WE know that in recent years it has been often said that "doggy" devotion is grossly overdone. Indeed, judging by news items from America, where dogs have their own beauty parlours and are left money in wills, this peculiar worship of dogs has become ridiculous. It is in plain contrast to the Biblical contempt of the dog and (at least in one place.) the use of the dog metaphor as signifying Satanic evil" the power of the dog."
Indeed, in Scripture, there is a curiously wide use of the dog metaphor. Compare: " After whom is the King of Israel come out ? After a dead dog? " " Beware of dogs" a dog doing sonic trick which seems undoglike—when. in fact_ the point of the trick is that it is undoglike. I don't like to see dogs dressed up, but then some wealthy old women dress up their dogs, a reminder that cruelty to dogs mat be found among alleged dog-lovers
Ordinary care
THERE is another cousidetatton involved in our treatment of dogs and other animals which Mal. be stated: " We should take an ordinary care of our lives. but we are not obliged to take an extraordinary care of them."
It is this consideration which makes me highly suspicious of experiments on dogs and other animals for the sake of some possible cure for human disease. The business is much too well calculated.
On the other hand, it is right that an animal should die instead of a human if that is the immediate choice. And many are the dogs which have. as far as they may be said to choose. accepted the death. Indeed, is seems that they have invited it.
Here we come to what may be the heart of the matter. For here is an animal which more than an other has breached most of the distance between man and the rest of creation and which has risked everything to belong to man and his family and to stand with man and his family against the world. In the process the dog seems to have given something of himself to man and in a certain sense (see C. S. Lewis again) there is something of man in his dog.
Deliberately to take up dogs and subject them to the most refined and carefully devised experiments is unjust, for it is to take undue advantage of them.