“Dogs are highly grateful animals,” according to my experience.  Once a street dog in my city recognized me  when I stood before him after a gap of some  3  years; it came wagging his hindquarters very vigorously at me. I strained my head.  Ah yes, then I remembered that I had fed this dog with the left overs of my snacks one  fine afternoon.

Yet, in the Southern part of India and in my Tamil language I have heard people curse  an evil man,  “You, ungrateful dog?” It baffles me.  How could a dog  be grateful and ungrateful at the same time?  No one could explain the inconsistency  to me.  But the saying goes on.  I wonder if this is so  in other Indian languages as well ?

Then one day I did discover the justification behind that saying.

Our dog Lassie (a female)  was very fond of my wife.   Lassie virtually was her   personal security guard  following her wherever she went inside the house. After we returned from a shopping trip, it was my wife the dog greeted first with gusto;  she would come to me for a ‘casual’ hullo only later.

As days  passed by, wife got admitted in the hospital with several complaints. I am sure Lassie would have missed her.  She couldn’t convey her feelings to me but I sensed that she was awaiting wife’s return from wherever she had gone.  Then one day,  after an absence of six weeks,  wifey did return home, not as a living  being but as a lifeless human body.  She was brought  home dead at 2 a.m. that great January 2010  morning.  My children, relatives and I collected the body from the ambulance and laid her on a bed – silently.  I expected Lassie to go near her and welcome her home.  She did none of that sort. And she was totally indifferent to her mistress as well.

Next morning, after we had got reconciled to the reality that the lady of the house was no more, I told Lassie, “Lassie, see there is Mummy. Say ‘hello’ to her.”  She did put her paws up the freezer bed to sniff at the lifeless body. No excitement or gurgling noise whatever.   She didn’t even  wag her tail at a person long known to her.  Had Lassie forgotten her erstwhile  mistress and so soon? She did, from all accounts.  It appeared as though Lassie had removed my wife’s name from her memory list. She refused to recognise her.

Two days later, having completed the funeral formalities, I asked Lassie, “Lassie, where is mummy?”  No reaction.  Wouldn’t even look around for her. In the earlier days, just a mention of the word ’mummy’ , Lassie would run to the door or peep into every room for ‘mummy’. Not any more.

Lassie wouldn’t even recall that it was my wife  who used to serve  every meal to her.  Often when she sulked, wifey would patiently sit down by her side and feed the dog with her own hand like she would to her own little son or daughter  and then Lassie would eat up every piece of pedigree.  All that’s gone. Our pet dog had no remembrance of all  these ministration?

Hasn’t she turned  into  an ungrateful dog as far as her late mistress was concerned?

Popularity: 7% [?]