Tammyshanty (1909)

AUTHOR: Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

KEYWORDS: animal welfare, animals, experimentation, vivisection

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

“Tammyshanty” tells the story of an orphaned newsboy, Peter “Jacket” Roosevelt Tammany, and the eponymous dog. They become friends after Tammyshanty rescues Jacket from drowning. Throughout the story, the dog is anthropomorphized, even engaging in conversation with Jacket, in order to elicit sympathy. Their first exchange, after Tammyshanty has rescued Jacket, reads as follows:

“Hullo!”
“Hullo yourself,” barked the dog.
“Hully gee,” said the boy.
“Hully gee,” returned the dog.
“Cold, ain't it? You bet!”
“You bet,” rejoined the dog.
“Deep, warn't it? Darn deep,” suggested the boy.
“Darned deep,” agreed the dog (212).

Their relation is characterized by the narrator as “intimate,” a “union of spirits,” and a relation of “love” between a “friendless boy” and a “homeless dog” (214), although their relation is situated within a natural hierarchy: “The outcast animal, longing always for an unknown master, accepted the sweet servitude rapturously. The desolate child, knowing neither the name nor the fact of love, he who had no human tie, and knew no human tenderness, received with almost incredible emotion the allegiance of the dog” (214-215).

A gentleman, “one of these private experimenters” (227), whose house they happen to pass by one day, offers to buy Tammyshanty, which the boy rejects (218-220). A few weeks later, the dog disappears and Jacket begins a desperate search, eventually finding the dog's whereabouts – the vivisectionist's home, an unwelcoming place the gloomy appearance of which mirrors the horrors going on inside: “Most of its shades were closely drawn. In the ell the blinds were closed. It was a gloomy house, destitute, it seemed, of family ties, of the sense of home, of the consciousness of human love” (226).

With the help of a philanthropist, a policeman, a reporter, and his fellow newsboys, Jacket pressures the vivisectionist into “contemplating flight” (231). The narrator deliberately spares the reader the gruesome details of the laboratory, noting instead the vivisectionist's inhumanity: “He stepped stealthily about his laboratory. The place was dim, but it was not still. – This pen refuses to portray the sights which met the cold eyes so familiar with them that the man's nerves did not complain. Such of his subjects as could walk he urged to their feet, and leashed them” (232). He is stopped in the street by a furious mob led by Jacket and all the dogs are freed, including, Tammyshanty. While the “practical physiologist,” having been “so rudely interrupted by ignorant laymen” (236), flees the city, Jacket and Tammyshanty are finally reunited.