Puppy Eyes
April 27 2021
The dogs are easily entertained.
A tossed ball
a tummy rub
a regular evening walk,
where even the same old place
day after day
is of endless fascination
to an off-leash dog.
Where they can explore a world of scent
in all 4 dimensions —
fresh new smells
along with the old decaying ones,
carrying a signal of time
as well as of space.
As other creatures
see in ultraviolet
echo-locate.
Hear infra-sound
from thousands of miles away,
discern earth's magnetic field
inherit a map of the stars.
But only dogs
look at human faces
and seem to understand.
Look into our eyes, as we look back,
engaging with us
as no other animal can.
I know this is merely a matter
of basic survival.
Because our best friends and loyal companions
depend on us.
Because their evolution
was never a product of chance;
like earthbound gods
we fashioned them after ourselves
and selected them to serve.
We focus so much on difference,
and over all of human history
have been busily killing each other
over really nothing much.
I realize how fear
misunderstanding
and the unknowable mind of the other
make this hard to overcome.
Yet what could be more dissimilar
than 2 distinct species,
2 apex predators
who should be competing for prey
somehow sharing space?
Who, with no common language
depend on sight and smell.
Who have no sentences or grammar
beyond a few recognizable words
like sit, come
good girl.
Who have only loyalty
obligation
and trust.
The only creatures
who can look into each other's eyes
and feel the heady heart-racing rush
of deep attachment
unstinting love.
I find inter-species relationships and attachment endlessly fascinating. It speaks so much to the basic commonality of many, if not most animals; not just mammals. Basic needs like love, touch, play, belonging. Contrasted with this is the human illusion of race: how we are so much more alert to superficial differences than the deep commonalities.
Most of us don't get to work with corvids or cetaceans or cephalopods: our sentient and intelligent counterparts in the animal kingdom. But most of us are intimately familiar with dogs. And there is no better example of similarity overcoming difference; of the exhilarating feeling of reaching across the species divide.
I was reading an article on the potential for artificial intelligence to some day allow us to communicate with animals, to understand their languages. I disagree. Of all the things we once believed distinguished human beings from the other animals and that we have since learned are hardly unique to us, language stands up as the unbridgeable divide. Animals make vocalizations, but they do not have language as we understand that word. And without language, they are incapable of abstract thought.
Yet even without this essential tool of communication, we interact deeply and precisely with our dogs. They interrogate faces: while other animals don't respond to facial expression, dogs do. Eye contact in most animals is taken as a threat. It evokes aggression. But domesticated dogs do not avert their eyes; they look directly into ours. Some evolutionary biologists have even postulated that the prominent whites of our eyes – a prominence not seen in any other primate – may be a result of our co-evolution with dogs: they read us through our eyes, and this makes them easier to see. (I'm not so sure of this. If the domestication of dogs goes back at most 30,000 years, this seems too short a time and probably too inadequate a selective pressure for that kind of evolutionary change.)
I love looking into my dogs' deep brown eyes, each of us holding our gaze. Our love for our dogs seems to some less worthy than love for our fellow human beings. We naturally privilege our own species. And I do realize how much easier it is to love a dog, because dogs are simple and subservient creatures. Nevertheless, I disagree. There is nothing illegitimate about this kind of love. Nothing to qualify or apologize for.
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