Gaspode
|
|
Gaspode is a small terrier-like dog featured in seven of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. He possesses human-level intelligence and the ability to speak, as well as an extensive collection of diseases (including one which is only found in pregnant sheep). However, since everyone knows that dogs can't speak, people tend to interpret his speech as personal thoughts, a tendency which Gaspode regularly uses to finagle food from passersby. The exceptions to this are Carrot Ironfoundersson, Angua, and the Canting Crew (who believe in much stranger things than talking dogs). Gaspode is frequently conflicted between his desire to be a Good Dog and his belief that he has to look out for himself, because no-one else will. Despite being given a home with happy children and suchlike, he ran away from this for the life he's always known.
Animals on the Discworld known to have human-level intelligence are Gaspode, The Librarian, camels and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
Gaspode originally gained his intelligence and ability to speak in Moving Pictures as the result of a wild idea which sought to (re)create a Discworld version of Hollywood. Descended from dogs that fled the destruction of the first appearance of this idea, Gaspode was "selected" to fill the movie role of the Wonder Dog. Unfortunately, he looks nothing like the common conception of what a Wonder Dog is, so lost the position to Laddie (an obvious Lassie analogue), whereupon he became an agent for Laddie and the human actors Victor Tugelbend (renamed Victor Maraschino) and Theda "Ginger" Withel (renamed Delores del Syn). After the wild idea was contained/defeated, Gaspode lost the unwanted gifts that had been bestowed on him, and returned to being a homeless street dog.
In Men At Arms, we find that Gaspode has regained his intelligence and speech as a result of sleeping too close to the High Energy Magic laboratory in Unseen University and being exposed to magical seepage. In this and the rest of the books he appears in, Gaspode is portrayed as something like a Dickensian urchin, scrambling to survive the harsh life of the streets while maintaining a lovable (if filthy) nature. Gaspode becomes the "thinking brain" dog (like a "seeing eye" dog) for Foul Ole Ron, and eventually joins the Canting Crew, a group of variably insane homeless people who have, as aforementioned, no difficulty in believing in talking dogs.
Appearances