Big Fido
| Chief Barker of the Dog Guild | |
| [[Image:|thumb|center|240px|{{{1}}}]] | |
| Name | Big Fido |
| Race | Dog |
| Age | |
| Occupation | |
| Physical appearance | Small white poodle, with a ragged tartan coat and a mad glint in his eyes. |
| Residence | Ankh-Morpork |
| Death | Died while trying to leap a gap 'that was nothing to a wolf' whilst being a small poodle Ankh-Morpork, 1988 UC |
| Parents | |
| Relatives | |
| Children | |
| Marital Status | |
| Appearances | |
| Books | Book:Men at Arms |
| Cameos | mentioned by Gaspode in Discworld Noir |
Big Fido was the Chief Barker of the Dogs' Guild. Gaspode remarked to Sergeant Angua that Big Fido was not mad - that's when you froth at the mouth; rather he was insane. That's when you froth at the brain... He was a small white poodle with red eyes. And a diamante collar. Size notwithstanding (and also ignoring his habit of farting nervously when talking [not nervously as in "fright" but as in "involuntarily"), he was one mean dog.
Something in his head went click! one day and he savaged his owner and beat up every dog in town until he was up against a one-eyed Rottweiler called Mad Arthur, whom, after beating in a fight, he killed, to Arthur's brief amazement (Animals don't fight to the death, just to defeat).
He ran the Dogs' Guild with a streak of insanity and no mercy. Any dog found begging, or fetching sticks or performing any other demeaning task was executed.
Because Big Fido had a dream. He dreamed that all dogs were spiritual wolves, deprived of their heritage by humans, who would one day rise to overthrow their human masters and run free through the forests with names like Quickfang and Silverback.
Powered less by muscles and more by the determination that meant that even if you sandblasted him for five minutes you'd better not turn your back on what was left because it wouldn't have given up, he tried to leap across an enormous gap between roofs that Angua (as a wolf) had just made. He almost made it, but refused to be saved by Gaspode's catching him by his collar - a remnant of his former slavery. He wriggled free and plummeted to his death.
Within minutes his body was picked up by Foul Ole Ron and sold to a furrier. Heis currently being worn about town as a pair of gloves.
An alternative history was created by the dogs, who had him fleeing the city, leading a pack of wolves to attack human settlements and living the life of freedom he had always envisaged. This made it more bearable for the dogs to beg from humans - they were only doing it until Big Fido came back. Sad, really.
His collar was kept in a secret place, and visited regularly by the dogs until they forgot about it.
Annotation
Fido's incoherent rantings about destiny and racial purity and restoring the bloodline of a mongrellised race are straight out of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Especially in later life, Hitler was also prone to nervous farting as he talked. People in the same room especially appreciated the smell, described as particularly rancorous, but nobody dared comment. Hitler's bowel problems gave Bunker life in the last days an extra aspect of horror.
For a long time the last resting place of Hitler's bodily remains was a matter of speculation. The Russians, who knew, kept it a closely-guarded secret. Eventually it was revealed that most of Hitler's corpse had been interred underneath the parade ground of a Red Army barracks in East Germany, so that generations of Russian soldiers were unwittingly marching and goose-stepping over his grave, just to rub it in to the unquiet soul Communism officially denied that we all have as to exactly who won the war, tovarisch. Those in the know would have found this most amusing. To prevent resurgent German fascism having a martyr to rally round, when the russians officially withdrew from Germany in the early 1990's, the remains were disinterred, thoroughly cremated, and consigned to a fast-running river so as to dilute him into the Baltic lest he rise again. However, large parts of his skull and jawbone remain in KGB archives in Moscow.
Of course, obsessive Russian secrecy directly led to the rumours that, in the absence of a body, Hitler had escaped the doomed city of Berlin, survived the war, and fled to South America, where he apparently died in the 1960s anyway...
Of course his philosophy was used by many others, such as Oswald Mosley and even the Daleks...