The Dog Breed That Was Literally a Kitchen Appliance.
For three centuries, every serious kitchen in Britain ran on dog power. The turnspit dog, a short-legged, long-bodied breed officially classified as Canis vertigus, was purpose-bred to sprint inside a wooden wheel mounted on the wall, which turned a chain connected to the roasting spit. First documented in 1576, these animals worked in shifts, running for hours to keep joints of meat rotating evenly over open flames.
They were universally described as ugly. "Long-bodied, crooked-legged and ugly dogs, with a suspicious, unhappy look about them," wrote one naturalist in 1809. The misery was apparently well-founded. Cooks reportedly threw hot coals into the wheel to keep a tired dog running. Kitchens kept them in pairs so each got every other day off, and owners could tell them apart because one always hid on its workday.
On Sundays, the dogs got a reprieve, they were brought to church. Not for salvation, but because they made excellent foot warmers during long sermons. During one service in Bath, the Bishop of Gloucester read from Ezekiel and uttered the phrase "it was then that Ezekiel saw the wheel." Every turnspit dog in the building bolted for the door.
Queen Victoria kept three retired turnspits as pets. But by the mid-1800s, a mechanical device called the clock jack could do the same job without feeding or rest. The breed had no other purpose. Within a generation, every last one was gone. Today, a single stuffed specimen named Whiskey sits in a glass case at Abergavenny Museum in Wales, the only physical proof that an entire breed of dog once existed solely as a living kitchen gadget.
Turns out planned obsolescence has been around a lot longer than the iPhone.
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