I wag, therefore I am: the philosophy of dogs

I like the author's positive outlook on life. Because when I see a dog act like that, especially in a family where a child has taken focus, I mostly see a prisoner longing for freedom.

Me and my dog have been exclusive for almost a decade now. We have traveled across europe, always by my side. Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible. To heck with human rules.

I've mostly worked remotely during my dog's entire life, so I've always been there, and we've always been able to take a long walk outside.

But at the end of the day we have to go home, and I have to fall asleep on the couch after dinner, and I have to work for hours and hours from home, or remote workspaces.

So even with all the freedom my dog enjoys, I still feel like it would want more. We have lived in houses with yards, and my dog has lazily spent every single moment outside, in the sun, in the grass. But I still feel like it's insufficient.

I have claimed this dog as mine, so it goes where I go, not where it wants to go.

If my dog could decide it would have probably died a harsh death in the streets a long time ago. But the dog doesn't understand that. I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.

Dogs derive much of their meaning and satisfaction in life from their humans. I know that when my wife and I leave ours in the house for too long, they start to become agitated; upon our return one of them, a Catahoula, has made a habit of complaining loudly, as is typical of her breed, as if to say "Where have you been? You belong here with us!" Oh, and a minute can count as "too long".

Shadow gets excited upon hearing "do you want to come with?" because the repetitiveness of the outing doesn't matter. It's time spent with his human and that is more than enough. It's literally what he was made to do: in need of a faithful companion (other humans being too dodgy) we took one of nature's finest predators and engineered it over millennia, bending its will to need our companionship to the point of utter emotional dependency. Dogs, compared to wolves, even have extra muscles around their eyes whose sole purpose appears to be to enable them to emote to humans more effectively.

Furthermore, dogs have the approximate intelligence of a human toddler... do any of you remember being three or four years old, and every single ride in the car was a new adventure to look forward to? I know that half of Hackernews considers it a biological impossibility to remember anything before about age seven, if that, but maybe when you have a toddler-level brain, things are still full of wonder that might be mundane or forgettable to adult humans.

Somehow this piece manages to avoid mention of both Diogenes, famed admirer of dogs for whom his philosphical school, Cynicism[0], is named, and Kafka, whose Investigations of a Dog is an essential short fiction about a genius dog philosopher[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes#Philosophy :

> asked why he was called a dog [Diogenes] replied, "I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals."

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_of_a_Dog

I would just like to comment that if you love animals, you should hate pets. The amount of animal factory farming (killing of animals often more intelligent than your canine) required to nourish a domesticated animal over the course of their lives is gross in all senses of the word gross.

Imagine you life for a pack, and to defend that pack, you have to bring the part that is most sensitive - your noose, towards the enemy and bite it. And its okay- you are living the rocket life anyway. Fast in, fast out, all for one, one for all.

As a humorous reference I recommend to watch this rather old tv commercial: https://youtu.be/ExnWRuniooY?feature=shared

I love this book: https://www.amazon.com/Be-More-Sausage-Lifelong-lessons/dp/0... it's a great description of how sausage dogs can teach us life lessons. Highly recommended if you know a dachshund.

Reminds me of how much insight Philip K. Dick could pack in his short stories. In this example, Roog. https://philipdick.com/mirror/websites/pkdweb/short_stories/...

Reminds me of when Mark Twain was asked if life was worth living, he responded "It depends on the liver."

Looking forward to this - very in line with the philosophy my wife writes about https://busydoggie.com/home/blog/

The post contains a pretty strong assertion that dogs cannot perform mental reflection:

> In the authentic happiness Shadow finds in the most banal of activities, his commitment to life and action is one that we humans find so hard to emulate. This is because of something that happened to us: a great schism in consciousness that we know as reflection. We humans are the world heavyweight champions of thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it.

> This schism breaks us in two. Henceforth we are all divided into one who thinks and one who is thought about; one who sees and one who is seen; one who reflects and one who is reflected upon. This bifurcation in our consciousness robs us of the possibility of a certain type of happiness, the happiness that accompanies being whole. Shadow is whole in a way that a human can never be.

...

> Being undivided by reflection, being whole and entire, a dog has only one life to live, whereas we – in whom reflection’s canyon is deepest – have two. For us, there is both the life that we live and the life that we think about, scrutinise, evaluate and judge.

It's one thing to assert that a philosophy of living in the moment may be good for people, something completely different to assert that dogs are incapable of living otherwise.

Thank you to bring this up.

Talk about kinicism.