Gaspode
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| Characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series |
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| Character details | |
| Full name: | Gaspode |
| Description: | A small terrier-like mongrel |
| Associations: | The Canting Crew |
| Location: | Ankh-Morpork |
| Story appearances | |
| First seen: | Moving Pictures |
| Also in: | Men At Arms, Soul Music, Feet of Clay, Hogfather, The Fifth Elephant, The Truth |
| Other details | |
| Notes: | Able to think and talk |
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 'Licky end' which is only found in pregnant sheep); he claims that the only reason the diseases haven't killed him is that they're too busy fighting amongst themselves to focus on him. However, since everyone knows that dogs can't speak, people tend to interpret his speech as their own personal thoughts, a tendency which Gaspode regularly uses to wrangle food from passers by. (In fact it has been mentioned in the books that a passerby kicked Gaspode into the gutter, and had gone no more than five steps before he thought "I'm a bastard, what am I"). 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.
As a newborn pup, Gaspode was thrown into the River Ankh in a brick-weighted sack. Since it was the Ankh, Gaspode was subsequently able to crawl ashore and find shelter in an alley, though not before forming a rather confused sexual relationship with the brick.
Animals on the Discworld known to have human-level intelligence are Gaspode, The Librarian, camels, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents and Quoth the raven.
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, and so lost the position to Laddie (an obvious Lassie analogy), 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.
Gaspode is named after "the famous Gaspode", a dog who, upon his master's death, stayed at the graveside howling until he died (possibly because the gravestone was on his tail). This is a reference to Greyfriars Bobby.
