The Guilty Dogs

Also known as Kukkura Jataka

• 4 minute read
• Ages 8-12
• Jataka Tales

The king's chariot stood in the palace yard one night and it rained.

The leather straps got wet, and the dogs that lived inside the palace grounds came out and chewed them, the way dogs do with wet leather, and by morning the harness was ruined.

The king was told that dogs had done it.

The order

He gave an order immediately and without asking anything further.

Every dog in the city was to be killed.

The killing started that day and it was thorough. Word went round and people brought their dogs out, and the streets emptied of them within hours, and the count went up into the hundreds.

The cemetery

Outside the city, in the burial ground, lived a large pack of street dogs whose leader was an old dog who had been there a long time.

The survivors came to him.

He listened to the whole thing and then he asked one question, which nobody else had asked.

"Was the chariot inside the palace grounds or outside?"

"Inside."

"Then it was not us," he said. "No dog from this cemetery has ever been inside the palace. There is a wall and a gate and men on the gate."

He got up.

"I am going to see the king."

In the hall

He walked into the city and into the palace and up the hall, and nobody stopped him, and he stood in front of the throne and asked whether the king had ordered dogs killed.

The king said he had.

"All dogs?"

"All dogs."

"Then why," said the old dog, "are there still dogs in this palace?"

The hall went quiet.

"The dogs inside your walls are yours," he said, "so they were spared. The dogs outside your walls belong to nobody, so they were killed. But it is the dogs inside your walls who were near the chariot, and the dogs outside who cannot reach it. You have killed several hundred animals and every single one of them was innocent, and the ones who did it are asleep in this building."

The test

The king said that this was a claim and not proof.

"Then test it," said the old dog. "Give the palace dogs grass and buttermilk. What they chewed will come up. Do the same to any dog from the cemetery and nothing will."

It was done in the courtyard in front of the whole court, and it came out exactly as he had said.

After

The king stopped the killing that afternoon.

And the story says he granted safety to all dogs in that country from then on, and that he fed the old dog at his own table, and that the old dog ate a little and then asked whether the order to kill several hundred animals had taken the king longer to give than it had taken him to overturn it.

The king said it had not.

"No," said the old dog. "It never does."