I was sitting on a bench on a railway platform when I heard loud barking from behind me. I wheeled around to see two dogs barking at an apparently 'new' dog in the area. That’s the thing with street dogs. They mark their territories & let only their own pack inside. If a new dog comes along, he’s howled and growled and barked back outside. What got me thinking was the reaction of the people. The people near these dogs, they just gave a brief look at the commotion & then got back to their own work. I looked back at the dogs and, judging by their tails & their huge & seemingly angry barks, it was a pretty serious issue for them. But to the more 'intelligent' species, it meant nothing. Perhaps they knew that the 'area' the dogs were fighting for did not really belong to them. It was a railway platform. We, the people, have paid taxes to build it. The platform was built solely on the money, intelligence, time & energy spent by us humans. So, in the correct sense, the railway platform belonged to us humans and not those four-legged creatures. In that sense, these poor creatures were fighting for something they didn’t even own. Just for a second (even though I firmly believe that dogs are fairly intelligent and affable creatures), I wished they could understand that their fight didn’t make any sense at all. Just for a second, I felt a tinge of sympathy towards them. After that, I wheeled back to my comfortable position & noticed a small boy sitting beside me. He must have come when I was observing the dogs. He was going to school, I thought; judging by the uniform and a school bag that he was wearing. He was reading a book. I grinned. The book that he was reading belonged to the subject 'History’. And then it struck me. The book contained information on the blood and gore that had been spent by us humans in the name of nations, religions & even resources such as coals and diamonds. It just struck me that while we fought and killed each other, the trees, the soil, the air; they all stood doing their own work. The higher power never interfered. Perhaps they knew that the things we were fighting for never belonged to us. It belonged to the supreme power who has made it. We pride ourselves in the lands that we think we own. But somewhere down the line, we know that perhaps one earthquake is all it takes to wreck an entire city. One earthquake is all it takes to throw all the people out of its territories. Perhaps we are not intelligent enough to understand this fact. I looked back at the dogs. They were still embroiled in their routine. I realized that my sympathy had metamorphosed into empathy.