Raggety’s Ears
I always wonder what people who do not own a dog do for general conversation. The very young, the uninteresting and uninterested alike, the dangerous, and the facetious can always be safely steered onto the discussion of dogs or the dog, if there happens to be a dog in the room. When you have not an idea, and your guest hasn’t an idea, when the man is treading on delicate ground or is approaching the barriers, if you just introduce Raggeties into the conversation the day is saved, the feelings are preserved, your own supremacy maintained. If politics and the market flavor the situation between men, dogs and dress savour the conversation with women. Take heed, if the woman has been driven to the dogs conversationally, you are losing headway and heart-way. This is about Raggety’s ears. They always, sooner or later, come into the conversation.
The fact is Raggety’s ears are very interesting. Haven’t I told you about them before? He has one ear that stands up and one ear that flops down and never stands up. You can never remember whether it is the right ear that stands up and the left ear that lies down, or the left ear that stands up and the right ear that lies down. Which is it? Well, I myself after knowing Raggety intimately for many years do not feel quite sure!
Those ears cause an endless amount of surmise and conjecture. A person sits in my room enjoying stereotyped conversation and invariably says, “What do you suppose makes one of Raggety’s ears stand up and the other flop over?” Now here are the three theories with which I invariably entertain my questioner in stereotyped form. The first is my own theory, which is that when Raggety was a baby-puppy, his mother or one of his baby-brothers bit him through the ear, just in play and broke the muscles. But when I once advanced this theory to a Doctor-friend of Raggety, he scoffed at it.
“Oh, no,” said Raggety’s Doctor-friend, “muscles don’t give out in that way. It is paralysis. The dog was kicked, probably in the head, once upon a time and that side is paralyzed and so he can not raise his ear.” This sounded professional and so thereafter I quoted this theory. But when I told this to a dog-trainer who observed and of course commented on the famous mismatched ears, again such theory was scorned as unprofessional.
“Why,” laughed the dog-trainer, “if the dog was kicked, his brain injured and paralysis occurred, he would have had all that side paralyzed, not just an ear. That isn’t it at all! That dog had a prick-eared father and a lop-eared mother,—or the other way round,—and so he just took one ear from each. That’s no paralysis!”
So you can choose your theory after you look at Raggety’s picture. You see I do not know which is right—do you?