i88i.] 
A Defence of the Dog . 
103 
without occasioning hardship to dog owners and to the 
animals themselves. That we cannot shoot a dog offhand, 
like a wolf, is a very irrelevant complaint. It is simply a 
case of the general principle that in a law-governed country 
one must not, except in the extremest danger, take the law 
into one’s own hands ; for even a burglar cannot safely be 
shot unless it can be shown that he is threatening your per- 
son as well as your property. That so many as 14,000 
people should suffer from dog-bites and 35 perish by hydro- 
phobia annually is deplorable, doubtless, but it cannot be 
accurately described as a “wholly gratuitous curse.” That 
a certain moiety of these injuries and deaths might be pre- 
vented by greater care on the part of dog owners and a more 
rigid administration of the existing law, there is no room to 
doubt, yet it would be difficult to find any other cause of 
death to which we are liable which counts so few victims as 
35 per annum. No faCts, indeed, are more liable, with all 
their apparent certainty, to give a seeming basis to unsound 
deductions than statistical ones. What an appalling chapter 
could be written on the destruction of life through horses ? 
All populous towns, and London especially, appear positive 
shambles when we read of the daily, far less the annual, 
destruction by horse traffic. Yet a horse is, in numberless 
cases, quite as much a luxury as a dog. The carriages of 
the wealthy are only in the remote and secondary sense 
necessities, and even travelling by cab or omnibus is fre- 
quently a lazy luxury. By cutting off, through removing all 
unnecessary vehicles, this “wholly gratuitous cause,” more 
lives would be saved in a week than would be saved in a 
year though every dog in the kingdom were hung to-morrow. 
As to cost, there is no comparison, and if one were but paid 
the annual expenditure over horses one could safely under- 
take to endow the whole canine community with a sufficient 
and perpetual annuity. 
But, even for a moment granting the supposition that the 
utile functions now performed by the dog may be in the 
future executed by some other agency, we should still expeCt 
to see the dog flourish almost as before. A pet dog is to 
many people a great pleasure and entertainment, in short, 
an immense luxury. As to which thing, luxury, there is a 
point to be cleared up. A luxury is often spoken of as syn- 
onymous with a superfluity, and, therefore, the contrary of 
a necessary. This is not so, for it is a curious point in 
human nature that with it some luxury seems a necessity. 
Smoking and drinking are undoubted luxuries, and yet they 
are the last thing that the poorest will dispense with. In 
