Meaning & Analysis
A female dog that whelps in haste (prematurely) produces blind puppies—i.e., rushing birth results in defective offspring.
Insights
Haste ruins work
Rushing a task yields immature, flawed results. Like puppies born before their time, works published or projects launched too soon lack essential development.
Speed–accuracy tradeoff
Moving fast sacrifices care and precision. The adage warns that the pursuit of quick completion impairs quality and clarity.
Gestation of ideas
Good work needs incubation—drafting, revision, testing. Forcing delivery before ripeness creates ‘blind whelps’: outputs that cannot ‘see’ their purpose or audience.
Impatience as vice
Impatience masquerades as efficiency but is morally and practically short-sighted, harming both maker and recipient.
Process over product
The proverb privileges proper process—time, order, and care—over mere speed to market, a challenge to cultures that prize immediacy.
Humanist transmission
Erasmus’s Adagia (Canis festinans caecos parit catulos) canonized the image; English writers echoed it to chastise ‘post-haste’ publication and sloppy workmanship.
Biological veneer
Puppies are in fact born with eyes closed and open them after a time; the proverb treats this as a sign of prematurity to dramatize a larger truth: visible defects follow undue haste.
Press and pen
Early modern translators and printers deploy the saying to apologize for rough drafts and rush-jobs, linking literary ‘birth’ to bodily gestation and warning that speed scars style.
Festina lente counterpoint
It pairs with the classical maxim ‘make haste slowly’: both praise measured acceleration—energy yoked to deliberation—against reckless hurry.
Craft ethics & midwifery
Cross-proverbs (‘More haste than good speed’; ‘Hasty people make poor midwives’) frame timing as an ethical craft: the midwife’s art is knowing when—not just how—to deliver.
Rhetorical Devices
Zoomorphic exemplum
Animal behavior models human conduct; the she-dog’s litter stands as a vivid parable for rushed human ‘births’—books, plans, laws.
Hyperbole
Causality is overstated (haste → blindness) to etch the warning sharply in memory.
Concrete imagery
‘Bitch,’ ‘blind whelps’ furnish tactile, unsettling detail, turning an abstract caution into a scene one can picture.
Alliteration & plosives
The clustered b/p sounds (‘bitch,’ ‘blind,’ ‘bring,’ ‘whelps’) give percussive bite that aids oral transmission.
Gnomic present
Stated as a timeless natural law, the line acquires aphoristic authority beyond its literal domain.
Transcription
Quotations
Canis festinans caecos parit catulos.
But as the latin prouerbe sayeth: The hastye bitche bringeth furth blind whelpes. For when this my worke was finished, the rudeness therof shewed it to be done in poste haste.
*A prouerbe applyed to them, whiche beyng hastye in settynge foorth theyr workes, do make them vnperfecte.
Whelps are ever blind that dogs in haste do get.
[As in Eras.] *A Prouerbe applyed vnto those, that take no deliberation in bringing any thing to passe.
My first burthen comming before his time, must needes be a blind whelp.
Lyke as forelittering bitches whelp blynd puppies, so I may bee perhaps entwighted of more haste then good speede.
(puppies).
(Hasty bitches bring).
[As in Eras.].
Cross References
- See DÜR., I, no. 340.
- H197 More haste than good speed
- P224 Hasty people will never make good midwives.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.