A Truly Honorary Title

"Want to know the ultimate training tip? Your dog thinks you're a dog. Your family and friends - all dogs. Children are little dogs, other puppies perhaps, but they are factored into the equation, too. The coolest thing, if you sit down and think about it, is that dogs are the only species on the planet that will trust another species as their own. You should be honored." - Sarah Hodgson, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Choosing, Training, and Raising a Dog

But should we really? After all, they're just dogs - furry masses of instinct jumped up a little by specific breeding in some cases. They bark and shed and relieve themselves at inconvenient times and reproduce without regard for polite society. And they can't abstract. "You will have noticed," writes C. S. Lewis in his essay "Transposition," "that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning." All of the dog-traning books I read emphasize that, since the dog cannot think like a human, humans must be willing to think like dogs if there is to be any communication. Thus, by definition, our mental state is "higher" and we must "lower" it to get our canine on.

So is it that big a deal that when I walk into the breezeway between kennels at the Gulf Coast Humane Society, leash in hand, all the doggy denizens down either side rush to the bars and see only another of their own kind?

Well, I think so, yes.

There is a nobility in the common canine that we humans share only by the animal's kindness, or perhaps by years of submitting ourself to his discipline. There is peace, for instance. Steve Brown writes, “Did you know that studies have shown it is almost impossible to give a dog an ulcer? Do you know why? Because dogs hardly ever try to be anything but a dog.” The dog doesn't worry about going to its thirtieth high school reunion and having everyone find out that it's still just a mongrel, not yet a purebred or, for that matter, still a Great Dane and not yet a primate. What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount about being content with the clothing and food that daily pursuits provide finds itself fleshed out in the dog. Paul's advice to the Corinthians (a distinctly feline lot in my opinion) about contenting oneself with a limited suite of spiritual gifts and a reciprocal part in the overall body - a congregation of dogs wouldn't have needed to be told in the first place.

Then there's loyalty. "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous," says Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, "he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." Of course, dogs sometimes do bite the hand that feeds them, but this is because they've gone mad. When human beings do it, we call it being realistic, or growing up. In other words, disloyalty, for a dog, is a disease; for human beings, it is often an achievement.

I read just recently that new official maps of Antarctica will include place names honoring eleven of the sled dogs that mushed Roald Amundsen on his winning venture to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912. Uroa, Myllius, Helge and Per, along with seven others, will provide Air Force pilots with navigational points as they zoom across the underside of the world. Eleven is the number of dogs who completed the trek, out of an original fifty-two. Some succumbed to diseases while some, according to plan, came along as self-moving meat which, at set intervals, the explorers fed to the rest of the dogs, and to each other. They never got famous, but they got the job done.

On February 21, 1925, Gunnar Kassen mushed his dog team out of the village of Bluff, Alaska, headed for Gnome bearing a load of anti-toxin to stem a diphtheria outbreak that threatened to devastate the snow-bound population. His lead dog, a two-year old Siberian husky named Balto, pointed the way through fifty-three miles of a blizzard so thick that it obliterated the trail and buried any guiding scent. Yet as unerringly as a King James Bible, this former scrub-dog piloted his master's precious cargo straight into the middle of town. The story goes that Kassen stepped from the sled and staggered to the exhausted animal, to whom he said merely, "Damn fine dog. Damn fine dog."

So do I consider myself honored that any random member of this ancient race would unconditionally enroll me in its records?

J. R. Ackerly, in his book My Dog Tulip, a memoir of life with his German shepherd, tells how he noticed that Tulip, happening upon another dog's excrement in the woods, would always urinate over it. One day, after relieving himself during a forest tramp, he noticed her do the same thing with her master's offal. "So I feel that if there ever were differences between us," he writes, "they are washed out now. I feel a proper dog."

To feel a proper dog - seems a great gift indeed.