Celebrating our best friends on International Dog Day
If you get it, you get it. If you don't, you don't. I'm not going to try to persuade anyone who doesn't already love dogs to start gushing over mutts. I won’t cite the scientific studies that only confirm what dog people already know about their intelligence, their instinctive sense of fairness, their ability to problem-solve, or their ability to love. And I won’t dive into the many ways dogs benefit their human companions — from the very utilitarian roles like guarding, herding, watching, hunting, seeing eyes, and pulling sleds to the soft skills such as emotional support, hospital therapy dogs, and companionship for combat veterans to the side benefits of having a dog such as walking exercise or the social benefits that come with walking a dog in the park or around the neighborhood.
It seems to me that our general discussions about dogs are actually about us and how and why they benefit us.
But today is International Dog Day, and I want to celebrate them and the 15,000-year interspecies love affair we have had with these extraordinary creatures. While it is impossible to set aside how just thinking about dogs makes me smile, I want to take a look at them, quite apart from any utility they may have for humans. They are indeed remarkable creatures.
As a species, they latched onto the most successful survival strategy of any mammal other than humans by befriending humans. Friendliness is their surpassing superpower. And while the oldest undisputed domesticated dog fossil dates to about 15,000 years ago, the first remains of a canid displaying signs of domestication date to 33,000 before the present. Betting on humans was a smart move in the depths of the last ice age. Some friendly wolves bet on shacking up with humans and won the genetic lottery.
They also brought a lot to the table. Unlike our closest relatives, chimpanzees, wolves are cooperative and highly social in ways that our preferred social order sought to emulate. They manage aggression, comfort losers, take turns guarding the pack’s pups, and display a variety of unselfish behaviors that we continue to aspire to. Those traits are alive and well in our dog friends — one of the most important of which is playtime!
Dogs love to play — sometimes with each other, sometimes with us, and sometimes all by themselves. Dogs will make up games to keep themselves entertained and teach those games to other dogs.
They also have a lot of very important things going on in their day-to-day lives. If you allow your dog to take you for a walk and follow their lead occasionally, you will learn where the trail of smells leads. Depending on the length of their snout, dogs have a 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute sense of smell than we do. They sniff in stereo, right nostril different than left, with a special organ dedicated to whiffing pheromones. If you can get out of the city and burbs, where you will mostly be waiting while your friend checks out the day’s “pee-mail,” you will be led off the beaten track to follow the tracks of bunnies, deer, and whatever else happened to wander through the area. It’s wonderful to imagine just how much they are taking in of a world that we are completely oblivious to. Dogs also sense the Earth’s magnetic fields, and multiple studies reveal that dogs are aided in their remarkable sense of direction through magnetoreception. That walking in small circles before peeing or pooping when left to their own devices? They are getting aligned north/south to do their business.
And then there are those ears that take in sounds up to three times higher than human ears and operate independently of each other to triangulate location. Dogs’ ears, located on top of heads, hear sounds in front of them while flat-lying human ears hear sounds best from the side of the head.
Imagine then all the inputs going into a dog’s decision-making: sight, scents we can’t imagine, sounds we can’t hear, and magnetic fields we long since lost track of. Now that is a very busy life. Having a dog around is like having a super-computing ninja who just wants to hang with you.
Given the depth and duration of our relationship with dogs, it’s important to note that we have not lived up to our end of the bargain. Each year, hundreds of thousands of healthy dogs, in this nation of pet lovers, are killed in our nation’s shelters for the simple lack of a home. And that’s not to say that there aren’t enough homes. It’s estimated that in the coming year, 7 million households will acquire a new pet; about half of those will bring home a dog. If roughly 6% more of those families decided to adopt a dog rather than purchase a dog from a pet store or a breeder, no healthy dog would be dying in a shelter. We are that close.
So on International Dog Day, let’s celebrate what extraordinary creatures they are and understand how much they do for us. Let’s do something for them. On this special day, let’s resolve to be as good a friend to dogs as they have been to us. Let’s save their lives.
-Julie
