R I P Fido the guard dog from Pompeii

RIP Villain, the police dog in our family I have just tidied up the chapter on the modern working dog's heritage (see 26 April blog). It goes back through the millennia to the first wolf-dogs who bonded with early humans, sadly not always to their mutual advantage.

                             CAVE CANEM
                      BEWARE OF THE DOG
Yesterday Paul took a photo of this tile which has hung on our kitchen wall since we bought it in 1978 on a visit to Pompeii and Vesuvius. Chained guard dogs like poor Fido (Faithful) here would have had no chance of fleeing from a pyroclastic flow despite having sensed preliminary earth tremors beforehand.

---

Paul took this photo of this tile on a gate post in Taormina, Sicily in 2016 when we would watch Mount Etna performing from our hotel window as it grew dark. It erupted soon after we had returned home.
    We thought it was a replica of our tile above but they aren't even as similar as 'Spot the differences' pictures. I can't remember seeing such notices on the Pompeian buildings but I was more interested then in collecting Beware of the dog notices in different languages. I gave up after getting to seven, including Cantonese and Hebrew.

---

​REST IN PEACE, FAITHFUL DOGS