The Dog Who Went Abroad

A dog named Spot, driven from his home city by a long famine, traveled to a distant land where he found a careless housewife who left food out generously enough that he could eat his fill there every day.

But the local dogs, proud and territorial, attacked him savagely each time he left her house, tearing at him from every side simply because he was an outsider enjoying what they considered their own city's food.

Weighing the abundance of food against the daily violence of not belonging, Spot concluded that his own homeland, however famine-struck, was still the better place to live -- at least there, even amid scarcity, no one turned on him simply for existing among them.

When he returned home, his relatives gathered eagerly to hear about his travels, asking what the foreign country and its people were really like.

Spot's answer captured the whole experience in one wry reply: the food abroad was excellent and the company remarkably easygoing, but the "relatives" he met there -- meaning the local dogs who should have welcomed a stranger with basic decency -- had no manners at all.