Tchin d’ tchèrète, martchande di makêye, li pwèrteûse d’ êwe vis rafristêye.
Sled dog, quark seller, the water carrier refreshes you
At the request of the newly founded Animal Protection Society, Baroness Hortense Montefiore-Bischoffsheim donated around twenty drinking fountains to the city of Liège between 1888 and 1891. With the advent of piped water, these fountains gradually lost their original purpose and fell into disrepair, sometimes becoming targets of vandalism. In the 1980s, several were restored and brought back into use. Today, each fountain is topped with a figurine of a water carrier, based on designs by Léopold Harzé. One distinctive feature of these fountains is their drinking troughs, which were specifically designed for animals. At a time when the automobile was still in its infancy, carts and carriages dominated the streets of the “fiery city.” Among the working classes, dogs were often used to pull small carts. These four-legged helpers drank from the lower troughs of the fountains, while horses used the upper ones. The lot of these dogs was far from enviable, as reflected in the Walloon expression “Pôves nos-ôtes et lès tchins d’tchèrète” (“Poor us and the cart-pulling dogs”). A historical note: shortly before the First World War, dogs were even used by the Belgian army to pull machine guns, forming so-called “dog-mobile” units