Our Friend the Dog | Page 5

at our approach like the birds.
Among the animals, we number a few servants who have submitted
only through indifference, cowardice or stupidity: the uncertain and
craven horse, who responds only to pain and is attached to nothing; the
passive and dejected ass, who stays with us only because he knows not
what to do nor where to go, but who nevertheless, under the cudgel and
the pack-saddle, retains the idea that lurks behind his ears; the cow and
the ox, happy so long as they are eating, and docile because, for
centuries, they have not had a thought of their own; the affrighted sheep,
who knows no other master than terror; the hen, who is faithful to the
poultry-yard because she finds more maize and wheat there than in the
neighbouring forest. I do not speak of the cat, to whom we are nothing
more than a too large and uneatable prey: the ferocious cat, whose
sidelong contempt tolerates us only as encumbering parasites in our
own homes. She, at least, curses us in her mysterious heart; but all the
others live beside us as they might live beside a rock or a tree. They do
not love us, do not know us, scarcely notice us. They are unaware of
our life, our death, our departure, our return, our sadness, our joy, our
smile. They do not even hear the sound of our voice, so soon as it no
longer threatens them; and, when they look at us, it is with the
distrustful bewilderment of the horse, in whose eye still hovers the
infatuation of the elk or gazelle that sees us for the first time, or with
the dull stupor of the ruminants, who look upon us as a momentary and
useless accident of the pasture.
For thousands of years, they have been living at our side, as foreign to
our thoughts, our affections, our habits as though the least fraternal of
the stars had dropped them but yesterday on our globe. In the boundless
interval that separates man from all the other creatures, we have
succeeded only, by dint of patience, in making them take two or three
illusory steps. And if, to-morrow, leaving their feelings toward us
untouched, nature were to give them the intelligence and the weapons

wherewith to conquer us, I confess that I should distrust the hasty
vengeance of the horse, the obstinate reprisals of the ass and the
maddened meekness of the sheep. I should shun the cat as I should
shun the tiger; and even the good cow, solemn and somnolent, would
inspire me with but a wary confidence. As for the hen, with her round,
quick eye, as when discovering a slug or a worm, I am sure that she
would devour me without a thought.

III
Now, in this indifference and this total want of comprehension in which
everything that surrounds us lives; in this incommunicable world,
where everything has its object hermetically contained within itself,
where every destiny is self-circumscribed, where there exist among the
creatures no other relations than those of executioners and victims,
eaters and eaten, where nothing is able to leave its steel-bound sphere,
where death alone establishes cruel relations of cause and effect
between neighbouring lives, where not the smallest sympathy has ever
made a conscious leap from one species to another, one animal alone,
among all that breathes upon the earth, has succeeded in breaking
through the prophetic circle, in escaping from itself to come bounding
toward us, definitely to cross the enormous zone of darkness, ice and
silence that isolates each category of existence in nature's unintelligible
plan. This animal, our good familiar dog, simple and unsurprising as
may to-day appear to us what he has done, in thus perceptibly drawing
nearer to a world in which he was not born and for which he was not
destined, has nevertheless performed one of the most unusual and
improbable acts that we can find in the general history of life. When
was this recognition of man by beast, this extraordinary passage from
darkness to light, effected? Did we seek out the poodle, the collie, or
the mastiff from among the wolves and the jackals, or did he come
spontaneously to us? We cannot tell. So far as our human annals stretch,
he is at our side, as at present; but what are human annals in
comparison with the times of which we have no witness? The fact
remains that he is there in our houses, as ancient, as rightly placed, as
perfectly adapted to our habits as though he had appeared on this earth,

such as he now is, at the same time as ourselves. We have not to gain
his confidence or his friendship: he is born our friend; while his eyes
are