PERFECT OBEDIENCE 17 



until the danger passed. This is vouched for in an 

 old work, " Brown on Dogs." 



Op ^ Cf 



Probably there would be no great difficulty in 



training a dog to drop a hare, or anything else, at 



the approach of somebody other than its 



Perfect master. Dogs are sometimes trained to 

 Obedience 



lie down, without receiving any signal or 



order, when their owners meet friends and stop to 

 talk. One old gamekeeper would consider his dogs 

 to be very ill-mannered if they did not lie down 

 of their own accord when he stopped walking. 

 Another keeper has trained his dog to quite an 

 out-of-the-way trick, which is to the keeper's per- 

 sonal advantage, if highly detrimental to his duties. 

 The trick is for the dog, on command, to spit from 

 his mouth any food he may be eating. The keeper 

 will take his dog to a public-house, and set the ex- 

 ample of throwing him biscuits, which he will eat 

 greedily. He will then make a boast about the dog's 

 obedience (in the shooting field, by the way, we have 

 never known a more disobedient animal, though 

 he is exceedingly clever). Eventually the keeper 

 wagers a pint of beer to a quart that the dog not only 

 will cease eating biscuits on command, but will eject 

 any crumbs from his mouth, and not touch them 

 again until so ordered. Many a pot of beer has the 

 dog won for his master by this trick. When the two 

 go home, it is the dog that finds the way. 



B 



