One day a small dog was wandering along a lane outside of a village. He was passing by a field when he heard some dogs having quite an argument. Well, he was too afraid that they might be larger than him and things were getting quite heated so he thought he would stay out of the argument and wait to see if he could be of some assistance if things went too awry. Pretty soon the argument turned into a ferocious fight and just as the little dog was contemplating seeing if there was anything he could do there was silence.
‘Oh they’ve stopped’, he thought. So he shimmied under the wire fence and went to check on the other dogs, perhaps he might discover what it was that was so important that this terrible fight had happened. As he neared the spot he thought the dogs had been in he could hear small whining sounds to his left so he headed in that direction and found a dog about twice his own size. ‘Oh’, he thought, ‘it’s a good thing I stayed out of this dog’s way’. He padded over to him and realised that he had been too badly hurt to survive. As he was trying to comfort the dog in his last moments he heard another small whimper off to his right. He wasn’t sure whether to leave the first dog but he quickly slipped away so he wandered off to see if he could find the source of the whimper. He soon came across a dog four times his own size and thought ‘Oh goodness, it’s a very good thing I did not get between this dog and the other dog, it must have been a very important thing they were arguing over’. He padded across to the other dog and found that in his condition he may survive but he would never be the same dog again, he would definitely lose a couple of limbs and there was some severe damage to his head. He would get help for him when he found the next farmhouse. The second dog whispered that the prize was just to the right of them so the little dog went looking for it.
Soon he came across a large old cow bone. ‘This was it?’, he thought with some puzzlement, ‘surely it took more than this to cause such a large and terrible fight.’ But this was it. So he took the bone, continued on his way, found the next farmhouse and led the people to the injured dogs, then settled down to enjoy the bone.
Moral - War is war. The third dog will always get the bone.
