The Cock, the Dog and the Fox are of La Fontaine's fables, the dog is shown running in from the distance. La Fontaine's version of the fable has also been set by several composers: The Cock, the Dog and the Fox The Cock, the Dog and the Fox is one of Aesop's Fables and appears as number 252 in the Perry Index. Although it has similarities with other fables where a predator flatters a bird, such as The Fox and the Crow and Chanticleer and the Fox, in this one the cock is the victor rather than victim. There are also Eastern variants of this story. In
The Cock and the Jewel in which a man inherits a valuable manuscript but prefers to have cash in hand for it. According to his reading of the fable, what the man and the cock lack is aesthetic judgement rather than wisdom. Some later interpretations are equally materialistic. Thomas Bewick applies the fable to the choice of sexual partner in his "Select Fables of Aesop" (1784), while the Canadian author Robertson Davies converts it to a playlet satirising devotees of the "Readers Digest" in his "A Masque of Aesop" (1955). Such a short fable suggested little latitude for invention to most book illustrators, apart from