Munito
Munito is the name of a dog who became famous for his tricks in the 19th century and had several successors of the same name.
The first Munito
The first dog named Munito was presented by an Italian named Castelli. He supposedly recognized the talents of the puppy, born around 1815, early on and trained him for thirteen months in a village near Milan before going public with him.
Castelli's identity could never be clarified. When he came out with Munito, he was around 50 to 60 years old. He spoke only Italian and bad French, although he performed with the animal in many European countries. Possibly Castelli was identical to that Mr. Castelli, who had performed with trained dogs in London in 1783 and in Dublin in 1784 , perhaps also with a man who demonstrated dogs in Germany, Italy and France in the late 1790s. In advertisements from the 1820s, Castelli called himself "Castelli d'Orino" and claimed to have served in the Italian artillery for 20 years. In Sweden Castelli finally spread that he had fought as a member of the Army of Sardinia in the battles of Marengo and Wagram and had received high awards.
Munito I. was a mixed breed. His father was a hunting dog, his mother, whom he looked more like, a water spaniel. He was white with a brown patch over his left eye, had curly fur, and the size of a water spaniel. He was supposed to be able to spell, do arithmetic, play cards and dominoes etc. and from the age of 15 months he performed these tricks in different countries. In Paris he could be seen in the Cabinet d'Illusions at the Palais Royal . In 1817 he was in London for a long time. At first he performed twice a day at the Saville House near Leicester Square . Entry was three shillings . For a corresponding payment, further demonstrations took place in private houses in the evening.
Due to the crowds, Castelli soon had to look for a larger establishment and relocated his screenings to number 23 on New Bond Street. The price has now dropped to one shilling. A book called Historical Account of the Life and Talents of the Learned Dog Munito was also sold on New Bond Street ; the illustration on the frontispiece shows that Munito had now received a kind of lion shear.
Towards the end of 1817 Castelli moved on to France and Italy with his dog, and in 1818 he returned to London. This time the master and dog made a name for themselves not only with their dressage demonstrations, but also with a life-saving solution: On October 2nd, 1818, Castelli, who still did not speak English, met a screaming and crying girl in Green Park who signaled to him that an accident had occurred. In a pond in the park he saw a woman who had apparently gone into the water with suicide, jumped into the water and tried to pull her out. The woman, however, resisted violently, but Munito came to his master's aid: He also jumped into the pond and distracted the woman so much that Castelli was able to bring her ashore. Castelli and Munito received medals from the Royal Humane Society for this act .
Allegedly, this wasn't the dog's only heroic act. In the vicinity of Trier he is said to have tracked down and caught a thief who stole Castelli's luggage. On another occasion, he is said to have performed an act of justice, tearing a turkey that had picked out a child's eye.
After the season in London in 1818, Castelli and Munito returned to France to make a third guest appearance in London in 1819. Munito now also showed tricks related to geography, botany and natural history. He performed at 1 Leicester Square every hour from twelve p.m. to five p.m. Castelli stayed with the dog in London until June 1819. This was followed by a tour of France with performances in Paris, Nantes , Toulouse , Strasbourg and Lyon . Munito could later be seen in Utrecht . In 1821 and 1822 Castelli traveled with Munito through Germany and demonstrated it in Munich , Berlin and Augsburg before returning to Strasbourg in October 1822. From 1824, there are no more evidence of the appearance of the first Munito.
The second Munito
In 1827, further appearances of the dog in Paris were suddenly announced. However, the pictures seem to show a much smaller dog than before, which looks like a poodle . Castelli had probably replaced his first dog with a new one, which in turn was named Munito. Eugène Muller , who saw the dog in his childhood, later described him in his book Les Animaux Célèbres as a beautiful white poodle with a lion's tail. This new Munito also performed arithmetic tricks, allegedly reading the time on a clock and then telling it with the help of cards and was able to look for things whose names had been given to him from a set of about 20 objects. He could also turn a key with his teeth, operate a drum, and perform acrobatic tricks; he also played Écarté against individual visitors. In 1827 it was shown on a tour through Germany, then in Russia , Poland , Austria and Sweden . There he made a big impression on August Strindberg , among others , who mentioned him in Gamla Stockholm .
Munito II fell ill in Sweden and people feared his death. However, the animal recovered and was now shown together with its real or alleged son - apparently Castelli wanted to use a third Munito in good time.
In 1830 Munito performed in Helsinki . Charles Colville Frankland , who met Castelli and his dog there, described the two in his work Narrative of a Visit of Russia and Sweden . According to this report, Castelli was a poorly dressed elderly man who had still not improved his language skills. A journalist who wrote about Munito in Helsingfors Tidningar suggested that the dog was controlled by tiny signs from its master that were difficult for the audience to perceive - similar to the famous horse Morocco once and later animals like the clever Hans .
In 1831 Castelli traveled again with the dog to St. Petersburg , where he had made several guest appearances, and later to France. In the same year "the famous dog Fido savant munito" appeared in the lead role of the play The Dog of Aubry in Königsberg , as the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung reported. In 1833, illustrations in a magazine showed Munito with glasses or a little coat, and a few years later he was shown dressed on a card from the Chocolats-Louit company in Bordeaux . On this card, a very youthful-looking trainer can suddenly be seen in the background, who can hardly be identical with Signor Castelli. When Castelli retired from business life cannot be precisely determined. In his book Notice sur les chiens Munito , J.-F. Bertachon 1836 that a Munito and a Munito junior were demonstrated by a Monsieur Nief. These two poodles were dressed in little coats and performed exactly the same tricks that Signor Castelli had already shown with his first and second Munito. According to Bertachon, Nief had trained the dogs himself. According to Bertachon, his first Munito was born in Valencia in 1813 and performed from 1817. The second Munito is said to have been nine years old in 1836, his son two. These life data show great agreement with the facts known about Castelli's dogs. Presumably they were actually the same animals. It has therefore been speculated whether Nief and Castelli were identical, but Castelli's poor knowledge of French and the images of the more youthful trainer speak against it. It is more likely that Castelli gave his dogs and their history to Nief in the early 1830s, who then claimed for publicity reasons that he had trained the animals himself.
Castelli's tricks
Charles Dickens reported in All the Year Round in 1867 how he had attended one of Castelli's performances in Piccadilly Circus many years earlier . Dickens noted that Munito apparently identified his spelling cards with smell rather than sight, and that Castelli smelled strongly of aniseed . He therefore assumed that the card Munito was supposed to draw had been impregnated with aniseed oil. However, this did not explain all of the tricks the dog showed. The Finnish journalist's speculations about minimal gestures or key words that guided the animal should be true. Jules Verne , who saw Castelli performing when he was young, also speaks in Dick Sands. A Captain at Fifteen suspected that Castelli steered the dog by snapping against a toothpick in his pocket - a sound that hardly any onlookers would have heard.
Literary mentions
Not only Dickens, Verne and Strindberg mentioned Munito. There is a poem by Winthrop Mackworth Praed in which he is mentioned. His ability to draw the right cards is compared here to the technique of social upstarts who always stick to the right people on the ladder of success.
[...] And though the cards in mix'd confusion lie,
And mock the vigor of the human eye,
Munito still, with more than magic art,
Knows Kings from Knaves, the Diamond from the Heart! [...]
Edward Bulwer Lytton mentions Munito in My Novel , as does Mario Proth in Le Boulevard du Crime . Théodore de Banville goes to Le Chat one on the Domino tricks Munitos that would never teach a cat. Henrik Wergeland mentions the gifted poodle Munito in Harlequin Virtuos from 1830, who even has a university degree. And in one of his early letters, Franz Liszt compares the existence of a concert virtuoso with that of a trained Munito. As early as 1823, Friedrich Karl Julius Schütz describes how quickly Castelli and Munito found imitators.
The Mercure de Londres considered the enthusiasm for dogs at that time to be a sign of disenchantment with politics at the time of the Restoration before the July Revolution of 1830 . He speculated that in a hundred years Munito might be better known than the Bourbon king Charles X.
Imitators
According to an article in the Stockholms-Posten, Munito was also seen in the US , but there is no further evidence. There may be a mix-up with a dog named Minetto. This occurred in May 1827 at Peale's Museum in New York City , as evidenced by a mention in Ricky Jay's Journal of Anomalies . Another dog that appeared to have been trained and baptized with Munito's track record in mind was Monetto , shown by Mr. Hoare, who had previously worked with trained pigs. Peter Bräuning testifies that a Munito du Nord performed in Paris in 1830 , while the real Munito was in Scandinavia and at the same time the dogs Fido and Munito could be seen in Mainz .
The attempts to reproduce Munito's achievements also took on grotesque features. For example, a man in Strasbourg theorized that puppies nursed by human wet nurses could also develop human minds. Even one of his contemporaries commented soberly: “As you can easily imagine, the attempt was made without success. Here in Strasbourg we knew all of the participants, the adoptive father, the wet nurse and the baby. "
Change of tricks
Well-known trained dogs already existed before Munito and also in later times. Don, the talking dog, which Karl Krall also studied, the arithmetic Airedale terrier Rolf, who was popular in Germany in the 1910s, and his daughter Lola became particularly famous . The dogs' tricks changed over time: While Rolf and Lola were praised as weather prophets, the mixed breed Chris, who lived in the USA in the 1950s, expanded this. He is said to have had telepathic powers and also predicted the future - especially the outcome of horse racing, which led to a rush of betting enthusiasts to his owners' property and suspected him of being in league with the devil. Chris is said to have predicted his own death on June 10, 1962. He died on Jan.
Similar talents to Chris are said to have possessed Oscar the Hypnodog, a Labrador who traveled to England and the European continent in the 1990s. Its owner was the hypnotist Hugh Lennon . Oscar was able to put visitors to the shows to sleep. In 1994 he disappeared in Edinburgh and the search advertisements that were subsequently circulated warned against looking him in the eye so that the honest finder would not be hypnotized. A Scotsman managed to avoid this danger and return Oscar to his owner. The successor to the now deceased hypnosis dog Oscar is called Murphy and is also trained by Hugh Lennon.
literature
- J.-F. Bertachon, Notice sur les chiens Munito, ou Preuves irréfragables de l'existence des facultés intellectuelles chez les animaux , 1836
- Delabere Blaine, Animal Sagacity , in: The Atheneum , Vol. II, Oct. 1817-Apr. 1818, pp. 451-454, especially 454
- Jan Bondeson , Animal Freaks , Tempus Publishing, Chalford 2008, ISBN 978-0-7524-4595-3 , pp. 47-62
- Ricky Jay, Jay's Journal of Anomalies , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2001, ISBN 0-374-17867-4 , p. 3 ff. (Excerpt available online)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung , No. March 10, 1832, col. 160.
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from April 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The Etonian , Fourth Edition in three Volumes, Vol. II, London 1824, p. 217. Translation: And although the cards are mixed up and the powers of the human eye are fooled, Munito distinguishes kings from boys with more than magical art who have favourited Checks of Hearts!
- ↑ cf. Allen Walker, Franz Liszt. The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847 , Cornell University Press 1988, ISBN 978-0801494215 , p. 130
- ^ Friedrich Karl Julius Schütz, Goethe and Pustkuchen , Halle 1823, p. 450
- ↑ Le Mercure de Londres , February 25, 1826, p. 15
- ↑ Excerpt from Ricky Jay's Jay's Journal of Anomalies
- ↑ quoted from: Maximilian Perty, Ueber das Seelenleben der Thiere , ²1876, Ndr. 2008, ISBN 978-0559171222 , p. 126
- ↑ http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9F01EEDD1339E433A25752C1A9649D946196D6CF Article in the New York Times about Don on December 11, 1910
- ^ Karl Krall, Thinking Animals. The clever Hans and my horses Muhamed and Zarif , Leipzig 1912, pp. 215-218
- ↑ Paula Moekel, My dog Rolf. A calculating and spelling Airedale Terrier , ed. by Friedrich Moekel, R. Lutz 1919
- ↑ http://kadmospublishing.com/adogslife/chapter1.html
