by Konrad Lorenz
Chapter 21
Fidelity and death
"This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose."
--Shakespeare: Sonnet
When God created this world, He evidently did not foresee the future bond of friendship between man and his dog, or perhaps He had definite and, to us, inexplicable reasons for assigning to the dog a span of life fives times shorter than that of his master. In human life there is enough suffering -- of which everybody gets his share -- when we come to take leave of someone we love, and when we see the end approaching, inevitably predestined by the fact that he was born a few decades earlier than ourselves, we may as well ask ourselves whether we do right to hang our hearts on a creature that will be overtaken by senility and death before a human being, born on exactly the same day, has even passed his childhood. It is a sad reminder of the transient of earthly life when the dog, which a few years ago --and it seems but a few months -- was a clumsy cuddlesome pup, begins to show unmistakable signs of age and we know that his end must be expected in some two or three years. I must admit that the aging of a dearly loved dog has always depressed me and at time considerably enhanced the gloom which occasionally afflicts every man when he thinks of griefs to come. Then there is the severe mental conflict that every master has to undergo when his dog is finally stricken in old age with some incurable disease, and the fatal question arises whether and when one should have him painlessly destroyed. Strangely enough fate has so far spared me this decision, since, with one exception, all my dogs have died a sudden and painless death at a ripe old age and without any intervention on my part. But one cannot count on this and I do not altogether blame sensitive people who shrink from acquiring a dog in view of the final inevitable parting. Not altogether blame them? Well, actually, I suppose I do. In human life all pleasure must be paid for sorrow, for as Burns says:
Pleasure are like poppies spread,
You seize the flowers, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river
A moment white -- then melts forever...
And fundamentally I consider a man a shirker who renounces the few permissible irreproachable pleasures of life for fear of having to pay the bill with which, sooner or later, fate will present him. He who is miserly with the coin of suffering had better retired to some spinsterly attic and there gradually desiccate life a sterile bulb which bears no blossoms. Certainly the death of a faithful dog that has accompanied its master for some fifteen years of his life's walk brings with it much suffering, nearly as much as the death of a beloved person. But in one essential detail the former is easier to bear: the place the human friend filled in your life remains forever empty, that of your dog can be filled with a substitute. Dogs are indeed individuals, personalities in the truest sense of the words, and I should be the last to deny this fact, but they are much more life each other than are human beings. The individual differences between living creatures are in direct proportion to their mental development. Two fishes of one species are, in all their actions and reactions, practically the same; but for a person familiar with their behavior, two golden hamsters or jackdaws show noticeable diversities; two hooded crows or two graylags are sometimes quite separate individuals. In dogs this holds good to a still greater extent, since they, as domestic animals exhibit in their behavior and immeasurably greater amount of individual variation than those other non-domesticated species. But, conversely, in the depths of their soul, in those deep instinctive feelings which are responsible for their special relationship with man, dogs resemble each other closely, and if on the death of one's dog, one immediately adopts a puppy of the same breed, it will generally be found that he refills those spaces of one's heart and and life which the departure of an old friend has left desolate. Under certain conditions the consolation thus afforded can be thorough that one feels almost ashamed of this unfaithfulness to one's former dog. Here again, the dog is more faithful than his master, for had the master died the dog would scarcely have found a substitute within the space of half a year. These considerations will perhaps seem absurd to people who will not admit of any moral responsibility toward an animal, but they have prompted mem to an unusual course of action.
When one day, I found my old Bully lying dead of a stroke on his old accustomed "barking beat," I at once regretted deeply that he had left no successor to take his place. I was then seventeen years old and this was the first time I had lost a dog -- I am unable to express how much I missed him. He had been my inseparable companion for years, and the limping rhythm of his trot when he ran behind me -- he was lame from a badly healed broken foreleg -- had become so much the sound of my own footsteps that I no longer heard his rather weighty tread and the snuffling that accompanied it. I only noticed it when it was no longer there. In the weeks that immediately followed Bully's death, I really began to understand what it is that makes naïve people believe in the ghosts of their dead. The constant sound throughout years of the dog trotting at my heels had left such a lasting impression on my brain -- psychologist call this a "phenomenon" -- that for weeks afterwards, as if with my own eyes, I heard him pattering after me.
On quiet Danube paths this reached the pitch of an almost sinister hallucination. If I listened consciously, the trotting and snuffling ceased at once, but as soon as my thoughts began to wander again I seemed to hear them once more. It was only when Tito, at that time still a wobbly half-grown poopy, began to run behind me that the specter of Bully, the limping ghost dog, was finally banished.
Tito too died long ago, and how long ago! But her spirit still trots sniffling at my heels. I have taken good care that it should do so, by resorting a a peculiar course of action: when Tito lay dead before me, just an unexpectedly as Bully had done, I realized that another dog would take her place just as she had taken Bull's, and, feeling ashamed of my own faithlessness, I swore a strange pledge to her memory: henceforward only Tito's descendants should accompany me through life.....
我的寶寶死了。 再回來念這一段文字，念一次哭一次。 哭的不是他講述的道理。 哭的是她文章裡流露出的感情。
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