Like any dog owner knows, peace and quiet is required to get through the days…and sometimes beloved pups can make that a challenge. Queen Elizabeth could relate, and as such, developed the perfect royal trick to get her fleet of dogs to relax, Craig Brown revealed in his recently released book, Q: A Voyage Around The Queen.
In the book, Brown detailed Elizabeth’s relationship with animals, which led to an anecdote about her experiences with her corgis and dorgis (Dachshund/Corgi mix). She reportedly employed the use of bagpipes to get the dogs to quiet down. “Coincidentally, the way to scare off a belligerent corgi is the same as for a belligerent human being: a blast from the bagpipes,” Brown wrote, adding, “Happily, the queen always kept a set of bagpipes to hand.”
Elizabeth also kept a royal bagpipe player, Jim Motherwell, on hand in the 1990s, and in the book, directly quoted the musician as saying that “the pitch of the pipes seems to hurt most dogs’ ears,” Motherwell once told told author Penny Junor. As the bagpipes begin to make their signature sound, “most corgis stop whatever they are doing and slink away, as though in pain,” Motherwell added.
In the book, Brown detailed a time where Elizabeth met former British prime minister Gordon Brown during his visit to Balmoral with his family—the Queen “was surrounded by her corgis and the boys were delighted and shocked in equal measure when she told one of her dogs to ‘shut up,'” much to the surprise of the minister’s kids.
While playing the bagpipes seems like an unusual punishment for the pups, Brown explained in Q: A Voyage Around The Queen that Elizabeth’s corgis often had behavioral issues, and that multiple people suffered bites from the dogs. The corgis and dorgis were considered “an unpredictable, temperamental bunch, one minute cuddly, the next psycho, the Corleones of the dog world.”
However, the wild temperament of Elizabeth’s dogs offered her a sense of comfort, as they were “rebellious in a way that Queen Elizabeth II could never be. Their clamour was her refuge, their indifference her comfort.”
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