Julian Grenfell (1888–1915) was an aristocratic soldier-poet and a keen huntsman, most famously the author of ‘In Battle’, in its time one of the most widely admired poems of the First World War. This chapter concentrates on a lesser-known work, ‘To a Black Greyhound’, in order to explore the complex but revealing relationship between Grenfell’s attitude to warfare, extreme but not untypical of his class, and his lifelong devotion to the ‘long dogs’ that accompanied him even to the battlefields of France. Drawing on both published and unpublished material the chapter re-establishes the close connection between Grenfell’s brief and often troubled life with the study of classical literature as it was taught at Eton College and at Oxford University. It concludes by surveying and questioning the still commonplace custom of attributing heroic, even militaristic, qualities to non-human animals.