The ancients said, "If you keep a pig, you won't have two. If you keep a dog, you won't have six." Why do you say that?

This is because the technology of raising pigs in ancient times was not so skilled. So the word "double" here means less, and farmers will not make money if there are too few pigs, and "six" means too many dogs, so this proverb appears.

Raising pigs means that farmers want pigs to have more children. As we all know, pigs are very fertile, and a fetus can have seven or eight. For farmers, of course, I hope that the more pigs are born, the better. After all, the purpose of raising pigs is to make money for piglets. However, many sows can only give birth to two or three piglets at a time, so farmers' plans to breed piglets and sell them may be useless. Think about the pigs that farmers have worked hard for a year. Piglets are not born much, but basically they don't make money except feed money.

You can't have a dog without six dogs. The "six" in this sentence does not refer to a quantity, but to a very large number. In other words, if dogs breed puppies, it is best not to have too many, because dogs are basically not sold in rural areas. Of course, even today, rural dogs are worthless, and a puppy may be around 10 yuan. And if you have too many dogs, you can't buy and sell them, but it is also a heavy burden for farmers to eat them. So many puppies either starve to death or are abandoned on the side of the road.

Of course, this sentence is no longer applicable to today's society, because there are fewer pigs in rural areas now, and pigs are generally given to some professional pig farms for breeding, and the output is also guaranteed. Moreover, the number of puppies is not out of control because of ligation technology as before.