Dog-Speech | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 27, 1879

Dog-Speech.

It is certain that dogs can interchange ideas as men talk with one another. It matters little whether they do it by sign or by sound, but they do it easily and effectively. Mrs. Burton gives some curious facts about dog-life in Syria and other Eastern cities. Dogs exist there by hundreds and thousands, without owners or care, and are a kind of community by themselves. Each one belongs to a particular quarter of the city, and is not allowed to live elsewhere. She treated them kindly, and fed them, while the inhabitants beat and stoned them, and in gratitude they undertook to escort her, and defend her from harm. When she went out to walk, a dog always met her, as if appointed by the whole community, accompanied her to the border of his boundary, and passed her over to one belonging to that quarter, who did the same thing in his turn. Each dog wagged his tail, as if bidding good-by, when his work was done.

She says, also, she has often in the quiet night heard a dog come barking from the foot of the mountains. Meeting the dogs on the border of the village, there would be quiet a few minutes, then a general barking in concert; then one dog would start for the middle of the village, with a similar result there; then a single dog again from the further side of the village, followed by general barking there. "Whatever the canine news is," she says, "in about twenty minutes it is passed round to all the dogs in Damascus."