It used to be that anyone wishing to take their dog with them if they were moving from North America to England had to stick their dog in quarantine for six months when they got to England so the English authorities could be certain that the dogs weren’t infected with rabies.

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The rules have changed somewhat, but before they did a friend of mine moved to England for a few years and brought along his dog.  The dog is a kind of malamute sort of dog.  One of those Alaska-husky-type-looking-dogs.  I believe they were able to visit the dog during its incarceration and things turned out okay.

But the remarkable thing they learned was that their dog was actually white.  Since it couldn’t get grubby while in custody it went through a full shedding cycle and came out completely clean and almost unrecognizable.

The dog was held for six months, so that’s something over 180 days and according to my dictionaries that’s not a quarantine.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary the root of the word is kwetwer and comes from Indo-European and means “four.”

Between Indo-European and English it passed through Latin where quadraginta meant “forty.”

By the time the word quarantine got into English it meant “a forty day period” and such a period was traditionally applied to several different things.

• Jesus Christ was supposed to have fasted for 40 days and in the 1400s the church used the word quarantine to refer to the place where he spent that time.
• When a woman became a widow it wasn’t always the law that her husband’s property should become hers.  During the time it took to sort out what she got out of the deal a 40 day period was allowed her to continue living in their home.  This period was also called the quarantine.

I won’t even get into the heartbreak of losing your partner and then getting turfed out of your home.

It was Samuel Pepys in 1663 in his diary who first noted that 40 days wasn’t what it used to be.  In his case it wasn’t dogs being isolated but people who might be bringing human disease into England.

Pepys said they were required to be quarantined for 30 days and that although this obviously wasn’t 40 days there was a general acceptance that the word no longer actually meant 40 days, but “it signifies now the thing, not the time spent in doing it.”