The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

Sometimes they [lions] run away stretching the tail straight out like hounds. A
lion has been seen before now to attack a pig, and running away when it saw it
bristling in defense. Against blows to the flanks it is weak, but it can take many
over the rest of its body and its head is strong. Whatever it has bitten or wounded
with its claws, the wounds run with ichors which are deep yellow and cannot be
washed out of the bandages and sponges. The treatment is the same as for
wounds caused by dogbite. (HA 630a) [68]
Evidence that the closeness of the dog and the lion extends also to their biology is
found elsewhere in the zoological treatises of Aristotle. In the Generation of Animals, he
notes, for example, that the dog is one of those animals that mates with species other than
its own, but species with which it is allied in nature. Although not directly related to the
lion, this information is crucial for the context it establishes:
The partners in copulation are naturally and ordinarily animals of the same kind;
but beside that, animals that are closely allied in their nature, and are not very
different in species, copulate, if they are comparable in size and if their period
of gestation are equal in length. Although such crossing is infrequent among the
majority of animals, it occurs among dogs, foxes, wolves (and jackals); the
Indian dog also is produced from the union of a dog with some wild doglike beast.
(GA 746a) [50]
In the History of Animals, Aristotle explains further the breed of the Indian dog as the
result of a mating between a dog and a tiger:
Other animals too are produced from the mixing of different breeds, as in Cyrene
the wolves mate with the dogs and generate young, and from fox and dog come
the Laconian hounds. They say too that the Indian hounds come from tiger and
dog, not immediately, but after the third mating; for they say the first offspring is
like a savage beast. They take the bitches to deserted places and tie them up; and
many are devoured, if the wild animal does not happen to be excited for mating.
(HA 607a) [65]
By identifying the Indian hound with the offspring of the third-generation mating
between a tiger and a dog, the passage indicates that Aristotle placed the dog lower than a
tiger in the scale of animals with savage nature, and viewed it therefore as the species
directly affected by cross-breeding. Aristotle is not the only author who records
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