A jackal seizes a rooster at dawn, and the rooster, calling itself the companion of the wakeful and the muezzin of night-worshippers, begs to be spared. The jackal answers that its resolve to kill is fixed, and even offers the rooster a grim choice of how it will die. The moral, stated in the closing couplets, is that tearful supplication before a cruel oppressor is useless and only emboldens his malice: escape from an evildoer must be sought through the strategy of reason (تدبیر خرد), not through pleading. Sparing such a foe from his own evil only makes him take a worse path. This abstract lesson is the didactic point that Jami's short animal fable in the Baharestan is built to illustrate.