the tail of two dogs

Loyalty....it was considered a virtue some years ago,A number of my contemporaries worked for companies because they had been treated well,their efforts recognised and so on.We rated loyalty very high on our agenda.Then the times changed and a new breed entered the work force.While job hopping was looked down upon in our time...rolling stones gathering no moss and all that...the new breed didn't know what moss was(not surprising as they grew up in concrete jungles) and for them job hopping was a reaffirmation of their abilities and the fact that they were needed all the time.Somewhere along the line companies also bought into the idea and that when loyalty became a liability.If we stayed on too long it was because we were not getting other jobs and that kind of questioned our skill sets and that's when some of us had to throw loyalty out of the window.
Did this virtue go out of only the corporate sector?.Far from it.Yesterday it was brought home to me so clearly how little loyalty pays.
There are two dogs on our street.They are both strays but there ends the difference.One is the extrovert.She has very sharp survival skills so she wanders among different houses,spending a day or two in each.She will greet you with swishy tail and prance around like she hasn't seen us in years.This is the treatment that anyone in the building she stays in gets.You don't have to feed her,pet her or do anything but she does her bit.End result is that most of us let her use our terrace or our car parks as temporary home,we feed her left overs and one person actually took her home to three streets away when they moved,so she now spends the week with them and is back for the weekend ruling the roost in our street.She is well fed and clean and this is a direct result of ditching loyalty to any one house and instead keeping all her eggs in different baskets.
The other dog,is the exact opposite.He also wandered into our street a few years ago and then decided on the house he wanted as home.He started by hanging around outside the gate,slowly moving into the garden and then making himself at home on the door step.His loyalties were very clearly to one house and one family alone.They fed him and played with him so all was well until one fateful day when the woman of the house died and the house was sold and everyone moved away.They didn't take the dog with them and the gates of the house was locked,so there he is an abandoned dog.Imagine my surprise when I tried feeding him last night.He didn't know how to get out of the gate and because he had not kept his options open,(preferring to safeguard the house and in the process bite a few people)there the food was on the road and the dog just stayed close and watched but couldn't eat and I was too scared to venture closer.The long and short of the whole exercise was that our extrovert dog came over and gobbled up all the food while the other one just looked on helplessly.Did his loyalty really pay or like so many of us who threw it away,would he have been better off doing his own thing.I believe he would.In the meanwhile I am still trying to get him to eat a bit.