Once Upon a time, there was a man who liked to hunt. Mostly he hunted deer and raccoon. He owned several packs of hounds he used for hunting. Packs are a group of dogs that live and work together, sort of like families and communities. There were two packs of dogs trained for hunting raccoons and two trained for hunting deer. The packs lived in four connected, but separate dog runs, or lots. They couldn’t get out of their lots–not even to go into another dog lot–so their activity each day was limited to what they found to do in their own lot.

The man took good care of his dogs. He fed them every single day–like clockwork. One day, when he went down to feed his dogs, he noticed that one of the food troughs was not completely empty. There was a little bit of food leftover from the previous day’s feeding. The man didn’t think much of it–figuring the dogs will eat when they’re hungry. He went ahead and put the regular, amount of food out for the dogs. Day after day, until a week or two had passed, the man continued to notice there always seemed to be some leftover food in that same dog lot with one of his packs of deer hunting hounds. It even seemed like the amount of leftover food was growing a little. The man couldn’t figure why that might be. He thought to himself, I haven’t been deer hunting in a while–it’s been a little longer than usual. Maybe they are eating less because they haven’t been on a hunt lately. Still, he continued on with his routine, feeding the same amount of food.

One evening, around sunset, He heard a big ruckus down at his dog lots. He rushed out of his house and ran down to his dog lots to see what was going on. He found that a pack of his dogs had dug a hole underneath the barrier between their dog lot and another packs. All but one dog had crawled under, into the lot of the other pack of dogs and they were fighting. Frustrated because it was quickly getting dark, he dragged the escaped dogs back into their correct place, then went to work in the dark, boarding up the hole between the dog lots.

The next day when he came down to feed his dogs, he saw that one pack of his deer hunting hounds looked really skinny. As a matter of fact, you could almost see their ribs!

He went about the task of feeding his dogs, and he noticed that the hole he boarded up the night before had joined the lots of his two deer hunting packs. The man realized that it was the thin dogs that had been fighting with the other pack. Those skinny hounds had dug the hole and gone into the other packs lot.

Except–
there was that one hound who did not join the fight.

It stayed behind.

The man recognized that–
in stark contrast to the rest of the pack–this one hound seemed particularly healthy and spry.

Somewhat suspicious and very curious, the man finished his feeding routine, feeding the same portion as always.
But this time, instead of walking up the hill to his home as he usually did when he finished, he stopped halfway up his yard.

He ran into his neighbors back yard then circled back around and down to his neighbors shed. The shed sat directly next to his dog lots–so close he could touch the wire with his fingertips. He hid there, and he watched.

What he saw perplexed him. That healthy and spry dog was eating, while the rest of the thin, obviously hungry, pack looked on. The dogs approached the feeding trough once the healthy dog had gotten its fill of food and stopped eating. But the dog would not allow them to eat! lt protected and guarded all that food, fighting off any other dog in the pack that dared approach.

The man shook his head. He didn’t understand. The dog had gotten its fill. And the trough was almost overflowing with the excess food the dog had already accumulated–more than enough to share with it’s pack. “And”, the man thought, “I feed them every day like clockwork. The dog has to know more food will come tomorrow”. The man was stumped. He did not know what to do.

What do you think?

What should the man do?

What would you do?