36 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 



from these creatures for a long time thereafter. Where, as 

 is not infrequently the case, a cur takes to eating eggs, a 

 single dose of tartar emetic concealed in an egg which is 

 placed where he can readily find it, is apt to effect an 

 immediate and complete reform. This ready learning from 

 experience is almost the gist of our human quality at least 

 on the intellectual side of it. 



Perhaps the greatest success to which man has attained 

 in his education of the dog is to be found in the measure in 

 which he has overcome the fierce rage which clearly charac- 

 terized the ancestors of this creature when they first felt the 

 mastering hand. The reader cannot understand the intensity 

 of the rage motive in the carnivora unless he has studied 

 some of these brutes in their wild state, where from the time 

 in the remote ages when they first began to take on the 

 qualities of their species they have survived and won success 

 by the fury of their assault. In almost all our breeds of dogs 

 this primal ferocity has been overlaid by the various motives 

 of rationality, sympathy, and conventional demeanor, until 

 one may live half a lifetime with well-bred dogs without a 

 chance to see the demon which we have buried in their 

 breasts, as we have in our own, beneath a host of civilizing 

 influences. It is rare indeed in our day that a dog, unless 

 insane, will bite a human being. The most of their assaults 

 are pure bluster, mere pretence of fury, as is shown by 

 the fact that if, carried away by their pretence, they are led 

 to use their teeth, it is usually a mere sham assault, having 

 no semblance of the effectiveness of true combat. 



Something of the pristine fury of the primitive dogs may 

 still be noted in a certain brutal variety of watch-dogs which 

 are still to be found in parts of continental Europe. The 



