Dog in a manger?

Reader question:

Does this sentence – He’s behaving like a dog in a manger – mean he’s selfish? Please explain.

My comments:

Yes, he who behaves like a “dog in a manger” is selfish.

That is, if you don’t have a stronger word for it.

The manger, of course, refers to the long, narrow container from which horses and cattle eat. A dog has no business there, and yet apparently some dogs do mess up the manger. This idiom is actually from the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop (who may or may not have written all of those famous fables but it scarcely matters now). In Aesop’s Fables, you’ll find the tale of The Dog in the Manger (LiteratureOnline.com):

A Dog looking out for its afternoon nap jumped into the Manger of an Ox and lay there cosily upon the straw. But soon the Ox, returning from its afternoon work, came up to the Manger and wanted to eat some of the straw. The Dog in a rage, being awakened from its slumber, stood up and barked at the Ox, and whenever it came near attempted to bite it. At last the Ox had to give up the hope of getting at the straw, and went away muttering:

“Ah, people often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.”

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte’s wonderful book of revenge and redemption, Isabella Linton once accused Catherine Linton, her sister-in-law, of being a “dog in a manger” when the latter became jealous of Isabella’s fond feelings for Heathcliff, Catherine’s childhood companion and lover. In the book, you’ll find these passages:

When Isabella confessed her feelings to Mrs Linton, her cry to me, for I was in the room with them, was:

“Is she sane?”

At this, Isabella kindled up.

“You’re a dog in the manger, Cathy, and desire no one to be loved but yourself!”

That assessment, stinging as it is, sums up the idiom in a nutshell. If you want to use it, make sure you use it correctly, i.e. in situations where the selfish dog, or person in question has no consideration for others, destroying something so that other people won’t be able to use it even though they themselves cannot use or cannot seem to benefit directly from the destruction.

Or maybe they can benefit in some bizarre sort of way, but that’s the point. People who behave like a dog in a manger are ultra-selfish and kind of bizarre.

One more example, a more recent one from the Web:

On July 17, 2003, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. House and Senate. The subject of WMD, of course, was on the front burner.

“If we are wrong, then we will have destroyed a threat that was at its least responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering,” Blair said. “I am confident history will forgive.”

Blair’s confidence is justified. History has forgiven U.K. leaders for plenty. How else, for example, could U.S. News and World Report have dubbed Winston Churchill “The Last Hero” in a 2000 cover story? In that article, Churchill was said to believe in “liberty, the rule of law, and the rights of the individual.”

As Sir Winston himself declared: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

This is precisely why so few of us ever discuss Churchill as a war criminal or racist. In 1910, in the capacity of Home Secretary, he put forth a proposal to sterilize roughly 100,000 “mental degenerates” and dispatch several thousand others to state-run labor camps. These actions were to take place in the name of saving the British race from inevitable decline as its inferior members bred.

History has forgiven Churchill for his role in the Allied invasion of the Soviet Union in 1917. England’s Minister for War and Air during the time, Churchill described the mission as seeking to “strangle at its birth” the Bolshevik state. In 1929, he wrote: “Were [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall.”

Two years later, Churchill was secretary of state at the war office when the Royal Air Force asked him for permission to use chemical weapons against “recalcitrant Arabs” as an experiment. Winston promptly consented (Yes, Churchill’s gassing of Kurds pre-dated Hussein’s by nearly 70 years).

“I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes,” he explained, a policy he espoused yet again in July 1944 when he asked his chiefs of staff to consider using poison gas on the Germans “or any other method of warfare we have hitherto refrained from using.” Unlike in 1919, his proposal was denied...not that history would not have forgiven him anyway.

In language later appropriated by the Israelis, Winston Churchill had this to say about the Palestinians in 1937: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

- History Forgave Churchill - Why Not Blair and Bush? DissidentVoice.org, July 19, 2003.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.