I am Her Highness’s dog at Slough. Muzzle me, Ma’am, or I’ll bow-wow. The Princess Royal’s appearance before the magistrates brought together two of Britain’s most sacred cows: doggies and royals. Both are national treasures. A thousand e-mails will leap from their laptops to avenge but a look that threatens either breed with insult. Princess Anne’s peccant bull terrier has a pedigree so long that if she could talk, she wouldn’t have spoken to anybody in court, except possibly Her Mistress. So on the bitch’s behalf, here are ten little-known facts about dogs and royals:

1. Royals have always kept pet dogs as well as huge hounds for hunting. Charles II favoured miniature cavalier spaniel lapdogs. They were pets, and ate of the crumbs which fell from their royal master’s table. But they also had a practical use as scapegoats to take the blame for socially embarrassing smells. Hence the epithet “feisty” (now applied to humans as well as dogs) comes from Old English fist, a foul smell or fart.

2. Bull terriers combine the feistiness of the terrier with the locking jaws of the bulldog. If you were offered the choice, you might prefer to be bitten by a bull terrier than by a bigger biting dog such as a dobermann pinscher, which goes around nipping anybody called Dobermann. But it is a poor choice. If you have to be bitten, go for a miniature poodle. The miniature turn your back, she does a poodle.

3. The doglore that humans grow to look like their pets must be as false as most folklore. Princess Anne’s bull terrier Dotty is snooty, snappy, impatient, aggressive to strangers, particularly the press, and has its breed’s characteristic long muzzle and slipped chin.

4. The first royal dog to be treated sympathetically in literature is Argos. Before him dogs were written off as biters, scavengers of the battlefield, carrion-chompers as evil as vultures and hoodie crows. But Argos, neglected on the pigsty midden, recognised his master King Odysseus on his return after 20 years away at the Trojan War. Wagged his tail, and died. Tears to eyes and triple Pedigree Chums all round.

5. Remember — a barking dog never bites. At any rate, not while it is barking. Jack Russells yap continually (particularly when on the lead), unless they are rare non-barkers such as beloved Parsley and Teasel. But they never bite. What, never? Well, hardly ever. And then only when they scent danger, stranger or a Royal Park ranger. And their bite compared to that of a bull terrier is as the nip of a stickleback to the snap of a shark.

6. The Princess Royal’s bull terrier is called Dotty, short for Dorothy, with comforting allusions to The Wizard of Oz. In general, as with all species, the bitches are nicer and less feisty than the males. But dog-names can mislead. Remember the French poodle with a fresh hairclip in the cartoon. He knew what people thought of his kind: “Highly strung”. “Spoiled Rotten”. “French”. But in the next 24 hours he’s going to change all that . . . He’s small. He’s black. He’s mad as hell. He’s poodle with a mohawk. You’ll never call him Fifi again.

7. Dog-tags matter. Sam Johnson said: “He was a vicious man, but very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him.” To make Dotty loveable rather than vicious, she needs to be renamed Hervey. And it is significant that Sam, sensibly, preferred cats to dogs. He even went out to buy oysters for his cat Hodge. I have always wanted to try this on my cat friends. But thrift prevails.

8. It is as foolish to stereotype breeds of dog as it is to make generalisations about races. No doubt there are pitbull terriers that are as gentle as labradors. The pekingese is an honorary cat that snuffles instead of purrs. I know one that took first prize in the cat show. It took the cat. The notion that the British are a nation of dog-lovers is weird. Think Battersea Dogs’ Home. Think motorways splattered with discarded puppies in the weeks after Christmas.

The French own more dogs per capita than the British. And treat them better.

9. Our cult of keeping dogs in town flats is absurd. Nobody keeps a pig in their flat. (Oh, yes they do.) Only medieval peasants kept cows in their houses. It is part of British nostalgia for a vanished (imaginary) pastoral Never Never Land, that was actually nasty, brutish and feisty. But at the Princess Royal’s country cott and in Windsor Great Park you would have thought that Hervey should get enough exercise to make her too exhausted to bite. Wrong again, Howard.

10. August Strindberg: “I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.” How odd that people of sense should find any pleasure in being accompanied by a beast who is always interrupting their conversation, biting the peasantry and taking us to court. Get a cat, Ma’am.

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