doggery

dog +‎ -ery

doggery (countable and uncountable, plural doggeries)

1. (countable, obsolete) A squalid tavern.
   • 1846, Home Missionary, volume 19, page 125:

     There is an enemy of religion here, who […] keeps a public house, and also a "doggery." […] By his "doggery," he keeps around him a gang of ten or fifteen of the most abandoned persons, whom he employs as assistants in carrying out his nefarious schemes. When intoxicated, he is most abusive; […]

2. (uncountable, dated) Bestial or underhand behaviour.
   • 1908, The Nation, volume 4, page 379:

     "There's a lot of 'doggery' about this business," my informant added musingly.

   • 1935, Frank Philpott Bacon, The Use of Spiritualism in the Drama, page 126:

     Then it is all doggery and devilry and there is no God and no mercy.

   • 1961, Boys' Life, volume 51, number 11, page 13:

     They fed on oily carcasses washed down with rum, brawled away the evenings, and collapsed each night in drunken stupor. After a week of this doggery, they made the rounds again, gathering freshly laid eggs, […]

3. (uncountable) Dogs generally; the realm or sphere of dogs.
   • 1967, Stanley Romaine Hopper, ‎David LeRoy Miller, Interpretation: the Poetry of Meaning (page 84)

     […] we'd distinguish an "entelechial" dog, the "compleat" dog toward which all doggery variously aspires […]

• John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary