How do you keep a pet?

AFTER obtaining a pet, the new owner had to feed and take care of the animal. Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) was the prototype of a pet-keeping scholar, and his letters provide an overview of the nature of pet ownership. He had several dogs. The first mention of a dog appears in a letter of 1338 to Giocomo Colonna. At that time Petrarch was living in Vaucluse, and he defends his reasons for living in so isolated in a spot, affirming that he had no companions apart from his faithful dog and servants.

A few years later his patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, sent him a dog from Avignon to be ‘a companion and source of comfort’, and in 1347 Petrarch composed a long letter in verse describing how the animal was settling down. Previously it had been used to fine food, running through elegant halls and sleeping on a ‘purple bed’. Petrarch maintains that its new surroundings delight the animal, which is very content with its new life as its new owner's ‘source of comfort and companion’. The dog has become accustomed to eating bread and water, the plain simple food Petrarch provides, living in his small home in Vaucluse, running in the countryside and swimming in nearby pools of water. The exercise has even cured the dog of mange, which Petrarch claims was brought on by the unhealthy airs of Avignon.