Dogs eat offal, while the others hunt for lizards in the fields.
A lizard diet is supposed to reduce their weight (it would certainly
reduce mine); but I suspect that southern cats are emaciated not only
from this cause, but from systematic starvation. Many a kitten is born
that never tastes a drop of cow's milk from the cradle to the grave, and
little enough of its own mother's.
To say that our English zoophilomania - our cult of lap-dogs - smacks of
degeneracy does not mean that I sympathize with the ill-treatment of
beasts which annoys many visitors to these parts and has been attributed
to "Saracenic" influences. Wrongly, of course; one might as well
attribute it to the old Greeks. [Footnote: Whose attitude towards
animals, by the way, was as far removed from callousness as from
sentimentalism. We know how those Hellenic oxen fared who had laboured
to draw up heavy blocks for the building of a temple - how, on the
completion of their task, they were led into green fields, there to
pasture unmolested for the rest of their lives. We know that the Greeks
were appreciative of the graces and virtues of canine nature - is not the
Homeric Argo still the finest dog-type in literature? Yet to them the
dog, even he of the tender Anthology, remained what he is: a tamed
beast. The Greeks, sitting at dinner, resented the insolence of a
creature that, watching every morsel as it disappeared into the mouth of
its master, plainly discovered by its physiognomy the desire, the
presumed right, to devour what he considered fit only for himself.
Whence that profound word [Greek: kunopes] - dog-eyed, shameless. In
contrast to this sanity, observe what an Englishman can read into a
dog's eye:
That liquid, melancholy eye,
From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
Seemed surging the Virgilian cry -
The sense of tears in mortal things. . . .
[That is how Matthew Arnold interprets the feelings of Fido, watching his
master at work upon a tender beefsteak. . . .]
Poor Saracens! They are a sort of whipping-boy, all over the country.
The chief sinner in this respect is the Vatican, which has authorized
cruelty to animals by its official teaching. When Lord Odo-Russell
enquired of the Pope regarding the foundation of a society for the
prevention of cruelty to animals in Italy, the papal answer was: "Such
an association could not be sanctioned by the Holy See, being founded
on a theological error, to wit, that Christians owed any duties to
animals." This language has the inestimable and rather unusual merit of
being perspicuous. Nevertheless, Ouida's flaming letters to "The Times"
inaugurated an era of truer humanity. . . .
And the lateness of the dining-hour - another symptom of the south.
