The man descends from the dog

In a garden, a German shepherd and a pointer are playing, and I am amazed by their expressive capacity. It’s clear to anyone watching what they communicate through their body and tail. They are saying to each other: I am pretending to attack, but I’m joking. What other animal is capable of distancing itself from its behavior, and to express irony in this way?

To signify irony, they adopt a childish body language: for example, while they pretend to attack, they wag their tail, or their entire rear end, like puppies do. The dog is the only animal – with humans – to maintain infantile characteristics, to share that quality that scientists call neoteny. Though unusual, that’s obvious.

In the two playful dogs on the lawn, the adoption of childish gestures is somehow conventional, comically exaggerated, and yet open in a distinctly canine way. The dog is also the only animal that can pretend, but not dissimulate. He cannot pretend to be calm when he is angry or scared and is really about to attack. This is impossible for his loyal nature. Or perhaps he is too much expressive for that.

Who knows how many ethologists and zoologists have already answered the questions I’m asking myself, but I’m speaking just as an admirer, as a friend of humanity’s oldest companion. So I’m wondering if it’s perhaps the participation in human life since the dawn of time, that has made the dog so expressive, so capable of speaking with the eyes, with the ears, with the tongue? Or is it the opposite: are we the ones who, after a long acquaintance, have learned to become expressive like canids?

Perhaps men and dogs have educated each other. I cannot help thinking that between our two species there has been from the very beginning, in some mysteriously preordained way, a profound affinity. More essential than that which should unite us to primates, to monkeys, which Darwinists assert are our ancestors, or our cousins, coming from a common ancestor.

It is impossible not to feel that the man and the dog belong to the same family, and by bonds that are much more decisive than genetic ones. I think I know what this affinity consists of: it is the ethics of the hunting or warrior group. Even before they domesticated each other, I am convinced, the pack of quadrupeds and the group of young human males hunted together.

At a prudent, wary distance, the canids will have followed or preceded the pack of bipeds, cooperating with them: they will have signaled the hidden prey with their prodigious expressiveness; they will have “pointed”; they will have driven the prey as a group, as the wild pack does spontaneously in order to push the prey into range of the weapons, and then wait for the remains of the banquet.

When you see a video like this, it’s not actually too hard to imagine how wolf domestication might have taken place in the distant past. Imagine a famished wolf begging for food at a human encampment… One of history’s great partnerships is born. https://t.co/OSNND3hLr5

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) June 11, 2024

Once darkness fell, they must have positioned themselves, always at a prudent distance, around the camp of the human males. Always alert, ready to emerge from their light sleep at the first noise, at the first sign that the hunt was resuming. Konrad Lorenz argues that that canine alertness must have allowed humans their first uninterrupted, undisturbed sleep, the deep rest that our complex interior life demands.

I am sure of that, with a certainty so fundamental it’s difficult to express – a certainty that I find in myself and that it’s in every human male, memory of that hunting prehistory. I will try to explain: it is the knowledge, in every human group, even in my harmless workplace, of which are the men to whom – in case of emergency, of catastrophe – I will spontaneously obey. I know, and each of us knows, identify those men, the responsible ones. No matter their rank, I know that I will place myself under their orders, and not those who have the official hierarchical rank. In war, in a small group engaged in combat, this happens every time: without consulting each other, the team of comrades united by death knows which of them to trust in desperate moments.

In the canine pack the same thing happens. The leader of the pack isn’t a despot or the hoarder of all the females, but the one in charge. He is the commander whose orders we put ourselves “under”. Among other animals, subservience often leads to cruel abuse; in the canine pack, it inspires active and – we must say – intelligent cooperation, from which the noble hierarchy that is typical of the group – the tactical group – of human hunters is born: that in fact from which aristocracy was born, founded on the values of loyalty, sincerity, friendship. I am speaking of friendship between men, a fundamental experience connected to war, a ray of light in its blood and mud.

Loyalty, the first military virtue, made man and dog alike before life united them. Then, man learned disloyalty. Much of modernity is nothing but the promotion of disloyalty in every aspect of social life. The dog remains faithful to the old values that made him man’s first companion in arms. He cannot live without those values, his intelligence cannot give them up: this is why communist regimes banned the possession of dogs, so that no one would have at his side – against the omnipotent arbitrariness of power, the night raids of the police, the injustice of arresting someone in their sleep on false charges – an unconditional friend, ready to die for him.

However, to put it bluntly, the sight of two urbanized dogs playing, simulating for fun the deadly game of war they once waged alongside us, sagacious tactical allies, in the mists of time, reinforces my skepticism about Darwinism. Morphological differences, intraspecific interfertility, the divergence of genetic codes that evolutionists point to in order to deny our affinity with dogs, are not the decisive factors.

Personally, the Roman myth that makes the founders “sons of a she-wolf [lupa]” seems more authentic to me: we are children of dogs, or the dog is our son, or at least brother, more than any monkey. The decisive affinity is not biological, but something that must be called “spiritual”: adherence to the same values of loyalty (which are innate in them), willingness to play, cultural – learning, shared experience – and even “political”.

Politics? That’s right. Monkeys, our presumed ancestors or collaterals are “particularists”. They do not bond with other species, they do not ally with them, they have never collaborated with man or with any other species. Above all, they do not possess the prodigious existential plasticity of the dog. They are specialized arboreal animals, and we (with our dogs) are steppe and racing animals; they are confined to a single environment, outside the Tropics they get sick and die; the dog has followed us into the Arctic ice and the sultry steppes, into the cities and the seas.

No animal has the morphological plasticity to serve the countless purposes man has assigned it: felines and bovids will never undergo the variety of shapes that distinguishes a Doberman from a dachshund, a Pomeranian from a Chihuahua, a Bergamasco Shepherd from a sled husky.

I am convinced that even this anatomical plasticity has a “spiritual” cause: it is an aspect, and not the least extraordinary, of the cordial, friendly canine “willing to serve”. It is also the sign of a superiority that we willingly attribute to ourselves as exclusive: being less determined by nature, less conditioned by the environment.

The humanization of wild environments kills, even drives mad, the strongest and most aggressive animals of prey; American bison could not share pastures with cows, the tinkling of cowbells drove them into a frenzy. The dog follows us in the roar of engines, and – with lowered ears – on the vet’s bed; it endures for us atrocious chemical odors, that any lion would flee from. Not born for water, man has however possessed from childhood a swimming reflex, which pre-constitutes him adaptable also to the aquatic environment. No monkey has the same ability. The dog, not born for water, follows us by swimming.

I do not want to say that the dog is human. I want to say – hopefully making Darwinists angry – that the dog was made for us humans. Which means, since we humans are radically cultural animals: the dog was made to accompany us in civilization. Made for us, an emulator of our interiority, a friend and brother in expression, in ‘speaking.’

I believe, in short, that God gave us the dog as he gave us – or pre-established for us – the ‘natural’ indeterminacy we possess, the ability to remain infantile and malleable (neoteny), the genetic heritage of superior primates, which makes us live our true life not “outside of us” – like all other animals – but in the interior world: which, for us, is the most important aspect of existence.

This is, perhaps, the equivalent of saying that dog and man constitute an “ecosystem” sui generis. I won’t speculate on whether our prehistoric comrade has his own true spirituality. I just want to remember what the Mahabharata says: Prince Yudhisthira refused to enter Paradise if his dog could not follow him; and the gods had to end up pleasing him. Because it would have been unfair to exclude Yudhisthira of the Paradise he deserved, and Paradise would not have been such for Yudhisthira, without his dog. A spiritual ecosystem.