The Dog in The Manger - Later Use in Europe

Later Use in Europe

The fable does not appear in any of the traditional collections of Aesop's Fables and is not attributed to him until Steinhöwel's Esopus (c.1476). There it appears as illustrating a moral proposition: 'People frequently begrudge something to others that they themselves cannot enjoy. Even though it does them no good, they won't let others have it. Listen to a fable about such an event. There was a wicked dog lying in a manger full of hay. When the cattle came and wanted to eat, the dog barred their way, baring his teeth. The cattle said to the dog, "You are being very unfair by begrudging us something we need which is useless to you. Dogs don't eat hay, but you will not let us near it." The fable shows that it is not easy to avoid envy; with some effort you can try to escape its effects, but it never goes away entirely.'

An English reference is found a century earlier in John Gower's Confessio Amantis (c.1390):

Though it be not the hound's habit

To eat chaff, yet will he warn off

An ox that commeth to the barn

Thereof to take up any food. (Book II, 1.84)

Although a horse figures in some allusions by later writers, the ox is the preferred beast in Renaissance emblem books. It appears as such in a Latin poem by Hieronymus Osius (1564), in the Latin prose version of Arnold Freitag (1579) and in the English poem by Geoffrey Whitney (1586).

All these authors follow Steinhöwel in interpreting the fable as an example of envy, but later on the dog's behaviour is seen as malicious, a reading made very clear in Roger L'Estrange's pithy version: 'A churlish envious Cur was gotten into a manger, and there lay growling and snarling to keep the Provender. The Dog eat none himself, and yet rather ventur’d the starving his own Carcase than he would suffer any Thing to be the better for’t. THE MORAL. Envy pretends to no other Happiness than what it derives from the Misery of other People, and will rather eat nothing itself than not to starve those that would.' Samuel Croxall echoes L'Estrange's observation in Fables of Aesop and Others (1722). 'The stronger the passion is, the greater torment he endures; and subjects himself to a continual real pain, by only wishing ill to others.' It is with this understanding that the idiom of 'a dog in a manger' is most often used currently. However, a recent study has noted that it seems to be falling out of use, in America at least, concluding that 'the majority of do not know it or even recall ever having heard it'.