I told him.
“So you’re one of those pet dogs I’ve heard of,” he sneered. “Lie on a cushion and eat cake, they tell me. Well, you won’t get any cake here. Bones and kicks are all you’ll have now for a while. I know. I’ve lived here four years. Pass out one of those bones. They’re mine by rights, anyway.”
I told him he could have them all and pushed them through the bars where he could get them, and he seemed more good-natured after that. He ate them just as though he was half-starved, and growled and growled over them. He had very bad table manners. After he had chewed them until there was nothing left on them he laid down and we talked.
He wasn’t really a bad sort of dog at heart, only he had been treated cruelly all his life, kicked and beaten and half-starved. Dogs, you know, are very much like you Two-Legged Folks. Be gentle and kind to us and we will be gentle and kind, too. Treat us crossly and we may grow to be cross and snappy like you. You are the ones we serve, and so it is not strange that we should learn our manners from you. Poor [Jim]—for that was the bulldog’s name—had had only blows and ugly words ever since he was a puppy and he didn’t know what it was to be well-fed and petted and looked after. He had heard of dogs who had nice homes and kind masters and he pretended to make fun of them and called them “pets,” but I knew very well that he envied them all the time.
I asked him what his master would do with me and why he had taken me from my home, and he said that I would be taken to the City and sold. “You’re not the first dog who has been here,” he said. “Every month or so he brings one home with him. I’ve met a lot of them in my time.”
“But he has no right to do that,” I said. “If I did a thing like that William would say I was stealing.”
“Of course,” said Jim. “He’s a thief. He makes his living by it. He will get twenty or thirty dollars for you, perhaps. He would have sold me long ago if I had been worth selling. Besides, he needs me here to keep people away.”