Dognity

Read Adam Gopnik’s amazing dog article in the New Yorker last night (yes, I am four weeks behind due to finally having a job, sue me (please don’t sue me)) in bed alone at one a.m. TOTALLY CRYING.

As a dog lover, as you know, it’s been difficult for me to accept that some people really hate dogs. Dogs and humans sort of created each other, in a mystical way that I’m not totally comfortable explaining on paper but that I really firmly believe. Dogs have been with us for like 30,000 years–more than half as long as we’ve had LANGUAGE, y’all. In the Chauvet cave, did you know this? There are side-by-side footprints of an 8 year old child and a big-ass dog, walking into the black interior together, 26,000 years ago. 25,000 year old grave unearthed reveals skeleton of woman hugging skeleton of dog to her chest. EMO. Dogs go with people; people go with dogs. It’s life! I’ve always thought, of dog haters, that “they just haven’t met the right dog,” which I realize is rude and narcissistic of me, but I think we can all agree that that never stopped me before. And now, thanks to Adam Gopnik, I have PROOF!!!!!

Gopnik introduces himself as a dog-hater. He says he and his wife shared a distaste verging on revulsion for the whole concept of a dog. Its smell, its shit, its drool, its fawning obeisance, its perceived lack of dignity. But then their 10 year old daughter enacts a relentless death-march of heavily researched dog desire that finally culminates in her getting her heart’s desire, which is a puppy they buy from a pet store supplied by a puppy mill, which is utter bullshit and I am ashamed of Adam Gopnik, but in his defense, at this point in his personal journey, he still hates dogs, so I guess he shouldn’t have to care about contributing to a totally morally bankrupt dog-abusing industry.

(sidenote: there is a woman at our dog park who only allows her dog to play with other purebred dogs. This is a true motherfucking story that I’ve seen with my own eyes. Chew on that for a second, America)

So anyway, they get this puppy. And then Gopnik, being a thoughtful poetic artsy-fartsy type dude, starts thinking about it and observing it and pondering the dog’s behavior and his own feelings. And his self-proclaimed “revulsion” toward dogs is, by the end of the article, transformed into total comprehension and appreciation, even love. It’s such a great personal journey!

He takes us through the whole history of dogs and dog science, bringing us up to date on theories of dog evolution as they stand today. Generally people think that some distantly previous culture figured out that it was good to have a tame wolf around, for various reasons, and so set to work taming and eventually breeding for various traits, and after awhile (a pretty short while, as that crazy Russian silver fox experiment proves), we had DOGS.

Gopnik points out that for thousands of years, dogs were friends and companions rather than pets and babied objects, and that this change is kind of sad. I have thought about this a lot. The friendship between a person and a dog can be so easy and strong and real, just walking through the woods together in mutual understanding, the dog knowing his tasks and duties, both of you enjoying the other’s company and his/her skillful performance of said duties. How did that become a chihuahua in a baby carriage? I guess it’s just a stand-in for a lot of other weird crap in modernity, including the infantilization of actual human infants themselves. Also this dog relationship still exists in lots of cultures/places. Amazingly, the article I painfully forced myself through just before reading the dog article was the one describing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, which was carried out by only ten marines, one of whom WAS A DOG. That dog had some hardcore tasks to perform and had perfected some pretty epic skills, lets all agree. Even President Obama was impressed, later declaring “I want to meet that dog,” and giving him a good congratulatory pat. What the dog was thinking is anyone’s guess, but if he was unaware of his role in geopolitics I don’t think that diminishes the epicness of his relationship with the U.S. Marine Corps.

Dogs have been used by people to do terrible things, this is not the issue. Marine dog is melancholy in his own right. Police german shepherd (Nazi german shepherd!), dogs trained to see skin-color, etc. It’s not what they do so much as the fact that they do it, though, that I find so amazing and ultimately moving. They are our partners, in all our bad and good deeds. They join us for better and for worse, to their own detriment and the detriment of others, or to everyone’s amazing gain.

Gopnik casts the transition from wolf to dog in a melancholy light, talking about how dogs gave up something wild and beautiful and individualistic in order to basically become scavengers on the detritus of the unstoppable human success machine. But later he seems to reflect on this transition in a new light, seeing dogs as, if not the equals of humans, at least the avatars of a beautiful possibility inherent (but so far unrealized) in humanity.

Dogs are the only animal on earth who don’t have to be tamed in order to live in social structures with humans. Dogs are the only animal on earth who look you in the face to see what you’re feeling.

I really think some of the final things he reflects upon, while staying up all night to see if his dog is going to die of chocolate poisoning, are worth quoting at length, because they are awesome and usually brainiac humanists don’t “go there” so mystically/cosmically and I like it when they do:

Dogs aren’t the Uncle Toms of the animal world, I thought as dawn came; they’re the dignified dual citizens who plead the case for all of mute creation with their human owners. We are born trapped in our own selfish skins, and we open our eyes to the rings of existence around us. The ring right around us, of lovers and spouses and then kids, is easy to encircle, but that is a form of selfishness, too, since the lovers give us love and the kids extend our lives. A handful of saints “love out to the horizon,” circle after circle—but at the cost, almost always, of seeing past the circle near at hand, not really being able to love their intimates. Most of the time, we collapse the circles of compassion, don’t look at the ones beyond, in order to give the people we love their proper due; we open our eyes to see the wider circles only when new creatures come in, when we realize that we really sit at the center of a Saturn’s worth of circles, stretching out from our little campfire to the wolves who wait outside, and ever outward to the unknowable—toward, I don’t know, deep-sea fish that live on lava and then beyond toward all existence, where each parrot and every mosquito is, if we could only see it, an individual. What’s terrifying is the number of bad stories to which I was once inured, and which now claim my attention. A friend’s dog had leaped from a window in a thunderstorm and only now could I feel the horror of it: the poor terrified thing’s leap. Another friend’s dog had been paralyzed, and instead of a limping animal I saw a fouled friend, a small Hector. My circles of compassion have been pried open.

We can’t enter a dog’s mind, but, as on that dark-chocolate night, I saw that it isn’t that hard to enter a dog’s feelings: feelings of pain, fear, worry, need. And so the dog sits right at the edge of our circle, looking out toward all the others. She is ours, but she is other, too. A dog belongs to the world of wolves she comes from and to the circle of people she has joined. Another circle of existence, toward which we are capable of being compassionate, lies just beyond her, and her paw points toward it, even as her eyes scan ours for dinner. Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity. They sit within their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there. Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great unending circles of Otherness that we can barely begin to contemplate.

Butterscotch, meanwhile, seems happy. She’s here, she’s there, a domestic ornament; she takes a place at the table, or under it, anyway, and remains an animal, with an animal’s mute confusions and narrow routines and appetites. She jumps up on visitors, sniffs friends, chews shoes, and, even as we laughingly apologize for her misbehavior and order her “Off!,” we secretly think her misbehavior is sweet. After all, where we are creatures of past and future, she lives in the minute’s joy: a little wolf, racing and snorting and scaring; and the small ingratiating spirit, doing anything to please. At times, I think that I can see her turn her head and look back at the ghost of the wolf mother she parted from long ago, saying, “See, it was a good bet after all; they’re nice to me, mostly.” Then she waits by the door for the next member of the circle she has insinuated herself into to come back to the hearth and seal the basic social contract common to all things that breathe and feel and gaze: love given for promises kept. How does anyone live without a dog? I can’t imagine.

LOVE GIVEN FOR PROMISES KEPT!

In other news, I just discovered that I am now officially TOO OLD TO DONATE MY EGGS.