# The Dog and Its Reflection

_Aesop_ · 2 min read · ages 3-8

A dog with meat in his mouth crosses a stream on a plank and sees another dog in the water with a piece that looks twice as big. He lunges for it and his own meat drops away, so the dog is left standing on the plank, hungry, because there had never been another dog at all, only his own reflection.

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Once there was a dog who had found a good piece of meat. He carried it off in his mouth, holding it tight, and trotted toward home to eat it in peace.

On the way he came to a stream. The only way across was a narrow wooden plank, so he stepped onto it and began to walk over the water.

Halfway across, he looked down. There in the stream was another dog, looking straight back up at him, and that dog had a piece of meat in its mouth too.

The dog stared. The other piece looked twice as big as his own.

“I want that one,” he thought. “Why should he have the bigger piece?”

So he opened his mouth wide and lunged at the dog in the water to snatch the meat away from him.

The moment his jaws opened, his own meat dropped with a splash. The current caught it at once and carried it off downstream, far out of reach.

And the other dog was gone. There had never been another dog at all, only his own reflection in the water, and the bigger piece of meat was something no dog could ever bite.

The dog stood on the plank, hungry, with no meat at all.

**Moral:** If you grab for more than you have, you can end up losing what you already had.

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- Read online: https://talerie.com/en/tales/the-dog-and-its-reflection
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q933784
- Source: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11339)
- Public-domain basis: Talerie contemporary retelling (CC0 2026), based on: Aesop's Fables: a new translation, tr. V. S. Vernon Jones (1912) — translation: author died 564 BC (+70 passed); translator V. S. Vernon Jones died 1955 (+70 passed)
- License: CC0-1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)