We have only to compare the position of the dog among Mohammedans or Hindoos in the present day with the conditions of his life in England and America to see what Christianity has done for him indirectly. He is saved from needless suffering, tended in sickness, and housed and fed so that his physical and mental powers can reach their highest point of development. He thus attains a far higher level in the life history of his race than is possible to his half-starved, cowed, and miserable brothers in Eastern lands.
To the Mohammedan he is an unclean creature, and by him is treated with a disregard of the amenities of intercourse between man and beast that goes far to make him the outcast in mind and manners that he is in the conditions of his outward life. The tumultuous troop of pariahs that rush out from an Indian village, to the discomfort of the English rider enjoying his morning gallop, show in appearance and disposition marks of the neglect in which their life from its earliest day is passed. With the Hindoo the dog is safe from active ill treatment, and while in health and strength may share the conditions of his master’s life. But when sickness, or accident, or old age overtakes him, not a hand will be lifted in his service. Though some simple, timely aid might save the poor brute nameless suffering, and even give him years in which to serve his master in the future as he has done in the past, his Hindoo owner will show the fatalistic indifference to his sufferings that is one of the marks of the followers of his strange creed. The dog’s time has come, and the man who will vex his soul if inadvertently he crush the life from the tiniest of creeping insects, will show a perfect disregard of the claims of the animal who has served him with all the love and fidelity of his heart and the strength of the best years of his life.
But in Western lands where Christian ethics have put the finishing touch to the gentler influences of a progressive state of civilisation, the dog’s rights as a living, sentient being are regarded as they never have been in the course of the world’s history. True, there are bright spots in the past as there are direful blemishes in the present, that on the one hand bring discredit on the vaunted progress of human development, and on the other throw the glamour of a strange acceptance of moral responsibility to the dumb creation on the men of far-off days, but these are the exceptions that go to prove the truth of the general statement.