Later on the dog's behaviour is reinterpreted as malicious, a reading made clear in Roger L'Estrange's pithy version: "A churlish envious Cur was gotten into a manger, and there lay growling and snarling to keep the Provender. The Dog eat none himself, and yet rather ventur'd the starving his own Carcase than he would suffer any Thing to be the better for't. THE MORAL. Envy pretends to no other Happiness than what it derives from the Misery of other People, and will rather eat nothing itself than not to starve those that would." Samuel Croxall echoes L'Estrange's observation in Fables of Aesop and Others (1722). "The stronger the passion is, the greater torment he endures; and subjects himself to a continual real pain, by only wishing ill to others." It is with this understanding that the idiom of "a dog in a manger" is most often used currently. However, a recent study has noted that it seems to be falling out of use, in America at least, concluding that "the majority of [respondents] do not know it or even recall ever having heard it".Wolfgang Mieder, "The dog in the manger": The rise and decline in popularity of a proverb and a fable. Midwestern Folklore: Journal of the Hoosier Folklore Society, 2011, 37.1: 1–44. An abstract of his study is available in FOAFTales Newsletter 78, April 2011, The article was later incorporated as a chapter in Mieder's Behold the Proverbs of a People, University of Mississippi 2014, Google Books
