DOGS IN LONDON 257 



be described as painful. Take the case of a chained 

 dog; he is miserable, as any one may see since 

 there are many dogs in that condition, because 

 eternally conscious of the restraint; and the per- 

 petual craving for liberty, like that of the healthy 

 energetic man immured in a cell, rises to positive 

 torture. Again, we know that smell is the most 

 important sense of the dog, that it is as much to 

 him as vision to the bird; consequently, to deprive 

 him of the use of this all-important faculty by, let 

 us say, plugging up his nostrils, or by destroying 

 the olfactory nerve in some devilish way known 

 to the vivisectors, would be to make him perfectly 

 miserable, just as the destruction of its sense of 

 sight would make a bird miserable. By comparison 

 the restraint of the muzzle is very slight indeed: 

 smell, hearing, vision are unaffected, and there is 

 no interference with free locomotion; indeed so 

 slight is the restraint that after a while the animal 

 is for the most part unconscious of it except when 

 the impulse to bite or to swallow a luscious bit of 

 carrion is excited. 



We frequently see or hear of dogs that joyfully 

 run off to fetch their muzzles when they are called 

 to go out for a walk, or even before they are called 

 if they but see any preparations being made for a 

 walk: no person will contend that these are made 

 unhappy by the muzzle, or that they deliberately 

 weigh two evils in their mind and make choice of 

 the lesser. The most that may be said is that these 

 muzzle - f etchers are exceptions, though they may 



