For the Love of Dogs
I’ve just received word that my parents are putting Lacey, their 12-year old Springer Spaniel, down after a long battle with cancer.
Canine mortality is, bar none, my least favourite thing in the entire world. I’ve dealt with a good deal of death in my life - from siblings to mentors, friends, ex-lovers, and extended family. But the death of my childhood dog, Starr, was the single most devastating experience of my life to date. My book, Unseen Beings, is dedicated to her - and for very good reason. Upon thoughtful reflection of my life’s trajectory, it’s become clear that my relationship with Starr was the primary catalyst that pushed me into the life that I live.
While I never lived with Lacey, my parents adopted her back in 2012, the last time that we all lived in the same town - Durango, Colorado. Her similarities to Starr - they were both female Springers with similar coats and personalities - were immediately noted. My father still ponders whether she is/was Starr’s reincarnation, returning once more to live with the family that loved her so profoundly. I always avoided thinking too much about it, since I always knew that it would only make her inevitable loss more difficult to handle.
I was fortunate to spend a few days with my family, including Lacey, in the States just last weekend. It was a short trip, mostly because our own animal companions - two 14-year old cats - are also doing rather unwell here in London. While the stark reminders of disease and mortality in our own little family were already weighing on my heart, the news about Lacey has been particularly hard to take.
In honour of her, and the great journey-to-who-knows-where that she will be undertaking in the hours to come, I wanted to share some of my thoughts about dogs - our oldest non-human friends.
We adopted Starr (my childhood dog) when she was a puppy back in the mid-1990s. I had begged my parents for a dog for years, and fell absolutely in love with her from the moment we met. I have a vivid memory of driving home with her for the first time - holding her in the backseat as she slept, coddled in her mother’s blanket. It didn’t take long for Starr, and dogs in general, to become my entire personality. Dogs were the first in a long line of obsessions that have punctuated my life. I devoured books about them, memorising well over a hundred dog breeds (and their places of origin), and bragged about my dog at every chance I had. I very much perceived Starr as my sister - my equal (and perhaps even sometimes my superior) in the grand scheme of things.
My love of dogs led me to become quite passionate about animal welfare. I tried to volunteer at the local animal shelter, and was devastated when I discovered that I was far too young. I had the direct office line of a worker at the shelter, and would sometimes call her to ask questions about dogs. For a while, I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian - but once I found out about euthanasia I become terrified of the prospect. Next I wanted to be an animal trainer, then later on, inspired by a tv show called Animal Precinct, I decided I wanted to be an animal cop - rescuing animals from abusive and dangerous situations. Ultimately, of course, none of this happened, but my love for Starr - and of dogs - never waned.
I had a number of existential transformations in my pre- and early adolescence. My brother was killed, leading to a highly intense period at home. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings shortly after, which completely transformed the way I viewed the world - and further cemented my already ‘weird’ reputation among my peers. It wasn’t long after I spirit gummed fake hair to my feet and told my classmates that I was a ‘hobbit’ that I left public school (due to unavoidable bullying) and finished my middle school years at a couple different Christian schools - one Catholic and one Seventh-Day Adventist.
This experience drove me deeper into questions of spirituality and theology - topics that I had long been interested in, even as a young child. Attending bible classes and reading scripture led me on a path of exploration - briefly driving me deeper into the Christian faith(s) of my community before ultimately catapulting me as far away as possible.
A key point of religious contention for me was always the sentience of animals. I knew with every fibre of my being that Starr was a fully sentient person. There was no doubt about that. But being told that only humans have immortal souls (the standard teaching in most Abrahamic religions) sent me into somewhat of a tailspin. I didn’t need an old book to tell me whether or not Starr was sentient and aware - given my close relationship with her, there was absolutely no questioning this fact.
This was first straw that broke the camel’s back in my relationship with religion. Suddenly I began racing down early-internet rabbit holes of problematic Bible verses and critiques of Christianity, and scouring books on alternative world religions. I learned a lot - and the more I learned, the more it became clear that Christianity was not for me. I had neither interest nor belief in God, nor could I stomach the doctrine of eternal damnation for the ‘unsaved.’ My 7th/8th-grade teacher gave me a valuable glimpse of a more progressive Christianity - also being the first example of a vegetarian that I had known - but there was no avoiding the fact that my spiritual proclivities were poorly satisfied by church doctrines.
It was during this time that I first encountered Buddhism. I had a schoolmate who had spent some time in Japan as a kid, and he would tell me stories about going to Buddhist temples, which I found highly enchanting. So I decided to pick up a book on Zen Meditation from the local bookstore, and within months, I had read a stack of books ranging from Sutra translations, to hagiographies of Buddhist saints, to photo collections of Buddhist ceremonies. I felt an instant connection to Buddhism on many levels - but an important one was what I felt to be a sense of shared values surrounding animals. The simple doctrine that all animals are sentient beings was deeply affirming. I couldn’t possibly subscribe to a worldview in which this wasn’t the case.
I quite naturally assumed that this philosophy would lend itself towards vegetarianism, so I became a vegetarian when I ‘converted’ to Buddhism at 13. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that most Buddhists are not vegetarians - particularly in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. But even so, I had unshakeable conviction on this matter, and save for a brief rumspringa-of-sorts in college, I remained a vegetarian until a year-and-a-half ago, when I decided to take the plunge into veganism. I say this not to preach the virtues of a plant-based diet, but rather to illustrate the ways that an earnest relationship with an animal can transform our values and perspectives on life.
When Starr passed away just shy of her 16th birthday, it was perhaps the darkest period of my life. It was right after I returned from my sophomore year of college - the year when I dropped out of musical theatre school and transitioned into Tibetan studies. I was grateful to be by her side when she passed, but the grief was absolutely unbearable. I prayed for her, did rituals for her, burnt Sur offerings mixed with her favourite biscuits to try and nourish her in the ‘intermediate state’. But the pain was profound.
Of course, my family was not the first to mourn the death of a dog. This is an experience that we share not only with our recent forebears, but indeed with a very long line of ancestors stretching all the way back to prehistoric times. We often under-appreciate the absolutely wonder that is the dog-human relationship.
Dogs have been with us humans - sharing our lives, our food, and our homes - since at least the peak of our last Ice Age, around 20-30,000 years ago. Long before we had ever milked a cow, rode a horse, or sown a field of grain, we had befriended a dog. Naturally, the first dogs were Pleistocene wolves - formidable beasts of legend. We had been watching them from afar for millennia, admiring and fearing their hunting prowess and their echoing howls that would fill the night. But in the depths of an Ice Age marked by limited resources and frigid temperatures, something remarkable happened - wolves started inching their way into our strange human world, and we accepted them.
What likely began as a timid sharing of spoils gradually evolved into a friendship - a kind of interspecies partnership that we had never before attempted. Wolves provided protection, companionship, and a natural ‘security alarm’ (allowing us to begin spending more extended periods in one place), while we provided them with food, warmth, and evidently also emotional satisfaction. Just like their humans, dogs experience a surge of oxytocin (the ‘cuddle hormone’) and other neurotransmitters when bonding with their humans. The love we feel is very much not a one-way-street, and this is deeply encoded in our very physiologies.
While a great deal of attention has been paid - particularly in recent decades - to canine intelligence, there has been far less appreciation of the profound ways that dogs have impacted human evolution (and vice-versa). We did not ‘train’ wolves to become dogs. We taught them things, and they evolved alongside us. But they taught us things as well. As persistence hunters, wolves taught us how to become pastoralists - teaching us how to fell giant mammals by stalking them to exhaustion in well-organised packs. They likely taught us how to mark out our territories (though we used visible markings rather than scent) - something that we had not begun doing until we made friends with the wolves. The ‘domestication’ of dogs was, without a doubt, one of the key forces that led to the development of the modern Homo sapiens. Dogs are, in many ways, an important part of what has made us human.
It wasn’t all about protection and learning - dogs also held important roles in human cultures and societies. Around 14,000 years ago, two human corpses were laid to rest in modern-day Germany, accompanied by all the requisite grave goods that would secure comforts in the afterlife. Alongside them was laid a dog - the earliest archaeological evidence for the modern domestic dog, now called the Bonn-Oberkassel Dog. Like the humans, this dog was buried with grave goods and ceremoniously dusted with red ochre - a part of funerary proceedings for many human cultures across the world. Another dog, buried in Siberia around 9,000 years ago, was also buried with grave goods, including a large spoon presumably used to dish out their meals in the afterlife.
These practices indicate many things. It’s clear that dogs were more than mere beasts - they were our friends and our companions, and at least some early humans may have expected to be reunited with their dogs in what must have been a collective afterlife. After all, someone with thumbs would have to use the Siberian dog’s spoon…
While we’ll never find accounts of the ‘first dog’ in written histories, it should come as no surprise that dogs retained an important status in many ancient cultural and mythic traditions. In many parts of the world, they came to represent psychopomps and guardians of the under/otherworld - from Kérberos (and his Indian counterpart Śárvana) to the Welsh Cŵn Annwn, there are countless stories of dogs embedded in our cultural memories. In Ancient Greece, their special role at the intersection of the human and other-than-human worlds afforded them a rather magical status (at least in some contexts). In healing temples, dogs would often roam the grounds licking wounds (once thought to be greatly beneficial) and offering therapeutic support to the human patients.
We learned a great deal from dogs, but perhaps one of the most important lesson simply came from having an up-close-and-personal relationship with a non-human being. Wolves represented a very definite ‘other’ in our world - a fierce representative of unbridled wildness. We must have feared them - as many still did in later times. But over time, we both softened. We became curious. We learned to love them. We shared our homes and resources with them. We let them keep watch over our young. We mourned their deaths, and hoped to see them again someday. Somewhere.
In modern times, dogs still hold positions of importance and value in many of our lives. While there are some parts of the world where they are seen as dirty and dangerous pests, most of us have been brought up in a world where dogs are a part of our families. Many even have important jobs and responsibilities - sniffing out weapons, providing critical health support, or assisting with accessibility. A dog was even the first earthling to venture into space (RIP Laika). After all these years, they still help us navigate the boundaries of our human-dominated world.
But dogs are also one of the greatest exemplars of our own cognitive dissonance. Take the middle school pastor who assured me that non-human animals (including dogs and cats) do not have souls. Take the endless dog lovers who would fight to the death to ensure the welfare of their ‘pet’, while coldly brushing off the abuses and sufferings experienced by other animals en masse. Dogs are both a blessing and a serious problem for the fixity of our now-dominant worldviews.
Most of the modern diminishment of animal personhood has a direct pedigree leading back to figures like René Descartes. Often regarded as the ‘father of modern philosophy,’ Descartes laid the foundations of modern ‘rationalism.’ Being principally inspired by mathematics, discourses on reason, and his Catholic faith, Descartes sought to balance a mechanistic view of the universe with Christian theology and Aristotelianism. He proposed that everything in existence can be explained (and understood) through the laws of mathematics, but he held that the human mind and soul was entirely unique. Echoing teachings from Aristotle (and Plato before him), he argued that only the human is truly ‘conscious’ in any meaningful way. Everyone else - very much including dogs - are nothing more than ‘biological automata.’
To demonstrate his confidence in the soullessness of non-human beings, Descartes famously performed public vivisections on dogs and other animals, often to the shock and horror of onlookers. But even amidst the cries of the dogs as he nailed their paws to wooden planks and ruthlessly dissected their still-living bodies, Descartes assured his audience that what might seem to be the screams of a creature in existential agony were actually just the mechanical responses of an unconscious machine being taken apart. Nothing to worry about - because dogs, like all non-humans, have neither souls nor consciousness.
The gulf that separates Descartes’s psychopathic dismissal and my present experience of grief is quite interesting to reflect upon. It’s remarkable how profoundly our worldviews impact our values, our ethics, and our lived experiences of reality.
Unfortunately, one does not need to go very far to hear Cartesian philosophies on animals being pronounced. Just ask a few people on the street whether or not animals have souls. You will get a range of responses (particularly depending on which animals are being discussed), but it won’t take long to find those who claim that non-human animals are biological machines driven by instinct, devoid of conscious experience. Perhaps some have simply never opened their hearts to an animal before, while others may be blinded by dogmas that prevent the very possibility. In any case, the depth of our anthropocentrism is highly concerning - not least of all in an era when we are actively orchestrating the sixth mass extinction on this planet. Are there consequences to our myopia? To our callousness towards the experiences of others?
I have to believe that there is a way back to a more relational and empathic state of being. A state in which we can remember our deep kinship with other kinds of persons. A state that fully embraces the continuity of being that runs through both humans and dogs (and many others beside) as mere nodes in the vast interconnected web of earthly life.
Stories can help in our recovery, as can facts and knowledge. The more we learn about our animal kin, the more we must realise that we are not, and have never been, alone in this world.
But I think one of the most powerful ways that we can transform our experience of being human is by sharing our life with a non-human. If not for Starr, I would not be who I am today. She was a catalyst for transformation. She taught me, guided me, and loved me. She made it as clear as day that persons can come in many forms.
Even though I never lived with Lacey, nor have I seen her much in recent years, she holds a very special place in my heart. Every time we reunited, even after very long absences, her welcomes were the warmest I have ever received. The love is real, and strong, and beautiful. And even though my daily routine will not change in her absence, she is leaving a void in the depths of my being. She will be missed so deeply - and that is truly something remarkable.
Farewell, Lacey. Thank you for the love.