TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 187[1]
16th January 2024
When people are very young they see animals as equal, even as kin. That humans are different, unique and superior to all other species – this they have to be taught.[2]
Dear friends and colleagues
Long ago an artist said to me that owning dogs is somehow similar to being an artist. I can’t remember now who said this, but the idea stuck in my head. What did they mean?
However familiar they are, however close they are to us, dogs remain so different. In the end we are watching an alien species, albeit one that has grown up with us. Maybe they are a bit like the not-yet-fully-formed artworks within our heads – those concepts, objects or dreams that we sense within ourselves but can’t quite understand, or articulate. That unfathomableness I fall into sometimes when I am writing, not knowing what I am doing, where I am going, blind, following my nose – just like a dog.
Currently we have eleven dogs. Two are children of dogs that Geraldine had long ago, both now deceased (a Labrador and a Pomeranian). Three are the offspring of the third sibling mating with a rottweiler. (They guard the house at night.) Three are rescue dogs (see footnote for where they came from.[3]) Three are, unlike the other dogs, pedigrees – Loki, a German Shepherd, Ragnar, a Golden retriever and Freia, a Weimaraner.
As a child I had a dog – a collie mix – my best friend for many years. But seeing so many dogs together, interacting with one another on a daily basis is something else. It is fascinating to watch them. If in another life I was to have a dog I would want more than one – they are social animals. A friend whose family bred German Shepherds told me that each puppy each dog has its own distinct personality. That is true of our eleven – all very different.
Do dogs have a word for “beauty”? Of course not! They don’t have words! However, they have noises: barks, woofs, growls and snarls. They make signs, wagging tails, peeing on particular spots, that big brown-eyed look for sympathy.
There are canine aesthetics, eg. what dogs find beautiful/attractive, which we can only guess at, and there are canine aesthetics from our human viewpoint – what we find beautiful in dogs. Our three pedigrees – a German Shepherd, a Golden Retriever, a Weimaraner) are better looking than the other eight – they are better proportioned, they walk with more grace. That I assume, tells us more about the aesthetics of dog breeding – how we make them conform to human notions of beauty
How well do we understand them? When Ragnar or Freya lick my face is it a sign of love or is it, as is suggested, because they want to taste what I last ate? Or both? Or something else?
In her wonderful novel The Friend Sigrid Nunez tells us that we have 6 million odour receptors but dogs have 300 million.[4] They do not experience the world as we do. They swim not in a different world, but in a different plane of this world.
It is curious how often in that novel Nunez, or her narrator, asks questions of Apollo, the aging great Dane she inherits: “Does a dog understand betrayal? How good is his memory? What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet one another? Does he have yearnings? Regrets? Sweet, sweet memories? Bitter sweet ones? With senses as keen as theirs, why couldn’t dogs have Proustian moments? Why couldn’t they have eureka moments, epiphanies, and so on.”[5]
The point about a dog is perhaps that however close to us he or she may be, they remain an other, always in some respects unknowable.
Having dogs is like having your own living, live-in soap opera, every day opening a door into a different episode.
They act as an intermediary to the world we have lost. Maybe they compensate to some extent for our alienation from the world of animals?
John Berger in a famous essay argued against any instrumentalist interpretation of our relationship with animals: “to suppose that animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn is to project a nineteenth-century attitude backwards across the millennia. Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.”[6] “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.”[7] Berger argues that modern man has lost the relationship with animals he once had – one that peasants (he always extols peasants) had before industrialisation (capitalism). He denigrates the keeping of pets and zoos, in both of which he sees animals as being defined only by man’s look. His argument is forceful, but in some senses simplistic – are all pet-human relationships or all zoos the same? Contrarily last year in the New York Times an Anglican priest, Tish Harrison Warren, argued that, “caring for animals is something that is deeply human and therefore humanizing. The ‘dominion’ humans are given over creation in Genesis is a care-taking role, a role marked by love, not merely power. In the creation story, humans and animals live not in competition but in mutual delight. C.S. Lewis went so far as to suggest, ‘The tame animal is, therefore, in the deepest sense, the only “natural” animal — the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy.’”[8]
Our relationship with dogs raises major moral issues.
If there is something I hate about the Philippines it is the way too many dogs are treated here – caged or chained, never walked, never part of the family. Having dogs, treating them as friends, giving them the run of a garden, letting them interact, feeding them well, walking them, caring for them, paying the vet and, yes, loving them is a statement about how we want to belong in the world.
As ever, have a good 2024
Tony
PS. For those of you who like dogs I attach some random photos of our dogs.
- Me and my dog, early 1960s
2. Sultan patrolling the wall above the ravine 2014
3. At home with Loki. Photograph by Geraldine Javier 2020
4. Ragnar as a cute puppy 2022
5. Fabritius by a banana tree
6. Freia loves Ragnar
7. Lab, Ragnar, Loki, Chocnut, Freia on the porch
8. Ragnar, with Loki cooling off on a hot day
9. Bjorn
- This should have been Tuesday in the Tropics 181 8th May 2023 but I couldn’t resolve it. Reading Sigrid Nunez made it possible. ↑
- Sigrid Nunez, The Friend, Riverhead Books, 2018, p. 171. The book of course is not just about a dog, it is also about loss and the act of writing – and how those three things connect. ↑
- One was given us by a homeless guy in Manila who could no longer care for him, one was given us by our builder as Geraldine couldn’t accept that his workers who brought him would cook and eat him once they finished building her house, the third, a husky, was passed to us because the people who had him had no enclosed garden so kept him on a chain, he whined and moaned so much at this that their neighbours said they would shoot him. ↑
- Nunez, op. cit. p. 199 ↑
- Nunez, op. cit. p. 90, p. 125, p. 146, p. 174. ↑
- “Why Look at Animals?” in John Berger, About Looking, Pantheon, 1977, p. 2 ↑
- Ibid. p. 4 ↑
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/opinion/pets-dogs-love.html ↑