“The best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy; his son or daughter, reared with loving care, may prove ungrateful; people prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads.â€
“The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, is his dog. A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer. He will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings, and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.â€
“The faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying his master, and when the last scene of all comes, and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, there by the graveside will be the noble dog.â€
The above is the closing appeal made to a jury in a small Missouri town more than a century ago by a lawyer named George Graham Vest, representing a client who was suing another man for having killed his dog.
Vest would go on to become a U.S. senator and one of the greatest orators of his time, back when the spoken word had much greater impact than it does today.
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DON'T BUY, DON'T BREED....A-D-O-P-T!