Misconceptions about Scott's attitudes to dogs

The following quotation from Scott's book on his first, Discovery, expedition is regularly given to justify the three criticisms just listed: for example by Huntford (Reference Huntford1993), Katz and Kirby (Reference Katz and Kirby1991) and Rosove (Reference Rosove2000). Rosove even quoted this passage, ‘this hidebound view’, to support his claims that Scott was ‘too sentimental to make serious beasts of burden’ of dogs and was ‘disdainful of their role’ before the push south on his first Antarctic expedition (Rosove Reference Rosove2000: 91–92), when in fact it was written as a result of the experience on that journey, as we will see.

Certainly these lines appear to offer good evidence for the last of the claims referred to above. They are not, however, from the journal Scott kept in Antarctica: he wrote them back in England, and, while preparing his book, he was lunching daily at the house of his elderly patron, Sir Clements Markham, who was known to advocate this view (Lewis-Jones Reference Lewis-Jones2005: 197). Much later, in The lands of silence, Markham referred to this as ‘one of the noblest passages in Scott's great work’ (Reference Markham1921: 472). But he was careful to explain the context of the quotation and to include the sentences that precede it, both of which, as will be seen, are vital.

In any case, Markham's attitude to the use of dogs had, in part, also become Scott's own, in reaction to the latter's experience on the Discovery expedition. In the southern summer of 1902–1903 Scott, Wilson and Shackleton had made a 93 day, 960 mile (1545 km) journey south. This was by far the longest and southernmost sledging expedition in Antarctica to that date. Dogs pulled the sledges at first and Scott's diary was full of optimism: ‘. . . our hopes ran high for the future . . . Confident in ourselves, confident in our equipment, and confident in our dog team, we can but feel elated with the prospect that is before us’ (Reference Scott1905: 18). From that point, however, their fortunes reversed. Partly as a result of tainted food, the dog teams ‘seemed to lose all heart,’ and soon the party had to carry half their load ahead and return for the rest, thus covering three miles in order to advance one. As they laboured on, the dogs had to be whipped to get them to move and some grew sick and died or were shot to feed the others. Later, the men released the surviving animals to follow the sledge, or even carried them on it. Finally there were no dogs left. Wilson described the experience as ‘soul sickening’ (Reference Wilson and Savours1966: 220) and it also had a powerful effect on the sensitive Scott, whose sympathy for the suffering of all kinds of animals was well documented by his companions on both Antarctic expeditions.

But Scott's perspective was far more complex than the single quotation usually given suggests, especially since that quotation excludes essential context. It is taken from a disquisition on dogs as a means of polar transport that runs for more than seven pages (Scott Reference Scott1905: 340–347), all written after Discovery's return, and it provides a good example of how misleading quotation can be. A summary of what precedes the fragment generally cited will be given, in order to show that Scott certainly appreciated the advantages of dog travel and that it was not prejudice, but compassion, that later prevented him from relying on them to the degree that Amundsen did. All of this was written long before Scott's famous last Terra Nova expedition, and at a time when there was no other Antarctic explorer he needed to compare himself with in this regard:

If the first method was chosen, Scott calculated, a dog could pull a heavy load about 25% further than a man consuming an equivalent amount of food, and a light load 50% further:

Scott noted that the best performances of dogs had been ‘little short of marvellous,’ but that these had been ‘on short journeys, over beaten tracks, and with a light load’ and that for some reason (he admitted: ‘the subject is complicated’) no dogs had ever returned alive from a long and completely isolated Arctic journey. He stated that if, and only if, the comparison was made with a dog sledge journey which aimed to preserve the dogs' lives, ‘I am inclined to state my belief that in the polar regions properly organized parties of men will perform as extended journeys as teams of dogs.’ On the other hand, if the lives of the dogs were to be sacrificed, then ‘the dog-team is invested with a capacity for work which is beyond the emulation of men. To appreciate this is a matter of simple arithmetic’, and Scott then performed the arithmetic (1905: 341). But efficiency notwithstanding, he expressed ‘reluctance’ to use dogs in this way:

Far from being the victim of ‘British’ dog-doting sentimentality and prejudice that his debunkers portray, Scott showed that he had thoughtfully considered both sides of this matter.

Public questioning of cruelty to animals had begun in England only about a century before Scott wrote those words, a development that coincided with the transition from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban and industrial society. Change had been slow and hard won, and ‘ridicule greeted every nineteenth-century proposal to widen the area of animals’ protection' (Harrison Reference Harrison1973: 788). At first, horses and cattle attracted most of the reformers' attention; the use of dogs for pulling carts, for example, was not outlawed in London until 1839. Many of the reforms ‘seemed to be directed at the pleasures and livelihood of the very poor’ and the uneducated (Harrison Reference Harrison1973: 789), but that changed when the medical practice of vivisection came under scrutiny much later. In 1876, for the first time, some legal restrictions were placed on the experimental use of animals, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection was founded in 1898. The anti-vivisectionists were soon on the back foot, however, because of the obvious benefits for medical research from animal experimentation (Lansbury Reference Lansbury1985: 153). As early as 1865, the celebrated physiologist Claude Bernard, chief of a new medical priesthood, had proclaimed (notoriously from the anti-vivisectionists' point of view) that a physiologist was not like an ordinary person:

Coral Lansbury has described how tensions between an increasingly triumphalist medical profession and those opposed to vivisection erupted in violent confrontations over the symbolic statue of a dog in the London suburb of Battersea in 1907 (Lansbury Reference Lansbury1985). But the prominence of the debate was short lived and the anti-vivisection movement soon failed badly. The use of animals for medical experimentation then flourished for many decades until the advent of the animal rights movement in the 1970s.

Writing two years before the Battersea riots, and about the use of animals in the Antarctic, Scott argued for a compromise: ‘the avoidance of unnecessary pain’ (Reference Scott1905: 342). At the same time he was forthright in acknowledging that his formative experience on the first southern journey had been:

He explained that he had tried to give a ‘just view’ of the use of dogs, and summarised:

The lines which are usually quoted, given at the start of this section, follow immediately. After such a balanced argument with its emphasis on pragmatism and logic, Scott's use of terms like ‘glory,’ ‘nobly’ and ‘splendidly’ for his peroration is probably unfortunate. But this does not excuse their quotation in isolation and the false impression thereby created. Dogs would remain a very important element in Scott's second quest for the pole but, as with the ponies, demands made of them would be subordinate to concern for their well being.

‘Pain, suffering, and death’

Amundsen, by contrast, took an entirely utilitarian approach, with consequences for his animals that will now be examined. Scott had stated that it was futile to pretend that dogs could be employed in the way they later were on the Norwegian expedition without concomitant ‘pain, suffering, and death’, and indeed Amundsen's report of the experience of his dogs is replete with examples of all three. The facts will be presented as the explorer himself gave them in The South Pole. The expedition left Norway with 97 dogs (1976, I: 169). Additional females were apparently not needed and two puppies of that sex were the first animals to be killed, en route at Madeira (1976, I: 122). The dogs continued to breed and on arrival in Antarctica there were 116 (1976, I: 169). More puppies were dispatched later. Six females were shot, for example, at the Norwegian home base at the end of winter (1976, I: 346), and three whose sex is not stated were shot when they followed the expedition during an abortive early start for the pole (1976, I: 382). Adult dogs were killed or died of exhaustion throughout the expedition. On a depot-laying journey, one called Thor was killed with an axe. Another, Lurven, reduced to ‘skin and bones,’ ‘fell down on the march and died on the spot. He was one of those dogs who had to work their hardest the whole time; he never thought of shirking for a moment; he pulled and pulled until he died.’ Even at this early point, Amundsen stated: ‘All sentimental feeling had vanished long ago . . .’ (Reference Amundsen1976, I: 242).

The South Pole journey took the heaviest toll of deaths. During the first stages dogs were killed because they were too old, too thin, pregnant or simply superfluous (1976, II: 22–29). ‘The more we could get rid of,’ Amundsen wrote at a certain point, ‘and the sooner we could begin to do so, the better’ (Reference Amundsen1976, II: 28). Not long afterwards, the mathematics of his plan demanded a mass slaughter, with a further six deaths held in abeyance:

At the point when the first of these killings took place, Amundsen made the candid comment: ‘We had agreed to shrink from nothing in order to reach our goal’ (Reference Amundsen1976, II: 62). Apart from the dogs that were killed, some that could not keep up were let go or ran away and were never seen again. More fell dead in their tracks. As devoted, hard working animals outlived their usefulness, they were summarily dispatched. Helge, ‘an uncommonly useful and good-natured dog [who] without making any fuss . . . had pulled from morning to night, and had been a shining example to the team,’ was ‘only a shadow of old Helge’ on arrival at the pole: ‘He was only a drag on the others and did absolutely no work. One blow on the skull, and Helge ceased to live’ (1976, II: 123).

At times, there was an incongruous satisfaction in the perfunctoriness with which Amundsen described the killing of dogs on whose loyal service he had just remarked. Lasse, Amundsen's ‘own favourite dog,’ was the first to be killed on the return journey: ‘He had worn himself out completely, and was no longer worth anything. He was divided into fifteen portions . . .’ (1976, II: 137). The incongruity was also evident in the relish with which the men ate the dogs: the thought of ‘fresh dog cutlets,’ Amundsen wrote, ‘made our mouths water’ (Reference Amundsen1976, II: 57). While he prefaced his description of the so-called ‘Butcher's Shop,’ where the mass slaughter took place, with some declarations of sadness, he was especially enthusiastic and graphic about the event itself: ‘Great masses of beautiful fresh, red meat, with quantities of the most tempting fat, lay spread over the snow.’ And as ‘Rex, a beautiful little animal,’ was being cut up: ‘I could not take my eyes off [the] work; the delicate little cutlets had an absolutely hypnotizing effect as they were spread out one by one over the snow’ (1976, II: 65).

When the expedition finally departed from Antarctica, there were 39 dogs left, about half of which had been with the expedition from the outset. Approximately 80 of the original 97 dogs, therefore, had either died or been killed, along with many others born during the expedition. On departure, when there was no particular need for it, Amundsen had planned to kill 21 of the remaining 39 dogs as superfluous to his breeding requirements, but spared them after his ship Fram returned with the news that Douglas Mawson had requested them for his Australian expedition (1976, II: 181).

From the death toll, we turn now to the dogs' suffering. Essentially this was of two kinds: either it was inflicted by the men to force the dogs to obey them or it was the result of the nature of the animals' work and the conditions in which they performed it. Early in his book Amundsen made it clear that he compelled absolute submission: ‘the dog must understand that he has to obey in everything’ (Reference Amundsen1976, I: 58). Later the author explained that he was aided by the fact that his ‘Eskimo’ dogs had a deeper fear of him than domestic dogs, the result of their stronger ‘instinct of self-preservation’ and their dependence on him for food (1976, I: 196–97). Nonetheless, submission was regularly enforced by whipping, of which there are many descriptions, particularly during the first sledging trips:

The expression of pity and the wry references to the men's work and discomfort (wet shirts) divert attention from the harsh reality of the repeated flogging of the dogs. This early cowing of the animals and the traditional view of Amundsen as a complete master of dog driving notwithstanding, he too experienced runaway dog-teams. And later in the expedition his dogs still ‘had to be flogged home’ (Reference Amundsen1976, I: 377) and physically punished (1976, II: 16, 21).

The animals were also suffering from their work. At times they were shivering constantly and so cold that they had to be lifted up and put into harness (1976, I: 384). And despite the careful mathematics by which the dogs were fed to each other and to the men, they were also ravenously hungry. En route to the Pole, they would eat ‘whips, ski-bindings, lashings, etc.’ and Amundsen added: ‘With some of them this voracity went so far that we had to chain them’ (Reference Amundsen1976, II: 40). At the Pole, ‘these ravenous animals . . . devoured everything they came across, even to the ebonite points of our ski-sticks . . .’ (1976, II: 110–111). They were required to perform gruelling work all the same. On an early depot laying trip Amundsen pushed on with dogs that were ‘very thin, and apparently worn out; but in any case we had to reach 82° S . . .’ (1976, I: 234). Closer to that target, the dogs were ‘terribly emaciated’ (1976, I: 236), and when they finally arrived Amundsen acknowledged he had:

One dog that died had been:

Others were in a similar state. On the return from the pole, when Fritjof was cut open, it was discovered that his ‘lungs were quite shrivelled up’ (1976, II: 160). Although the internal condition of these dogs may not have been apparent to Amundsen at the time, he later wrote at the beginning of his book: ‘the dogs were always in splendid condition’ (1976, I: 56). He has been taken at his word. Turley, for example, an early biographer, told us merely that Amundsen ‘loved his dogs’ (Turley Reference Turley1935: 80).

The point of enumerating all this suffering and death, therefore, is that very few commentators have either noticed it or found anything to object to in it. On the contrary, Scott has been widely criticised from the beginning for not employing the same means. The torment of the animals, it seems, has vanished into a collective blind spot.

Amundsen's and Scott's men seem to have been mostly silent about this matter. Helmer Hanssen, virtually the only member of the Norwegian polar team apart from the leader to have been published in English, wrote tactfully and politely:

And on the British side, Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote about Amundsen going ‘so gaily to the Pole and back: with no abnormal strain on men or dogs . . . .’ (Reference Cherry-Garrard1994: 563).

An extremely rare exception in all the subsequent commentary was ‘Dogs’ by New Zealand poet Bill Manhire. The poem detailed some of the animals' suffering and showed Amundsen trying to write a little poetry but without success: ‘sometimes/ I feel quite alone. It is hard almost to speak . . . [let alone write poetry]/My best friends bark in my stomach . . . .’ (Manhire Reference Manhire2005).

Two faces of Amundsen

The explorer's harsh treatment of dogs probably did not begin with the Fram expedition. A member of the earlier Northwest Passage voyage wrote in his diary: ‘He [Amundsen] either knows no better, or he enjoys tormenting animals’ (Bomann-Larsen Reference Bomann-Larsen2006: 40). But in any case, in the quest for the pole, by his own admission, Amundsen acted on the basis that the end justified any means. Whether one agrees with him or not, there is cognitive dissonance at least and perhaps hypocrisy in his attempts in The South Pole to appear as an animal lover despite the evidence of his actions, something which has previously been overlooked.

Amundsen had read Scott's The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’ and, early in The South Pole, linked his own statement about the need for absolute domination over dogs with some heavy irony regarding their use by the British: ‘Can it be that the dog has not understood his master? Or is it the master who has not understood his dog?’ (1976, I: 58); ‘It must be rather hard to have to abandon one's motive power voluntarily when only a quarter of the distance has been covered. I for my part prefer to use it all the way’ (1976, I: 59).

But the explorer also revealed his awareness that the treatment of animals was a topic of some sensitivity:

Whatever the conditions and treatment his dogs actually experienced while at sea, Amundsen's superior tone and irony here suggest a certain defensiveness, and throughout his book he was at pains to demonstrate his own sensitivity to the special qualities of dogs. ‘There can hardly be an animal,’ he wrote,

The hint of didacticism in the imperatives, ‘now take a look . . . study them’, may be Amundsen trying to persuade himself of his empathy, because it is difficult to square such a statement with the actual treatment of the dogs on the Fram expedition. Likewise, it was when the suffering inflicted first became obvious, when dogs dropped dead from exhaustion on a depot laying journey and ‘the whip had long ago lost its terrors’, that Amundsen first felt the need to justify his actions:

This seemingly reasonable statement bears further examination. The reference to the ‘sportsman's instinct’ may well be a deft swipe at the British hunting tradition, and there is deftness too in the wry exception made for ‘rats and flies,’ with agreement guaranteed from most readers. It is at least questionable whether such an animal lover as Amundsen here portrayed himself could treat animals the way he did. Scott could not. And there are two claims here which may be challenged on the author's own evidence. The first is the assertion that he took no pleasure in the hunting of animals. He described, for example, at considerable length ‘an exciting seal-hunt’ which occurred shortly after the Norwegians set up their base, and which he obviously found side-splittingly funny. At first he ‘chuckle[d] and laugh[ed]’ as he watched two men stalking the seals:

Despite the fact that the seals were being hunted for food, Amundsen's hilarious enjoyment of their being used for ‘target practice’ and then shot at indiscriminately cannot easily be reconciled with the statements such as ‘There is none of the “sportsman's” instinct in me’ and ‘I am naturally fond of all animals, and try to avoid hurting them.’ Certainly the laughter in this episode was partly at the struggles of the hunters, but Amundsen showed no concern at all for the seal. On another occasion he described thrashing dogs in order ‘to be revenged’ for their disobedience, while emphasising the trouble this gave the driver (1976, I: 190). Furthermore, the claim that he would only kill an animal ‘to support life’ is belied by the previously mentioned fact that, before he was told of Mawson's request, he was intending to kill 21 of his remaining dogs before leaving the continent. And when one of the dogs gave birth to eight pups as the ship sailed north from Hobart later in 1912, ‘four of these were killed, while the rest, two of each sex, were allowed to live’ (1976, II: 353).

How do we explain these contradictions? In the first place, probably, by acknowledging that human beings are inconsistent, and rarely more so, Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders have pointed out (Reference Arluke and Sanders1996), than in their attitudes to animals. Certain theorists have emphasised the happiness they believe animals derive from successful cooperation with people. But while Amundsen did write about especially helpful and hardworking dogs, he did not claim, as Vicki Hearne did (Reference Hearne1995), that their work fulfilled some innate purpose or desire of the animals themselves. Only on short journeys near home did Amundsen believe his dogs ‘loved their harness’ (1976, I: 187–188). More plausibly, critics like Barbara Noske have argued that there has been long-standing and systematic exploitation of animals by humans, and that this has become more extreme as animals have been ‘incorporated into production technology’ (Noske Reference Noske1997: 14). Noske (Reference Noske1997: 53) and Ruth Wallsgrove (Reference Wallsgrove, Birke, Faulkner, Best, Janson-Smith and Overfield1980: 233) both pointed out that this exploitation requires a partitioning of human beings from the rest of the natural world and an objectification and depersonalisation of animals, and that this has been greatly strengthened by certain attitudes of modern science. Wallsgrove further believed that such attitudes with their concomitant detachment and denial of emotion (the words of the physiologist Bernard quoted above provide a striking example) form an unholy alliance with ideologies of masculinity. ‘Science and masculinity,’ she asserted, ‘are one-half of an exaggerated polarity, a dangerous imbalance’ (Wallsgrove Reference Wallsgrove, Birke, Faulkner, Best, Janson-Smith and Overfield1980: 235). So it may be that Amundsen, in writing so candidly and at times with such apparent self satisfaction about the way he worked his dogs to death and converted them into consumables, was aligning himself with what he saw as an efficient modern technological outlook. There was, moreover, a decidedly ‘masculine’ flavour to his book. He was consistently dismissive of what were obviously, at the time, serious dangers and hardships. And on several occasions he linked the conquest of the pole to the winning or ravishing of a woman: ‘The deity of success is a woman, and she insists on being won, not courted. You've got to seize her and bear her off, instead of standing under her window with a mandolin’ (1976, I: 42, see also I: 179; I: 194). By contrast, and interestingly, Scott's ‘feminine’ qualities have sometimes been remarked on, first perhaps by one of the Terra Nova expedition's most famous members, Apsley Cherry-Garrard (Reference Cherry-Garrard1994: 466).

A pyrrhic victory?

Whatever the reasons for Amundsen's contradictory attitudes to his dogs, it seems that, after the event, he felt some pangs of conscience about this matter and in his book attempted to justify himself in retrospect. Some of the statements he made in doing so were inaccurate. In places, however, he was more honest in his remorse and admitted that he was brutalised by his monomania with being first at the pole. Of the time he drove the dogs to death on the depot laying journey to 82° S, he wrote: ‘the daily hard work and the object I would not give up had made me brutal, for brutal I was when I forced those five skeletons to haul that excessive load’ (1976, I: 238). Arluke and Sanders have drawn attention to the potential costs both for the individual and for society of ‘allowing, or even condoning’ such contradictions, on the grounds that this ‘dulls our moral sensitivities.’ Accordingly, they suggested that it was ‘appropriate and healthy to challenge’ them, as this article has attempted to do (1996: 190).

When considered solely as an example of the single-mindedly determined prosecution of a great and arduous plan, Amundsen's South Pole expedition is unsurpassed. But his conduct had serious consequences for others. Here, some of the consequences for his animals have been described. It is therefore not surprising that part of the personal cost to Amundsen of his triumph was a certain brutalising of character, which he acknowledged. The Norwegian psychoanalyst Per Anthi believed, moreover, that the explorer experienced acute guilt at his South Pole victory for a variety of reasons and, through lack of insight into his inner conflicts, afterwards lapsed into paranoia (Anthi Reference Anthi1999). The Norwegian ambassador in London, Anthi added, later came to regard him as ‘mentally deranged’ and Fridtjof Nansen confirmed that ‘there were several unmistakable signs of insanity’ (Reference Anthi1999: 1003). (Nansen himself had previously felt ‘bitter self-reproach’ for ‘undeniable cruelty’ to his own dogs in the Arctic two decades earlier (Quoted in Fiennes Reference Fiennes2003: 66), but was apparently better able to deal with his guilt.)

Such aspects of Amundsen's personality and subsequent life, hitherto little known to readers of English, are extensively documented in a recently translated Norwegian biography (Bomann-Larsen Reference Bomann-Larsen2006).

Apart from the personal cost, there may also be broader implications, as Arluke and Sanders suggested, of overlooking or condoning certain aspects of Amundsen's conduct. By his own admission, the explorer was ruthless in the pursuit of his goal and used it to justify questionable behaviour of various kinds. The most-debated instance is the concealment of his plan to attempt the pole and Bomann-Larsen's biography contains many additional examples. Subsequently, Amundsen's attainment of that goal also justified in the eyes of many the means he had employed. Scott had foreseen that this would happen, writing to his New Zealand agent Joseph Kinsey when he learned of Amundsen's presence in Antarctica: ‘If he gets to the Pole he is bound to do it rapidly with dogs and one foresees that success will justify him and that our venture will be “out of it”’ (Reference Scott1911). ‘In victory, there are no questions asked,’ Roland Huntford, a hero worshipping biographer of Amundsen, stated in an early article he co-authored: ‘After Roald Amundsen won the race for the South Pole . . . very few cared how he did it, least of all himself’ (Drewry and Huntford Reference Drewry and Huntford1979: 329). The last four words of this quotation are, as we have seen, not quite accurate. And this points to a broad potential distinction between the two expeditions, just one aspect of which has been examined here: a distinction between means and ends which is as vital today as it was a century ago in Antarctica. Is the achievement of personal success paramount, and so the greater the success the more ruthless the behaviour it can justify? Or must the pursuit of success be subordinate to correct conduct and a concern for others, nonhuman as well as human? These questions might be borne in mind when assessing Amundsen's Antarctic achievements and comparing them with those of Scott, as might the very different fates of the two explorers' dogs.