THAT'S MY BOY!

Over at a blog I read, Jeffrey Cohen's "In the Middle," "a conversation is unfolding" about animals and humans and love. More precisely, about dogs. And, as so often is the case in things academic, I have no idea what they are all talking about. Except that they are excruciatingly...smart.

It does make me think about dogs and love and what it means to be human, though I hesitate to throw my hat into the extremely theoretical ring, mainly because I don't write like an Ivy-trained academic and my thinking about the issue is not concerned as much with, well, theory. Rather, I think I write like a poet with a fiercely materialist bent. Or at least I hope I do.

So here's what I posit about dogs and love and what it means to be human: canids and our love, perhaps even our need, for them are not a good example of how humans generally relate with animals. This is because dogs are a bit different, for us, with us, through us, than other domesticated species. They are the first domesticated animal, and in many ways, to paraphrase Michael Pollan's argument about our co-evolution with domesticated plants, in his excellent book The Botany of Desire, you could say that dogs have domesticated us. They figured out that if they stuck around the garbage pile, and let us pet them, and looked really sweet, that they had a better chance at survival. And we figured out that if we kept dogs around, we had better luck with hunting and with protection from other predators. We could raise and herd flock animals. We could capture large game. We could hoard stuff, with a dog to protect it. We could get rid of rodents. We could leave our babies in the care of dogs and know the babies would be guarded.

As you can see, above, I have a dog. And I LOVE him, genuinely, I love him. I won't pretend to guess what he thinks, or how he feels about me, because that's a pathetic fallacy. He can't speak. This does not mean that I cannot advocate for him, defend his right to exist, rescue him from abuse, rely on him, and yes, love him. But I must respect the fact that he is a separate self, a separate species, and that I will never completely understand how he operates. He is, in essence, difference.

He has enormous muscles and sharp teeth and he likes to guard whatever it is he's chewing on. In fact, he can't deal with how much he loves and want to guard certain objects. Like raw, meaty bones. To the point where he wants to kill whoever comes close to aforesaid bone. And he could kill someone, if he really wanted to.

Now, I bring this up because I have been thinking a great deal about "the human" and "the canine," especially in light of recent legislation that seeks to control the movement and existence of my dog and of other dogs like him. Something weird is at play in how we have come to think about dogs, and people, and how the two species are supposed to interact. Dogs are predators, and we are predators, but I suspect we'd like to ignore both of those facts. We don't like to think too much about our responsibility towards dogs, our symbiosis with dogs, how we have used and been used by them. To do so risks considering that we may not be as high up on the food chain as we think we are. Or, more succinctly, that we are not as superlatively "human" as we think we are, but are instead flawed, dependent, and rather weak, in the scheme of things.

We like to think of dogs as "fur babies," instead of thinking about ourselves. As a "fur baby," a dog is the silent, seemingly accepting site for all of our projections about control and power. To think of the dog as a furry human infant, one who never grows up or enters the oedipal stage, is to not think about how much we require of dogs, what a dog actually is. It is to ignore how imbricated we are in the creation of the dog-as-species, and it is to ignore how close we might be to what is animal about the dog. The dog eats other animals. It bites and it kills. And so do we, often through the aid of the canid.

My dog is a red-nosed, American Pit Bull Terrier. He is not a "fur baby." He is the antithesis of human. But I still need him in my life. I don't need him for the historical reasons that people have kept pit-bull type terriers--for catching and pinning large animals to safely aid in butchery, for the hunting and killing of small game, for the protection of children, for the "entertainment" of dogfighting. What I need him for is company, and walking, and humor, and should the need ever arise, to deter a ne'er-do-well who might threaten me.

He needs me for food, shelter, snuggling, and the protection from abuse. Simply put, he just wants to live. I can do that for him. Because somewhere in the animal past, he did that for me.