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The Dog — as a Sportsman
by
In a well-conducted dog-fight each dog in turn has to attack the other dog, and one can see fierce earnestness blazing in the eye of the attacker as he hurls himself on the foe. What makes him fight like that? It is not bloodthirstiness, because they are neither savage nor quarrelsome dogs: a bulldog will go all his life without a fight, unless put into a ring. It is simply their strong self-respect and stubborn pride which will not let them give in. The greyhound snaps at his opponent and then runs for his life, but the fighting dog stands to it till death.
Just occasionally one sees the same type of human being — some quiet-spoken, good-tempered man who has taken up glove-fighting for a living, and who, perhaps, gets pitted against a man a shade better than himself. After a few rounds he knows he is overmatched, but there is something at the back of his brain that will not let him cave in. Round after round he stands punishment, and round after round he grimly comes up, till, possibly, his opponent loses heart, or a fluky hit turns the scale in his favour. These men are to be found in every class of life. Many of the gamest of the game are mere gutter-bred boys who will continue to fight long after they have endured enough punishment to entitle them to quit.
You can see in their eyes the same hard glitter that shows in the bulldog’s eyes as he limps across the ring, or in the eye of the racehorse as he lies down to it when his opponent is outpacing him. It is grit, pluck, vim, nerve force; call it what you like, and there is no created thing that has more of it than the dog.
The blood-lust is a dog-phase that has never been quite understood. Every station-owner knows that sometimes the house-dogs are liable to take a sudden fit of sheep-killing. Any kind of dog will do it, from the collie downward. Sometimes dogs from different homesteads meet in the paddocks, having apparently arranged the whole affair beforehand. They are very artful about it, too. They lie round the house till dark, and then slink off and have a wild night’s blood-spree, running down the wretched sheep and tearing their throats open; before dawn they slink back again and lie around the house as before. Many and many a sheep-owner has gone out with a gun and shot his neighbour’s dogs for killing sheep which his own wicked, innocent-looking dogs had slain.