Creature Comforters

From prime ministers to army privates, people of all ranks and stations adore their animal companions. Pets and working beasts have inspired acts of compassion, conservation, and sometimes even artistic greatness. Furred, feathered, or fetlocked, here are a few animals that have pawed, prowled, and pranced their way into Canadian history.

BELOVED BEAR

Military veterinarian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn was on his way to the First World War training camp in Valcartier, Quebec, in 1914 when his train stopped in White River, Ontario. There he met and bought a friendly seven-month-old female black bear cub. Colebourn named the bear Winnipeg — soon shortened to Winnie — after his hometown. The playful bear, pictured above with Colebourn, became the mascot for the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade. The troops treated Winnie as a pet and took her with them to England. When the brigade left for France in 1915, Colebourn took Winnie to the London Zoo for safekeeping. Seeing how beloved she became, he donated her permanently in 1919. That’s where author A.A. Milne and his son, Christopher Robin, pictured above right, got to know her — an acquaintanceship that led to Milne’s famous Winnie the Pooh books. There’s a statue and plaque to Winnie in the zoo to this day.

GREY OWL, BROWN BEAVERS

While the beaver, writ large, is central to the story of Canada, no individual beavers are better known than Jelly Roll and Rawhide. Their tale is interwoven with that of Archibald Belaney, the Englishman who called himself Grey Owl, so the facts can be slippery. The most common version says that Belaney caught the kits’ mother in his trapline. His Mohawk partner, Gertrude Bernard, persuaded him to spare the little rodents, who became pets. A 1930 National Film Board short, Beaver Family, even chronicled their lodge-building skills. Jelly Roll and Rawhide lived with Belaney and Bernard, first in Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park and then in Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan. Grey Owl is seen above, feeding one of the baby beavers from a bottle. The bark-chewing duo probably inspired the human couple’s work to conserve Canada’s national animal.

PAINTER’S PET

Among Emily Carr’s many companion animals, she retained a special affection for her Javanese macaque monkey, Woo, pictured here with her in 1930. Carr obtained the monkey in 1923 from a pet shop in downtown Victoria. The monkey “named herself” on her first night in Carr’s home, with her “sad wailing, ‘Woo, woo, woo,’” Carr wrote in her story collection The Heart of a Peacock. Woo had her own corner in Carr’s studio and may have inspired the artist’s creativity. “Some of Woo’s stupid critics might well have learned, from my monkey, ingenuity, thoroughness,” Carr wrote. “Every object must be felt, smelt, tasted, pulled to pieces before her curiosity was satisfied.” When Carr fell ill in 1937, Woo was sent to live at Vancouver’s Stanley Park Zoo.

LITERARY HOUND

The beloved tearjerker Beautiful Joe, by Margaret Marshall Saunders, told the story of a real dog, pictured above, who was rescued by a kind family after his original owner had cut off his ears and tail. In 1892, Saunders, shown above right, submitted a heart-rending story about him to an American Humane Education Society contest (under the name Marshall Saunders) and won. The book followed the next year, and by the 1930s it had sold seven million copies. A bronze statue of Beautiful Joe stands in the eponymous park in Meaford, Ontario, where he is buried.

INFANTRY UNGULATE

When a group of soldiers from Western Canada stopped in the small town of Broadview, Saskatchewan, en route to joining the Fifth Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, in Valcartier, Quebec, a family gave them a goat named Bill. The troops dubbed their new mascot Sergeant Bill and snuck him first to England and then, in 1915, to the front lines in France. Arrested twice — once for eating paperwork — the goat later distinguished himself by standing guard over a Prussian soldier in a crater, despite his own injuries. Another time he butted three Canadians into a trench seconds before a shell exploded where they’d been standing. Sergeant Bill lived through battles at Vimy Ridge and Festubert in France and at Ypres and Passchendaele in Belgium, enduring gassing, shelling, and trench foot — or, in his case, trench hoof. He was awarded a sergeant’s chevrons as well as the Mons Star, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal. He is shown above, in his finery, with an unidentified member of the Fifth Battalion. Despite a commanding officer who wanted him left behind and an immigration official who was reluctant to allow him back into Canada, Sergeant Bill paraded with his brothers-in-arms back in Saskatchewan, where he was returned to his family. He died soon after but was preserved and mounted, and he now stands behind glass in the Broadview Historical Museum.

LITTLE CHAMPION

Born in 1961, Northern Dancer was too small by horse-racing standards to be considered a competitor. When nobody bid on the horse as a yearling, owner Edward Plunkett Taylor turned him over to legendary trainer Horatio Luro, who saw the little bay’s potential. On May 2, 1964, Northern Dancer became the first Canadian horse to win the Kentucky Derby, where he set a record. He is shown above, centre right, with jockey Bill Hartack, reaching the Kentucky Derby finish line a neck ahead of Hill Rise, left, ridden by Willie Shoemaker. After the Derby, Northern Dancer won the Preakness Stakes, finished third in the Belmont Stakes (the last part of horse racing’s triple crown), and came home to win Canada’s most prestigious race, the Queen’s Plate, by seven lengths. In all, Northern Dancer won fourteen of eighteen races in his thirteen-month career. He went out to stud at the end of 1964 due to an injured tendon and is still considered the greatest sire in the history of racing. Thousands of thoroughbred racehorses are his descendants. In 1965, Northern Dancer became the first animal to be inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.