“A dog’s love is something more or less complicated, according to the owner of the dog.”

The expression “A dog’s love is something more or less complicated, according to the owner of the dog” introduces a dispute over whether a dog’s loyalty comes from affection or appetite. Through Fidelis Waldvogel and Pete Kozka, the book turns that abstract difference into a neighborhood rivalry: Pete trusts in his dogs’ personal devotion, while Fidelis sees Hottentot’s visits to his shop as proof that food governs canine attachment.

The Expression and Its Contrast

The line appears as a general observation before the narrative sets out the two men’s opposing convictions. Fidelis is faintly contemptuous of canine adoration and believes it rests mainly on a dog’s stomach rather than its heart. Pete, by contrast, considers dogs creatures of exceptional fealty and regards their loyalty as personal love. The expression therefore does not settle what dogs feel; it makes the owner’s interpretation central to how their attachment is understood.

The contrast is embodied in the men’s different relationships to Hottentot. Pete and his wife, Fritzie, raise purebred chow dogs, and Hottentot is the snuff-brown champion who fathers their line. Fidelis sees the same dog not as a devoted companion but as a revealing example of opportunism. The disagreement is consequently not just an argument about animals: it gives each butcher a way to read the other’s attachment and judgment.

Hottentot at the Butcher Shop

After Fidelis establishes his shop across town from the Kozkas, Hottentot begins appearing at the back loading plank, where scraps are sometimes available. The visits gain significance because the butchers already disagree about what should happen to the waste of their trade. Pete saves even the smallest remnants in a locked freezer barrel and sells them monthly to a guts dealer. Fidelis distributes waste instead, attracting dogs as well as itinerants and poor residents of Argus.

Hottentot’s behavior seems to confirm Fidelis’s view. The dog fawns on whoever offers a bone or the prospect of a tidbit, while treating those who do not feed him with contempt; he is also prone to snapping and biting. Yet Pete and Fritzie remain well liked in town, so the dog is not poisoned, as other troublesome dogs sometimes are. The episode holds affection and appetite in tension: Hottentot is Pete’s prized stud, but at Fidelis’s shop his attention is plainly tied to what he can eat.

Fidelis’s Teasing and the Rivalry

Fidelis takes satisfaction in seeing Pete’s dog cross town to visit him. At first, he gives Hottentot scraps and a large cow bone to carry home. He then repeatedly escalates the joke, offering increasingly elaborate remains, until he gives the dog a heifer’s spinal column carefully trimmed so its ligaments keep the bones articulated.

Hottentot drags the column through Argus and brings it to the Kozkas’ shop, where he chews on it for much of the morning. Its condition makes the incident impossible to miss, and the episode tests the Kozkas’ patience. Fidelis’s teasing turns an abstract difference of opinion into a public provocation: the dog’s visit can be read as loyalty to Pete, as Fidelis’s evidence of food-driven behavior, or as both at once. The expression’s qualification—love depends on the owner’s point of view—fits a conflict in which neither man’s interpretation is detached from his pride.