3. BOUND BY SPIRITUAL TIES
1. Emphasis added. Quoted in Darcy Morey, Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond (London: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 2.
2. Lorenz doesn’t come to us without problems. In the late 1930s he joined the Nazi Party, accepting a university chair. Much like Martin Heidegger, often considered one of the greatest philosophical minds of the twentieth century, Lorenz’s legacy is marred by these political associations. Yet, like Heidegger, his academic work has had an important impact.
4. MINDLESS, FURRY MACHINES
1. Berns gives some texture and pushes in directions I’ll be heading here: “Instrumental learning forms the basis of every dog-training method ever published. Teaching the ‘sit’ command is based on instrumental learning. Here, the stimulus is either a hand signal or a spoken word, and the desired behavior is the act of sitting. When the dog sits and he is immediately rewarded, he makes an association between the act and the reward. In instrumental learning, the link between stimulus (‘sit’) and act (sitting) is called the stimulus-response (S-R) relationship. Instrumental learning is also called operant conditioning because the animal learns to operate on, or affect, the environment.” Gregory Berns, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (Boston: New Harvest, 2013), p. 35.
2. John Homans, in his popular dog book What’s a Dog For?, nicely summarizes this “LEGO theory”: “Comparative psychologists see the mind as a toolbox with a whole range of particularized modules—some of them fairly complex and specialized—that fit together in specific ways. By contrast, behaviorists like Wynne see it more as a LEGO set. Their aim is to break complex behaviors down as if they were LEGO constructions, to see how they’re linked, finally getting down to a pile of neat blocks. ‘I believe that the essence of science is to analyze something that looks complicated into its simpler parts,’ he told me. ‘Take a behavior like an animal following a human point. I think it can be disassembled so that you see that it’s basically a form of associative conditioning.’ ” From John Homans, What’s a Dog For? The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man’s Best Friend (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), pp. 90–91.
5. IT HAPPENS ONLY FACE-TO-FACE
1. Ibid., p. 110.
2. Michael Tomasello discusses further the shortcomings of apes and pointing in A Natural History of Human Thinking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), see pp. 52ff.
3. “As insightful as it is about dogs, Hare’s tameness finding is most remarkable as a window onto the talents (and lack thereof) of chimpanzees—and, by extension, of humans. It shows the dog to be, in this respect, more humanlike than the chimp. For an explanation, Hare looked to experiments where chimps have to cooperate. He describes a classic cooperation experiment in which a pair of chimps have to pull on opposite ends of a rope in order to receive a reward. But due to their competitiveness and aggression, many of these animal Einsteins fail to solve the problem. In the chimp universe, you can’t get there from here. An alpha chimp will simply take a lesser chimp’s food, and the weaker one has no incentive to cooperate. No one gets a banana. The only chimp pairs that successfully solve the problem are ones that can eat together without warring at the same food dish—the tamest sort of chimps.” From Homans, What’s a Dog For?, p. 80.
4. Ibid., p. 48.
5. Hare says, “These studies suggest that dogs interpret your gesture depending on what you are paying attention to. In short, Mike and I concluded that dogs have communicative skills that are amazingly similar to those of infants.” Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, The Genius of Dogs (New York: Dutton, 2013), p. 53.
6. Vilmos Csányi, commenting on his own study with wolves, writes, “But the tame wolf is not a dog. It will pay no attention to human speech and is not interested in what people are talking about, and when it hears its name, it will not run to its master.” From Vilmos Csányi, If Dogs Could Talk: Exploring the Canine Mind (New York: North Point Press, 2005), p. 22.
7. “Subsequently, researchers have raised wolves for the sole purpose of comparing their social skills with those of dogs. The researchers gave the wolves even more exposure to humans than the wolves I tested, but their results were similar to ours. At four months of age, heavily socialized wolves could not use a caretaker’s gesture to help them find food, even though the caretaker had raised them from puppies. When the wolves were tested as adults, they needed explicit training to match the spontaneous performance of dog puppies.” From Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 59.
8. Stanley Coren discusses and gives commentary on this study: “When faced with a manipulation task that they can’t solve, dogs will stop, look at the face of the person with them, and try to discover clues as to what to do from the person’s actions. In comparison, wolves, even those that had been tamed and were living with humans, do not look at the faces of people for clues as to what to do. Dogs can thus extract more information from human social sources around them simply because they are specifically looking for it.” Stanley Coren, How Dogs Think: What the World Looks Like to Them (New York: Free Press, 2008), p. 237.
9. Alexandra Horowitz, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (New York: Scribner, 2009), p. 46.
10. Bradshaw says, “Although pointing has become the scientists’ favorite experimental tool, it is by no means the only activity to which dogs are particularly attentive. They also follow gestures such as nodding and hand movements much more attentively than most other animals do. In addition, dogs seem fascinated by people’s eyes and faces: they will follow the direction of their owner’s gaze almost as reliably as they will follow pointing.” John Bradshaw, Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 198.
11. Horowitz, Inside of a Dog, p. 149.
12. Csányi concurs: “Dogs are excellent human ethologists, too; they continually observe us, and are much helped in this by the fact that they strongly bond with humans. They also have an excellent understanding of human body language.” Ibid., p. 132.
13. Csányi, If Dogs Could Talk, p. 54.
14. Quoted in Homans, What’s a Dog For?, p. 75.
6. WINDOW TO THE SOUL
1. From Luther’s Table Talks, found in Laura Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition (Urban, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), pp. 104–5.
2. Remember, Tomasello was so interested in gestures such as pointing because they appeared to be fundamentally hardwired into human beings. Our villain B. F. Skinner and his theory of behaviorism believed that animals (including human beings) were born as blank slates, essentially, as TiVos straight out of the box, with no programmed connections. Yet the cognitive turn that ended Skinner and behaviorism’s reign showed that our minds were not just blank slates awaiting programming. Language itself was too complicated (and quickly learned) to be solely the result of behavioral conditioning. Rather, our minds came with already formed modes. Minds, whether chimp, dog, or human, were shaped and ready for certain tasks and operations.
And one of the most fundamental tasks for human beings is the ability to produce and respond to gestures. Infants, at an amazingly early age, are able to respond to gestures such as pointing, and very quickly begin pointing out things themselves. The human being, compared to other animals, is pathetically dependent for a long time in his or her infancy and childhood. The infant human being can’t get places on his or her own—or even stand—for years! This is a remarkably long time compared to most other animals.
Still, while the infant is pathetically immobile, very soon after her birth she is uniquely able to read gestures, and to gesture herself for what she needs. This is her great skill to survive! The infant can’t run and grab the milk she needs, but she can read gestures and make her own gestures readable enough actually to enter the mind of her caregiver, calling the mother to her person, to meet her basic needs by taking her needs into the mind of her mother.
The infant’s ability to enter the mind of her mother is not done through horror movie–like possession, but through the actions of communion; the infant reads and gives gestures as a way to bind her being to the being of her caregiver—and as caregivers will report, this binding is spiritual. Through the communion of shared gestures, we are given a bond that grows through our face-to-face expressions. Hare says it this way: “Almost simultaneously, infants begin to understand what adults are trying to communicate when they point. Infants also begin pointing out things to other people. Whether infants watch you point to a bird or point to their favorite toy, they are beginning to build core communication skills. By paying attention to the reactions and gestures of other people, as well as to what other people are paying attention to, infants are beginning to read other people’s intentions” (Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 37). This reading of intentions is the catalyst of spiritual ties. The human child is cared for because of a deep spiritual bond that has linked infant to caregiver, and this linking has its beginning in the innate mindful ability to respond to gestures. Responding to gestures is the first profound building block of spiritual ties. So it is significant that dogs are innately able to respond to gestures at all, actually to enter our minds in some kind of communion.
3. “By the end of the fifth week almost all babies are engaging in visual smiling and their smiles become sustained for increasing lengths of time. They are accompanied moreover by babbling, waving of arms, and kicking. Henceforward a mother experiences her baby in a new way.” John Bowlby, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 284.
4. “From the time that smiling to visual stimuli is first established, the most effective visual stimulus is a human face in movement; and a face is made even more effective when it is well lit and approaching the infant, and still more so when it is accompanied by touch and voice. In other words, a baby smiles most and best when he sees a moving figure who looks at him, approaches him, talks to him, and pats him.” Ibid.
5. I concur with Kirkpatrick’s words here. In many ways, I’m offering a theology that believes just this, that the relational connection between mother and child is a deep analog to God’s own relational longing for us. Kirkpatrick says, “Psychologically, I suggest, a worshiper’s love for God is more akin to a child’s love for her mother or father than to an adult’s love for a romantic partner or spouse.” Lee A. Kirkpatrick, Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), p. 77. While I concur with Kirkpatrick, I’m trying to avoid his reductionism in so doing.
7. THE SURPRISING POWER OF CANINE COMPASSION
1. Douglas J. Hall, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986).
2. Homans explains that, “[f]or Hare, the notion of the cognitive adaptation, the new faculty, was now out the window. It seemed that tameness itself enabled the foxes to use an existing cognitive skill to interact with the humans they had become so fond of. This new, simpler formulation had many virtues. It showed how complex behaviors could arise quickly—within a generation or two—and from relatively simple mutations. It also tilled in the picture of neoteny as a process that could change the course of a species, as it had with the wolf and the dog—and may have done with humans.” Homans, What’s a Dog For?, p. 79.
3. Hare adds to this: “Perhaps barking is another by-product of domestication. Unlike dogs, wolves rarely bark. Barks make up as little as 3 percent of wolf vocalizations. Meanwhile, the experimental foxes in Russia bark when they see people, while the control foxes do not. Frequent barking when aroused is probably another consequence of selecting against aggression.” Ibid., p. 132.
4. Darcy Morey describes further: “Notably, and again surely not surprisingly to many dog enthusiasts, recent test data indicate that people are often able to classify (recorded) dog barks in terms of their emotional content. And they can do so without knowing the context in which the barks were produced, and with no previous experience with a given dog breed or in owning a dog. That is, they can identify emotional information by sound alone. That factor surely fosters enhanced communication between people and dogs, and serves, in general, to reinforce their social bond. In fact, dogs in general have a remarkable capacity to communicate with people: ‘In so many respects, modern dogs seem to be better adapted to communication with humans than with other dogs.’ Accordingly, it seems that dogs belong with people…Dogs simply do not thrive when deprived of regular human care and interaction.” Morey, Dogs, p. 199.
5. Bradshaw says, “In this sense, the capacity for love that makes dogs such rewarding companions has a flip side: They find it difficult to cope without us. Since we humans have programmed this vulnerability, it’s our responsibility to ensure that our dogs do not suffer as a result.” Bradshaw, Dog Sense, p. 171.
6. Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 87.
7. One of the major impacts of selection for kindness was that it allowed for shared intentionality, and shared intentionality would lead to what Tomasello calls the ratchet effect. You need kindness and shared intentionality to get to this. Tomasello says that apes don’t have the ratchet effect, which is why they don’t have direct spiritual experiences, because spirit is bound in personhood (soul). This quote, however simply, articulates how cultural and even technological advances may have happened: “Teaching and conformity then led to cumulative cultural evolution characterized by the ‘ratchet effect’ in which modifications of a cultural practice stayed in the population rather faithfully until some individual invented some new and improved technique, which was then taught and conformed to until some still newer innovation ratcheted things up again. Tomasello argues that great ape societies do not display the ratchet effect or cumulative cultural evolution because their social learning is fundamentally exploitative and not cooperatively structured in the human way via teaching and conformity, which constitute the ratchet that prevents individuals from slipping backward.” Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Thinking, p. 83.
8. John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008), p. 165.
9. See Elissa Gootman, “The City as Chew Toy,” New York Times, December 16, 2011, nytimes.com/2011/12/18/realestate/dogs-living-in-new-york-city-city-as-chew-toy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
10. Lieberman offers a nice definition of empathy: “The word empathy was introduced into the English language just over a century ago as a translation of the German word einfühlung, which means ‘feeling into.’ Einfühlung was used in nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy to describe our capacity to mentally get inside works of art and even nature itself, to have something like a first-person experience from the object’s perspective. Empathy still means something like ‘feeling into,’ but it almost always refers to our connecting with another person’s experience, rather than ‘getting inside’ an object.” Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown, 2013), p. 152.
11. For the close reader there may be some fear that this kind of empathy or soulfulness leads to forms of enmeshment. Here J. Wentzel van Huyssteen and Erik P. Wiebe discuss Paul Ricoeur’s position, showing how empathy actually can lead to differentiation. “Strikingly convergent with Ricoeur, then, it is through the transcendence of empathy that one gains the ability to separate self from other and to see the other as fully other in relation to the self. Through the transcendence of imagination, one receives release for the past through openness to a new future.” J. Wentzel van Huyssteen and Erik P. Wiebe, In Search of Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Personhood (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), p. 9.
12. Antonio Damasio tells David’s story: “David was being brought to a bad-guy encounter and as he turned into the hallway and saw the bad guy awaiting him, a few feet away, he flinched, stopped for an instant, and only then allowed himself to be led gently to the examining room. I picked up on this and immediately asked him if anything was the matter, if there was anything I could do for him. But, true to form, he told me that, no, everything was all right after all, nothing came to his mind, except, perhaps, an isolated sense of emotion without a cause behind that emotion. I have no doubt that the sight of the bad guy induced a brief emotional response and a brief here-and-now feeling. However, in the absence of an appropriately related set of images that would explain to him the cause of the reaction, the effect remained isolated, disconnected, and thus unmotivated.” Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego: A Harvest Book, 1999), p. 46.
13. Damasio states, “To be sure, there was nothing in David’s conscious mind that gave him an overt reason to choose the good guy correctly and reject the bad one correctly. He did not know why he chose one or rejected the other; he just did. The nonconscious preference he manifested, however, is probably related to the emotions that were induced in him during the experiment, as well as to the nonconscious reintroduction of some part of those emotions at the time he was being tested. David had not learned new knowledge of the type that can be deployed in one’s mind in the form of an image. But something stayed in his brain and that something could produce results in non-image form: in the form of actions and behavior. David’s brain could generate actions commensurate with the emotional value of the original encounters, as caused by reward or lack thereof.” Ibid., p. 46.
14. Jeffrey Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), p. 9.
15. Morey, Dogs, p. 233.
16. In Stanley Coren’s The Modern Dog: How Dogs Have Changed People and Society and Improved Our Lives (New York: Free Press, 2008), pp. 148–49 and 227. Coren continues: “The strong connection between humans and animals has been a subject of serious psychological research. Scientific evidence about the health benefits of such a relationship was first published about thirty years ago, when a psychiatrist—Aaron Katcher of the University of Pennsylvania—and a psychologist—Alan Beck of Purdue University—measured what happens physically when a person pets a friendly and familiar dog. They found that the person’s blood pressure lowered, his heart rate slowed, breathing became more regular, and muscle tension relaxed—all signs of reduced stress.”
8. BONDING FEVER
1. Bowlby, Attachment, p. xxix.
2. Lieberman discusses what I call the “pull of attachment”: “We all inherited an attachment system that lasts a lifetime, which means we never get past the pain of social rejection,…just as we never get past the pain of hunger. We have an intense need for social connection throughout our entire lives. Staying connected to a caregiver is the number one goal of an infant. The price for our species’ success at connecting to a caregiver is a lifelong need to be liked and loved, and all the social pains that we experience that go along with this need.” Lieberman, Social, p. 48.
3. Bradshaw, Dog Sense, p. 68.
4. Morey gives a little background on cats in relation to dogs and attachment. He says, “It is noteworthy that a telephone survey of several hundred Rhode Island residents, reported by Albert & Bulcroft, found that ‘[o]wners who selected dogs as their favorite pets reported feeling more attached to their pets than did people whose favorite pets were cats or other animals.’ The reasons for this kind of difference in perception probably stem from the fact that cats are solitary and mostly nocturnal hunters. In contrast, both dogs and people are socially gregarious and, in general, active by day, though wolves do sometimes hunt at night. Those are behavioral factors that surely underlie the differences in perception, and it is especially useful to focus more closely on their different patterns of sociality. In that light, it is relevant to note that in a study emphasizing visual cues, Miklosi et al. found that cats seem to lack some components of human attention-getting behavior that are present in dogs.” Morey, Dogs, p. 204.
5. “The extraordinary similarity between the bonding processes of dogs and humans is also established by tests that have shown that the evident depression of dogs separated from their masters can be alleviated by precisely the same medications as that of humans. It is quite certain that the same biochemical processes take place in both.” Csányi, If Dogs Could Talk, p. 55.
6. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 40.
7. Hare and Woods, The Genius of Dogs, p. 266. Bradshaw adds, “The remarkable thing about this strong physiological response is that it is triggered by contact with Homo sapiens, a different species. As noted earlier, dogs’ attachment to people is often more intense than attachment to individuals of their own species; dogs that become very upset when their owners go out are rarely comforted by the presence of other dogs. It’s tempting to speculate that ‘one man dogs’ may lack oxytocin, but so far no one has looked into this possibility. What scientists do know, however, is that all dogs have been programmed by domestication to have intense emotional reactions toward people. This lies at the root of the ‘unconditional love’ that many owners describe and treasure in their dogs. Such intense feelings are not easily turned off, as attested by the high proportion of dogs that hate being left alone (as many as one in five, according to one of my surveys).” Bradshaw, Dog Sense, p. 171.
8. See Jon Katz, The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family (New York: Random House, 2004).
9. Katz says, “At about the same time television and computer screens became pervasive, the emotional and familial lives of Americans also grew more complex. The extended family began to shrink and disintegrate. Divorce rates shot up and remain high. The medical advances that helped people live longer also meant that the number of widowed and disabled rose sharply. Americans moved more frequently, leaving their communities. The number of single-person households continues to increase, along with the number of childless couples.” Ibid., p. 13.
10. “John Archer…wrote in 1996 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that it’s the social arrangements of modern Western societies that drive the growing bonds humans forge with pets. Mobility and divorce have gnawed away at the extended family, so family units are growing smaller. The trend toward smaller households has reached its logical and inevitable conclusion: more people live alone.” Ibid., p. 116.
9. DOGGY PLAY AS SOUL TALK
1. Bradshaw, Dog Sense, p. 206.
2. George E. Vaillant, Spiritual Evolution: How We Are Wired for Faith, Hope, and Love (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), p. 129.
3. “The subject of play has turned us from individuals and their concern with identity (although this theme itself is located within the horizon of the social relations of individuals) to the life-world which individuals share. In play, human beings put into practice that being-outside-themselves to which their egocentricity destines them. The process begins with the symbolic games of children and finds its completion in worship.” Ibid., p. 338.
4. Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 158.
5. Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), p. 104.
6. Bradshaw, Dog Sense, p. 207.
10. A HEALING PRESENCE
1. Jonah Engel Bromwich, “In a Shaken Orlando, Comfort Dogs Arrive with ‘Unconditional Love,’ ” New York Times, June 16, 2016.
2. Rachel McPherson, Every Dog Has a Gift (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2010), pp. 20–21.
3. Ibid., p. 27.
11. COULD IT BE LOVE THEY’RE FEELING?
1. I believe my position here still holds, but Konrad Lorenz adds nuance by pointing out that dogs are able to understand words linked together. My point is only that they have no mastery of syntax and that they read our emotions (mind) more than the hard data of words. Lorenz adds: “It is a fallacy that dogs only understand the tone of a word and are deaf to the articulation. The well-known animal psychologist Viktor Sarris proved this indisputably with three Alsatians called Harris, Aris and Paris. On command from their master, ‘Harris (Aris, Paris), Go to your basket,’ the dog addressed and that one only would get up unfailingly and walk sadly but obediently to his bed. The order was carried out just as faithfully when it was issued from the next room whence an accompanying involuntary signal was out of the question. It sometimes seems to me that the word recognition of a clever dog which is firmly attached to its master extends even to whole sentences. The words, ‘I must go now’ would bring Tito and Stasi to their feet at once even when I exercised great self-control and spoke without special accentuation; on the other hand, none of these words, spoken in a different connection, elicited any response from them.” Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog (London: Routledge, 1954), p. 130.
2. Berns, How Dogs Love Us, p. 193.
3. Ibid., p. 204. “The pattern of activations in the cortex suggested that [dogs] concocted mental models of our behavior, which might be due to mirror neuron activity. But regardless of the mechanism, the…data showed that their mental models included the identity of important people in their lives that persists even when the people aren’t physically present.”
4. Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love, p. 210.
12. BOBBY AND THE “RIGHTEOUS” DOGS OF EGYPT
1. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 153.
2. There are other biblical views and interpretations aside from Levinas’s. Hobgood-Oster explains: “Dogs are equally reviled, albeit for different reasons. In the description of the holy city in the book of Revelation, dogs are left outside the gates (Revelation 22:15), thus symbolically excluded from heaven. Jesus also questions the worthiness of dogs to receive scraps from the table, though he is challenged and, some would argue corrected, by the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:25–30). Dogs, in this instance, are a symbol for the other but also function as real dogs who do eat scraps from human tables.” Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses, p. 44.
3. Laura Hobgood-Oster, A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014), p. 102. Aaron S. Gross helpfully explains that this interpretation of the text as Hobgood-Oster is interpreting it is from a rabbinic interpretation: “[As] one Rabbinic interpretation of Exodus has it, [the dogs] did not bark and thereby allowed the ancient Israelites to escape from bondage.” Aaron S. Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 129.
13. A STORY FROM THE CAVE OF DREAMS
1. Paleoanthropologists haven’t determined whether this child was a boy or a girl, but for the sake of this midrash, I am calling him a boy.
2. I’m following Mark Derr in believing that these prints are from a wolf-dog. He makes a strong case for it in his book How the Dog Became the Dog (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2011). However, again, it must be mentioned that this is a debated point. In a footnote on page 82 of Morey’s Dogs, this child and her wolf-dog are discussed further. Morey points out that it is contested that the child and wolf-dog were actually together, though I feel the evidence supports that they were.
3. It is true that some theorists believe the dog prints come years (even thousands of years) after the child left his or her footprints. This is possible, and Homans (later in this note) nicely articulates the conflicts with this theory. Yet, while this episode is contested, there are others who believe the footprints are indeed following the boy (Mark Derr, for example). I, then, am taking a leap in saying the wolf-dog is with the boy (or girl) and stand with solid thinkers who believe they are together, but the reader should be aware that this is a contested episode in the archaeological record. Homans explains the contestation: “Chauvet Cave in southern France (which also features a gallery of animal portraits), contains a remarkably well-preserved set of child’s footprints, carbon-dated at some twenty-six thousand years old. The prints are intertwined with those of a wolf, or possibly a dog, judging by the shortness of one of the digits on its front paw. So far the animal’s prints have been found only on top of the child’s, suggesting that the wolf—or dog—came afterward. If one of the animal’s prints were to be found under the child’s, it would provide a simple, elegant archaeological proof that the two had walked together. It’s a beautiful image, a child and his best friend making their way through a dark place by torchlight, but thus far no such print has been found, and it remains just a dog lover’s dream.” Homans, What’s a Dog For?, p. 121. Laura Hobgood-Oster, for instance, holds to the child and wolf-dog being together. She says, “Over 26,000 years ago, in the deep, damp darkness of a cave in southwestern Europe, a human child and a canine walked side by side. The child’s torch brushed up against the wall numerous times, providing a time signature; and their feet left a 150-foot-long trail that marks the journey they took together. The archaeological discovery of the footprints of the young human and the wolf-dog offers a compelling snapshot of the beginnings of a story of two species whose lives would be intertwined for thousands of years to come.” Hobgood-Oster, A Dog’s History of the World, p. 5.
4. Lorenz, too, crafts a story about the meat toss: “Then suddenly the young leader with the high forehead does something remarkable and, to the others, inexplicable: he throws the carcass to the ground and begins to rip off a large piece of skin to which some flesh still adheres. Some young members of the band, thinking that a meal is about to be distributed, come close, but with furrowed brow, the leader repulses them with a deep grunt of anger. Leaving the detached pieces on the ground, he picks up the rest of the carcass and gives the signal for marching….Not a man is conscious that he has just witnessed an epoch-making episode, a stroke of genius whose meaning in world history is greater than that of the fall of Troy or the discovery of gunpowder. He acted on impulse, hardly realizing that the motive for his action was the wish to have the [wolf] near him.” Lorenz, Man Meets Dog, p. 5.
5. John Bradshaw, in his book Dog Sense (see pp. 48ff.), believes that there was some form of feeding that led to domestication. This feeding Bradshaw connects to the drive to keep pets. What Bradshaw doesn’t do, that I have here done drawing from Bellah, is to connect this keeping of pets with a spiritual dynamic born within Homo sapiens. Bradshaw, however, it must be mentioned, would not concur with my early thesis of the arrival of wolf-dog.
6. Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger, Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 134.