Of Dogs and Frogs -- Or Toads

This morning, I went outside to mow the lawn in the backyard. Bow watched me from the pens. The grass had grown considerably since the last mowing, and the skies were cloudy. It looked as if it might rain, and the air had a kind of greenish sheen, as in tropical weather.

I started to mow, but I spotted a little creature under the trampoline. It was a frog. No, actually not a frog. A Bufo Americanus or American toad, my friend Sena later told me. At first the dogs did not notice it, but as soon as they did, Brownie was eager to catch it. I had to tell him "No!"

Brownie is a chocolate lab and the sweetest, kindest dog you could possibly know. Some people, when they first see him, are taken aback, and say things like: "That's a very big dog. Does he bite?" Well, he certainly wanted to bite that toad. But when I told him "No", he backed off. You could see on his face how very much he wanted it, but he also accepted my authority, and he deferred to me.

Of the two, Leo, the smaller and younger, is currently more dangerous, because he is more rambunctious and less obedient. Not dangerous to us, but to frogs, certainly.

In yesterday's discussion of violence and dogs, I neglected to mention this fact: up until recently, dogs were entrusted with guarding the home. They were expected to show utter loyalty to the family they grew up with, while total ferocity toward intruders. They were never intended to be docile -- just loyal and obedient.

I transported the toad to the front porch, where I knew the dogs would leave it alone. I can trust our dogs with many things, but not eating  a toad  when I am not there to supervise them is not one of them. Everybody has limits. There are some temptations that are insurmountable. Understanding those limitations is part of managing the situation.

A toad is too big a temptation for a dog. A stranger crossing your property line is something a chimpanzee is very alert to. Not all creatures or all people enjoy the same privileges and protections.

On one level, all flesh is kin. We can look at  a frog and see what we all have in common. We can feel empathy. But from a different perspective, anyone who is not a member of your family is a stranger. To conflate all violence into one handy category of undesirable activity is to fail to do justice to heroes like Jean Laffite and to consider the Karankawa cannibals, just because they ate some of their enemies. We should judge a man, a dog or a chimpanzee not merely on how kind they are to their friends, but also on how well they can neutralize their enemies. In today's culture, we forget that kindness without courage is impotent. Or that all life feeds on other life, but we should take care not to feed on our friends.

The difference between the in-group and the out-group is what distinguishes murder from hunting, terrorism from patriotism and lunch from manslaughter. Not understanding the limits of empathy is like thinking that you can live outside the inexorable laws of nature.

To make it up to Brownie for not letting him eat the toad, I played a couple of rounds of fetch-the-rock with him, before I went back to mowing the grass. This seemed to satisfy him.

And what did Bow think about all this? He understood. He knew exactly how Brownie felt about the frog, but he was happy when I came back into the pens to spend more time with him. He knows what I think about all this, because he has read parts of my new book, Theodosia and the Pirates: the War Against Spain. Or at least he has heard me read them aloud.

Bow helping to proof my latest manuscript

Chimpanzees, Dogs and Domestication

Today is Mother's Day, and I am being nostalgic. In the picture above, from nine years ago, you can see me and Bow inside the sun room, while Sword and her friend are out in the yard on the back  porch. They are playing hopscotch on a chalk outline they made on the concrete. Bow was in his favorite pose, riding on my back. And, of course, there's a swing.

Today, the sun room has been transformed into the inner pens, the back porch is the floor of the outer pen, and the swing has been moved outdoors. It's Bow's swing, but today, since it is Mother's Day, Bow let me use it.

Bow was very unconcerned with my use of his swing, but Leo, who is a barker, kept trying to get more attention. If he were inside the pens, he would not feel so left out. Luckily, I do also interact with Leo at other times, so he's not entirely a neglected or a feral dog.

Which reminds me, offhand, of a discussion of chimpanzees, dogs and domestication I recently had with some friends and friends of friends on Facebook.

It all started with someone claiming that humans, even under conditions of slavery, cannot be domesticated, because they are so smart that they can cloak their tendency toward violence and thereby avoid having the violence culled right out of them. This, it was claimed, was in contrast to dogs who have been entirely domesticated, and can therefore be expected to be non-violent toward humans.

I took issue with this. I pointed out how many incidents of dogs killing humans we have in the United States each year. The killings are not breed specific. My point was not  that dogs were bad or that certain dogs were violent, but simply that those dogs who do not choose to kill humans do so not out of some kind of genetic predisposition against violence, but because of the way they are brought up, the way they are treated and the positive relationship that they have with humans. I mentioned that chimpanzees, who have not undergone "domestication", have by contrast not killed any human in the US in decades.

Up popped some woman, a friend of my friend, and gave me a stern lecture. She told me that chimpanzees may seem cute when they are babies, but by puberty they are very dangerous, and I should have a plan in place to get rid of mine. (She assumed Bow was in the cute baby phase, or else I would be dead by now.) Then she explained that domestication is not the same as taming, in case I thought it was, but was a program of genetic selection for certain traits that dogs have undergone for tens of thousands of years and that foxes underwent more recently in a less lengthy process.

First of all, if domestication as a way to disarm populations were really a possibility, whether for humans, dogs or chimpanzees, don't you think it would be achieved by now? The biggest killers of other humans are humans themselves. Governments interested in eradicating resistance are plotting to take away our guns or to drug us, because they don't know of any sure fire way to make us docile.

Many people have their dogs neutered, and it is not just for purposes of birth control. If birth control were desired, why not just perform a vasectomy? The same people who claim dogs are domesticated also push for universal neutering of all domestic dogs. Why?Some of it is to control behavior.

 Dogs don't always do what we expect them to. Neither do humans or chimpanzees. All of us are dangerous, whether armed or unarmed. Many different expedients are tried to neutralize the natural tendency to resist authority that comes built in to any intelligent being.

But even castrati can plot against the king, and neutered dogs and chimps have been known  to do much damage. So neither "domestication" despite its centuries' long breeding program, nor other methods such as drugs and lobotomies, is a substitute for a relationship of trust.

Telling people their dogs are domesticated and hence cannot harm them is an invitation to having people treat dogs badly or fail to relate to them at all, and expect that everything will be fine. Everything can be fine, but first you need to earn respect.

I go into the pens every day, bare footed and bare handed, with only trust for a weapon. It works a lot better than domestication ever could. Nobody in my house is domesticated: not me, not my daughter, not the dogs and certainly not Bow. We all came down from a long line of carnivorous predators, and somehow we avoid killing each other every single day.

Amazing, isn't it? But I bet it's the same at your house, too! Happy Mother's Day!