Little Things

I love this photo taken by my daughter, Jess. Like a movie that is appreciated at greater depth with each viewing, I find myself revisiting this depiction of a Bullmastiff studiously sniffing something too small to see in the photo. Very likely the dog is engrossed in a blade of grass bearing a few molecules, but that scent signature conveys an entire story to the dog; she may know that a grouse and her brood fled from this spot in a panic when a red fox sprang upon them last night. She knows the grouse was old, she knows the fox was a malnourished male. She knows this, processes the information, and were it anything relevant to her own interests she would be prepared to act accordingly.

Sometimes we humans seem to spend considerable amounts of energy ignoring the things that are under our own noses. Why? To conform. To avoid confrontation. To make nice. To maintain our own illusions. So, unlike the dog, we are not prepared to act according to our own interests. And then we engage in elaborate personal hoaxes to perpetuate the myth that we are, that we really did, do, want things the way they are. That we're content. We're satisfied. We're happy, dammit!

We're really, really good at charades. Dogs are generally perceived as being guileless. While by comparison to us they may be relatively so, I'm not convinced it's absolutely the case. Yesterday I noted they engage in quite a lot of manipulation. Whether that implies the conscious will required to qualify as guile, I'm not sure.

On the topic of yesterday's blog, someone commented (privately) that when a person owns one or two dogs, they get to know those dogs intimately, while my life with multitudes has enabled me to know the breed. Yes, and no. I agree that with one or two dogs you become incredibly bonded and close. But I'm not sure I'd call that intimacy (with the implication of knowing all the intricacies of their personality) because it's far too easy to contaminate our perception of our beloved companions (human and animal) with what we believe we see. What we want, wish, or need to see. Among other things, having so many dogs has taught me that I never really knew those dogs that I was so in love with back when I had only two or three at a time. Kind of like falling in love with another human being and being swept along by an intensity of feeling for years, only to be startled one day by an action or behavior that leaves us wondering who this stranger is, our adoration of our canine companion blinds one to the truth of the other's Otherness...we're as much or more in love with a projection of a love-object as we are with the real thing. So it is with our in-love-ness with dogs. We become blinded to the bigger picture.

Seeing dogs interact with other dogs as opposed to with people, day in and day out, opened my awareness to the subtleties of their communications. They are less polite, more direct, with each other...or maybe it just seems so because messages are immediately comprehended by other dogs, while a dog has to work harder to get their point across to people. But eventually I came to appreciate their individual motivations, fears, interests, preferences, etc. by observing what they "say" to each other as they form friendships and feuds, partnerships and gangs, as they work out their places in the pack or ascend to pack leadership positions.

With those new insights I began to re-evaluate my understanding of their communications with me. I'm not sure yet what, exactly, that means for my relationship with dogs. I'm still sorting it out. I think that's part of my own interest in doing this blog...I want to know what I've learned, and I have to get it worked out in words. Right now the understanding is more or less gut level, a dog's way of thinking, and I have to work a bit at translating it into English ;-)