Wherever you see a fresh garbage heap in Constantinople there you will see a group of dogs. They are engaged in making a living, and they turn over all parts of the heap in search of something edible. Nothing comes amiss. A crust of bread, a bit of meat, a bone, fleshless or otherwise, is immediately seized and appropriated.
I used to watch the dogs when thus foraging, and was surprised to observe their apparent friendliness. When one found anything he ate it without being disturbed by his companions; but he never lingered long over it. Sometimes one would seize hold of a large bone and another would attach himself at the same moment to the opposite end. Then began a discussion of growls, snorts, and bites, and very often the whole party would go in and there would be a general scrimmage, in which the dogs would be in a struggling heap, doggedly clinging to the bone of contention.
One afternoon I happened to witness a fight of this sort in which half a dozen dogs were engaged. There was one little fellow in the lot, and while his big friends were quarreling at a lively rate he slipped in beneath the belly of the largest and came out in the same way, bringing the bone and making off with it.
So intent were they upon their unpleasantness that they did not observe the abstraction until little dog and big bone were out of sight around the corner. They looked around an instant with their noses in the air and then struck up another chorus of growls interrupted with bites and tussles. Then they appeared content and returned to their scientific investigations in the heap of garbage, pawing, scratching, and turning it over industriously for everything capable of mastication. To my mind a whole bundle of morals was bound up in the incident, but I forbear to thrust them upon my readers.
These dogs know and remember their friends as readily as do the members of the canine race in other parts of the globe, and numberless are the anecdotes of their sagacity related by old residents at Constantinople. A stranger walking the Grand Rue de Pera will frequently be accompanied a block or so by a stray dog who will wag his tail and look pleadingly in the stranger’s face as if to say “Please give me something to eat.” These demonstrations will be liveliest in the vicinity of an open-front cook-shop, such as are so common throughout the “city of dogs,” and if you stop and buy something for the poor brute he will manifest his gratitude in the various doggish ways with which we are all familiar. He will remember you and the next time you walk that street and block, he will be on hand to welcome you.
One day a couple of dogs thus pleaded for me to stand treat and I obliged them by stopping at a cook-shop and buying a few pennies worth of the pancaky productions of which the lower class of Turks are so fond. That evening I was calling on some friends at the Hotel de France and returned rather late to my quarters in the Hotel de Byzance. Two or three hundred yards from my destination two dogs came to my side and after a few demonstrations of welcome traveled along with a dignified air and did not leave me until I entered the doorway of the hotel. At that hour the cook-shops had long been closed and the manner of the brutes did not indicate that they expected to be paid for taking me home. Next day they met me again and were prompt to recognize me, and I returned their recognition by again standing treat at the cook shop. That night they were again on hand to escort me, and when a third dog approached they drove him away. In the day time they were suppliants but at night they were guardians, and I was told that if any man had ventured to attack me there was little doubt that they would have done good service with their teeth.
We kept up our acquaintance—the dogs and I—as long as I remained in Constantinople. I have always entertained great respect for the dog, and this experience increased rather than diminished it.