Sniffer Dogs Credit: Nixxie-fic
There are a number of dogs Holmes uses to sniff out the case. The first is Toby in The Sign of Four who was ‘an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown-and white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait’. There is also Pompey in ‘The Adventure of the Three Quarter’ who is something between a beagle and a foxhound.
In some of the stories dogs are used to protect the household and the owners inside. In ‘Silver Blaze’ Holmes realises the perpetrator must have been known to the household because the dog did nothing to prevent it.
In two other cases, the dog attacks its owner in defense: Carlo the mastiff in ‘The Copper Beeches’prowls the grounds at night to protect the home but in the end attacks Mr Rucastle. In ‘The Creeping Man’ the newfoundland is taunted by its transformed owner and attacks the professor.
There is a great scene in The Hound of the Baskervilles where Holmes and Watson compete to deduce a walking-stick left behind by their prospective client. Watson does not do very well, but Holmes works out that the owner of the stick must also have a terrier:
In ‘The Lion’s Mane’ a poor Airedale Terrier dies by the rock pool where his owner had died. It is presumed to have been through grief for his master, but Holmes knows better!
Holmes uses dogs occasionally for experimenting. The spaniel in ‘Shoscombe Old Place’ is upset to discover that the woman claiming to be Lady Beatrice is not his owner and thus proves a plot is afoot.
In Study in Scarlet Holmes euthanizes a very sick terrier in the name of science. He feeds the dog the pills Jefferson Hope uses on his victims to prove the method of murder.
Another experiment is performed on little Carlo, a spaniel, by Jack Ferguson in ‘The Sussex Vampire’. The dog is assumed to have spinal meningitis and is unable to walk. Holmes deduces that the young boy had experimented on the dog to test the poison darts he intends to use to kill his baby brother.
Lastly, the most famous dog in the whole of the Sherlock Holmes canon: the Hound of the Baskervilles.
‘an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.’
The poor, mistreated dog is kept on the Devonshire Moors by the evil Stapleton and is painted in phosphorous to give it a demonic look. It scares Charles Baskerville to death, chases the murderer Selden to his fatal fall, and almost kills Henry Baskerville before Holmes stops him. It is a murder weapon and like his owner, meets a mortal end.
Did Sherlock Holmes have a basset hound?
Watson the Dog is a Basset Hound who is the loyal companion of Shirley Holmes, and the rest of the Holmes family, who appears through out multiple episodes of The Adventures of Shirley Holmes.
American Humane Certified Animal Safety Representatives™ were unable to directly supervise all of the animal action in Sherlock Holmes because some of the animal action was filmed outside the U.S. and the production did not establish a contract for our oversight. American Humane did not monitor some of the dog action or any of the horse, camel, bird, fly and maggot action.
Sherlock Holmes has a pet bulldog named Gladstone who performs such mild action as lying or sitting on the floor, being petted or briefly walking across the room. For this action, trainers placed the dog on its mark and cued it to perform the action, rewarding it right after. The actors who interacted with the dog were instructed on its proper handling before filming began.