Nature & Animals Quote by Robert Falcon Scott

“Certainly dog driving is the most terrible work one has to face in this sort of business” lands with the weary authority of someone discovering, too late, that heroism is mostly logistics. Scott’s “certainly” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it’s not just emphasis, it’s self-convincing, an attempt to make the complaint sound like settled fact rather than a creeping doubt. The phrase “this sort of business” also matters. He frames exploration as a trade, almost a bureaucracy of suffering, where a man is judged less by grand visions than by whether he can manage animals, gear, and morale in conditions designed to break all three.

In context, Scott is writing from the early 20th-century Antarctic campaigns, where dog teams were both indispensable technology and cultural sticking point. British expeditions carried a class-coded suspicion of dogs and “foreign” methods; Norwegian polar practice treated them as central. Scott’s line reads like the moment when romantic imperial grit collides with the mundane reality that dogs don’t respond to stoicism. Driving requires a different masculinity: patience, improvisation, a willingness to be bossed around by weather and animal instinct.

The subtext isn’t simply that dog driving is hard. It’s that the expedition’s success hinges on a skill Scott doesn’t fully control, and that dependence feels humiliating. “Terrible” isn’t melodrama; it’s a crack in the narrative of mastery that polar exploration liked to sell back home.