man and Rabbit Lady again, in another sculpture at Brushfield Street near Liverpool Street Station, also in the City of London.

Dog Man and Rabbit Lady yet again, this time just outsidr Paddington Station, W2



FOOTNOTES

1 Tertia Barnett, archaeologist, pers. comm; David Coulson, Chief Executive of the Trust for African Rock Art, Niarobi, Kenya, pers. comm (both October 2011);Footprint Libya handbook: the travel guide, James Azema, Passport Books, Lincolnwood, Illinois, 2001; Wadi Mattendush photographs and line drawings are here.


2 St Augustine of Hippo in his City of God (Book XVI, Chapter 9, early 5th century AD) placed dog-headed men in Ethiopia, and after much agonising as to whether they were human or existed at all, concluded that they were human and ‘were indeed descendants of Adam’ and also of Cain and the disobedient sons of Noah (Genesis, 9.19). Augustine reasoned that even monstrous births had to be part of some unfathomable plan, and opened heaven’s gate to the monstrous races.
3 The staring straight ahead Anubis in art and sculpture doesn’t always represent the god Anubis himself, but often a priest wearing a ceremonial mask of Anubis.

4 Ratharamnus’ works enjoyed a revival during the Catholic Counter-reformation of the sixteenth century. Epistola de Cynocephalis in Latin is in Patrilogia Latina 121: 1153-56 (online here) with extracts in English in The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, John Block Frieddman, Syracuse University Press, NY, 2000)

5 On the Track of Unknown Animals, Bernard Heuvelmans, Kegan Paul, London 1995 edition; Fabulous Animals, David Attenborough, BBC, London 1975; ‘Shug Monkeys and Werewolves – The Search for the Dog-Headed Men,’ Jon Downes & Richard Freeman, Fortean Studies vol. 5, John Brown Publishing, London 1998: video of Faith the upright-walking dog linked from here.

6 Hunting the American Werewolf – Beast Men in Wisconsin and Beyond Linda S. Godfrey, Trails Books, Madison Wisconsin 2006. I have avoided mention of anything that could conceivably fall into the “werewolf” rather than “dog-headed men” category; anything seen walking on four legs as well as two, or seen transforming to or from a canid. Cynocephali were distinct from werewolves as early as Herodotus’ Histories, which mentions in addition to its description of dog-headed men that each man among the Neurian people of the Crimea “once a year becomes a wolf for a few days… Not that I believe this, but they constantly affirm it to be true.”
I have also excluded reports of “shug-monkeys” from Rendelsham Forest, Suffolk, and elsewhere in Britain, as these creatures, described as a cross between a dog and an ape or a lion and an ape, are usually on four legs don’t seem to be all that human-like.

7 David Simmons – Skinwalker Ranch, my notes from his talk at the Fortean Times UnConvention, 2004

FURTHER READING

Bestiary – being an English version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 764, Trans. Richard Barber, Boydell Press Woodbridge 1993

America Magica - When Renaissance Europe Thought It Had Conquered Paradise, Jorge Magasich-Airola and Jean Marc de Beer, Anthem Press, 2007

The Conquest of Mexico, Hugh Thomas, Hutchinson, 1994 (on Velázquez’s orders to Cortes)

The Riddle and The Monk, Giles Milton, Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton 1996 (on John Mandeville)

From Other Worlds, Hilary Evans, Readers Digest/Pegasus 1988 (on “Iagra”)

The Reign of Arthur (from History to Legend), Christopher Gidlow Sutton Pubs Stroud, Glocs 2004 (on Pa Gur)

The Histories, Herodotus, Bk 5, trans. George Rawlinson, online at Internet Classics Archive

Medieval Folklore – an encyclopedia, Vol. 1 A-K, Ed. Carl Lindahl et al,
ABC Clio Publishers, Santa Barbara, California

Etymologies, St Isidore of Seville, book IV, “On men and monsters”, online here.

‘The Dog headed St Christopher,’ V. Newall, in Folklore on Two Continents ed. N. Burlakoff and C. Lindahl, Trickster Press, Bloomington, India 1980

Myths of the Dog-men, D.G. White , University of Chicago Press 1991

The Golden Legend (on St Christopher), on the Fordham University website

African Rock Art: paintings and engravings on stone, David Coulson, Alec Campbell, Abrams, New York 2000.

Canoptic jar with a lid in the shape of the jackal-headed god Daumutef, protector of the stomach, in the egyptology gallery of the World Museum, Liverpool.

Another canoptic jar with the head of Daumutef, son of Horus. This one's in Ipswich Museum, on loan from the British Museum.

Dog Man again, this one in Paternoster Square next to St Paul's Cathedral,London. Photographed in 2024.

The Quest for Pedler - biography of Cybermen creator Dr Kit Pedler

Just published is the first ever biography of Dr Kit Pedler, best known as creator of the Cybermen for Doctor Who, but also the co-author of 1970s environmental sci-fi drama shocker Doomwatch, presenter of scientifically rigorous early 1980s paranormal investigation series Mind Over Matter and a medical doctor with a double doctorate who headed London's Institute of Ophthalmology and did some pioneering work on early electron microscope investigation of lizard's eyes.

The Quest for Pedler - The life and times of Dr Kit Pedler by Michael Seely, published by Miwk books includes among its sources my 2006 Fortean Times article on Dr Pedler - 'Father of the Cybermen'.

Dog-headed men forthcoming in Fortean Times

My "short history of dog-headed men" will appear in the April 2012 issue of Fortean Times (FT 289), hitting the shops around 1 March

HMIC review of police "domestic extremism" intelligence-gathering units

A review of national police units which provide intelligence on criminality associated with protest was published at a minute past midnight today (2 February 2012) by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC ).

This started life as a review of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPIOU) a police ‘domestic extremism’ unit that spies on protesters, and in which undercover cop Mark Kennedy (aka Mark Stone) was deployed. The review, led by Bernard Hogan-Howe, now Met commissioner, was about to be published in October when it was postponed after the revelation that another NPIOU asset, Jim Boyling, had apparently been allowed by his handlers to mislead the courts.

NPIOU has since been subsumed into the Met’s SO15 directorate whose brief includes ‘counter-terror,’ and ‘domestic extremism’ has rather worryingly become closely associated with ‘terrorism’ in the strange world-view of the cops.

The report rightly criticises some alarmingly vague definitions of "extremism", including a statement that “extremism is defined as the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values.” Another definition of domestic extremists quoted critically by the report says of them “They usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process.”

The report recommends that “ACPO and the Home Office should agree a definition of domestic extremism” which should stick to “serious criminality” rather than taking an unhealthy interest in anyone who ever goes to demos ever, which seems to be the current default position.

Many would welcome a “tighter definition of domestic extremism". But given their agendas, the task of coming up with a definition should be given to anybody but the Home Office and ACPO. The latter is basically a private company for senior police officers, and the Home Office aren’t exactly challenging of the police either. They’ve been rubber-stamping “intrusive surveillance” of one sort or another for ages, and have an intelligence-gathering operation of their own through the Criminal Records Bureau.

There is also a recommendation that the Office of Surveillance Commissioners – people who currently or have formerly held ‘high judicial office’ - get involved in some kind of oversight of undercover surveillance, as they currently do with snooping local council officials and benefits fraud investigators. A look at the OSC website
suggests this scrutiny will be quite bureaucratic in nature.

The checks and balances and ‘controls’ recommended by HMIC on ‘domestic extremism’ units are all checks to be carried out within the police forces. Undercover ops, surveillance and keeping files on people has to go upstairs to the “suits” at Superintendent level or above for clearance, and some wiretaps need the nod from the Home Secretary, but there’s nothing about submitting such operations to scrutiny by “civilians” outside police and Home Office circles (magistrates, local authorities, Parliament, police authorities or the new police commissioners, for example). Different bits of the police and the ministry that includes policing will be running intelligence gathering ops on activists past each other to rubber-stamp with the vaguest of justifications.

One recommendation is to reconsider the whole police “domestic extremism” intelligence-gathering enterprise, and to move such intelligence gathering ops to either the National Crime Agency or to some kind of public order ‘hub’ somewhere else within the police Given that most surveillance of protesters on demos in London is carried out by surveillance teams put together by CO11 “Public Order Directorate”, don’t expect rearranging “domestic extremism” units into some sort of public order “hub” will have a positive impact on the policing of demos anytime soon.

The HMIC report tries hard to find examples of actual criminality that the domestic extremism police units have actually fought. There aren’t many. The most recent examples of actual “serious” criminality (according to police’s own weird made-up definition of domestic extremism) that they could find were a neo-Nazi convicted of making bombs in 2010 and “the hijacking of a coal train” in 2009, over two years ago.

Elsewhere “a network of anarchist groups set up to disrupt the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles,” is cited as a positive “intelligence outcome” of Mark Kennedy’s undercover NPIOU deployment. The operation against those G8 summit protesters resulted in a lot of convictions, generally for minor public order offences along the lines of obstructing the highway, that went no further than the local sheriffs’ (magistrates) courts. (As anyone who was in the press gallery in the sherrifs courts in Edinburgh, Sterling and Perth during the summit can tell you.) Hardly “serious criminality.”

There is also the somewhat hilarious suggestion in the report that all this surveillance on people who just regularly go on demos is needed to aid in “protecting the rights of those who wish to protest peacefully” be “differentiating” between peaceful protesters and bad people.

As anyone who’s been a target of NPIOU surveillance will tell you, such surveillance seems to have nothing to do with “criminal intentions”, any violence almost always arises out of violent policing of protests, and most intelligence seems to be about who’s seen or observed taking part in a demo. Even by the police’s own bizarre definition of domestic extremism, most of the NPIOU targets aren’t involved in any such thing. These intelligence gathering units seem to exist to disrupt and destabilise and demoralise environmental, anti-war and anti-capitalist movements (and journalists who regularly cover them) rather than to prevent crime.

A review of national police units also insists that Mark Kennedy was some kind of lone rogue agent who “defied” his instructions and was going “beyond” what his handlers had ordered him to do. Its authors don’t seem to have spotted patterns in behaviour common to Kennedy and to other NPIOU undercovers, Jim Boyling and Bob Lambert - such as sleeping with activists they were spying on, taing on a very prominent role in the groups they were infiltrating, and maintaining their covers when giving evidence in court. “Poor supervision” was blamed for what went wrong with Kennedy, rather than any suggestion that he might have done what he did because his handlers wanted him to.

And it is revealed that “Nationally, between 2006 and 2011, 26% of officers seeking selection for advanced undercover roles failed their initial assessment. Likewise, Mark Kennedy was unsuccessful at his first attempt.”

I’m particularly interested in all this business about the NPIOU and other police “domestic extremism units” as last year I discovered through a Data Protection Act (DPA) disclosure that the NPIOU hold data on me – or at least they had recently held data on me.

The disclosure included a photo taken of me cycling past the ExCel Centre, venue for the G20 summit, on 2 April 2009, and had me down as being at a demo in Crawley (of all places!) that I was never at. The Met’s Subject Access Office people, who handle DPA requests, promised they would delete the photo after all issues around the disclosure had been resolved. The Anthony Wood judgment on “disproportionate” retention of images may have had something to do with this.

After I complained about the “intelligence report” on a demo in Crawley in September 2007, at which “the subject Matt Salusbury was seen taking part in this,” I got a nice letter from the Met admitting that “the original information “ on this “was incorrect” and that “incorrect data held within our own unit, has now been deleted and our records amended.”

This would suggest that it is possible for individuals to challenge data held on them by these “domestic extremism units” and apparently get it deleted. Although whether these police reports on us really get deleted or just moved somewhere else remains to be seen.

I’m still bewildered as to whether someone like myself, with no criminal record, is down as a “domestic extremist” on the NPIOU database.

HMIC wasn’t too happy about the NPIOU’s “rationale” for recording such data as “details of an event” on its database, and promises to “revisit this database to check that improvements have been made.”

For Data Protection Act enthusiasts like myself, the HMIC report’s recommendation that “The rationale for recording public order intelligence material on NDEU’s database should to be sufficient to provide assurance that its continued retention is necessary and justified given the level of intrusion into people’s privacy” is an interesting one, and it may be useful to quote this to police Data Controllers in an effort to get them to delete any “domestic extremism” unit’s data they hold on you.

While there’s been a lot of attention on the activities of NPIOU, there’s been less attention on The National Domestic Extremism Unit, or NDEU, one of its “sister units” also in the shadowy world of the “domestic extremism” industry.

The NDEU has its own database, and HMIC writes that “since 2008 more than 2,900 expired entries and documents have been removed from the database… fewer than 2,000. The database is continually reviewed and weeded and, since June 2005, a total of 2,063 images have been deleted.”

HMIC found the ‘rationale” for retaining data on the NDEU database, while better than a lot of other police database, wasn’t strong enough, and HMIC will be coming back to this in a separate investigation. I for one am inspired by this revelation to use the Data Protection Act to go after any data NDEU might hold on me.

It is also noted that the NDEU had a role in intelligence gathering during last year’s Tottenham riots. NDEU is definitely one to watch.