p. 8 | SOME COSTLY DOGS by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 1, 1899

SOME COSTLY DOGS.

By Editor

IN the group of pictures on this page we present some rather high-priced dogs, and incidentally a chicken that is claimed to be worth $2,500. The chicken, perhaps, would not rank so high did he not belong to the pugilist fraternity. He won a bet of a hundred thousand dollars for his owner in a single contest. Of course I hear you say that it is barbarous and degrading to fight chickens in this way and bet on them; but that is not to be accounted of when sport is to be had and any money is to be won. Games and races and the brutal ring-fights of men, birds, and beasts, and the accompanying gambling, are prevailing vices of the age. And to the thinking mind there is nothing that will indicate more clearly how madly this generation is driving down the decline into certain ruin than this selfsame craze for gambling and games and races.

Six thousand five hundred dollars was actually paid for the dog that stands by himself in our engraving. The supposed value of this cur consists in certain "marks" that they say make him a perfect type of his kind, and an English "nobleman" was willing to pay that large sum in order to be able to say that he had the one "perfectly-marked collie."

The group of four dogs in our cut is owned by an American capitalist. He has some sixty of this kind of dogs in all, but values these four at $10,000. These sixty dogs have their fine kennel to live in, the basement of which is the kitchen, where their food is prepared. Choice beef and mutton are cooked for them regularly, and such other dishes as may be thought palatable and wholesome for the favored canines are given to them from time to time by the man who is hired as a servant to dogs.

Dogs such as are shown in our engraving are supposed to belong to a sort of canine nobility. They are not only better than common dogs, but are much better, so they say, than common people. They require human servants to wait upon them, seeing that they are luxuriantly fed and bathed and combed and taken out day by day for proper exercise. But, after all is done, what does it amount to? No amount of care will make these animals anything more than yelping, barking curs.

There is something homelike about seeing a dog roving over the farm or lying in the yard. But when it comes to spending days and nights in caring for dogs, and when seemingly the larger share of a person's affections is bestowed on these brutes, it would appear that it should be below those who are endowed with human reason.

How many poor children there are who have no homes, no one to feed them, to love them, or teach them, or save them from ruin! And why is it that those who have such vast fortunes will not turn their means to account by helping their fellows, rather than bestowing their substance upon dogs—just nothing but dogs? There is the most touching, the most absolutely destitute poverty in the world. Our great cities are burdened with it. And if the men and women who have means with which to relieve this distress continue to lavish it upon dogs and kindred objects, they will soon be aroused from their useless follies to encounter the dread realities of the worst time of trouble this world has ever known.

Men are now having opportunities to relieve distress and help the poor. But if these opportunities are slighted, it will be only a few years till they would gladly give their lives to have these same opportunities return. It is better to see these things now and act upon them than to have our lives snuffed out amid bitter lamentations in the revolutions that are surely and hastily coming unless the present order of things is most speedily changed. T.