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 - fetchers are exceptions, though they may 
