Guinness May Not Come Through, But You, Dear Reader, Will Never Fade

It is early April and a rainy 36 degrees Fahrenheit in central Texas. Very ridiculous. I have been relaxing at home, doing that scrapyard thing, but the dogs are getting restless, cooped up as they are. So Guinness, a Rottweiler-Blue Heeler mix who is not quite 50 pounds, I think, has a slobbery tennis ball (minus outer felt layer, and therefore rubbery) that she keeps bringing to me so that I might throw it somewhere for her to run after. We do this outside from time to time; it's a great way for the dog to get quite a workout and for me not to. So we're both happy. It's not quite as effective for her indoors, but there we were, about an hour ago, trying our hardest. One of my throws bounced around a while and ended up under a living room chair.

The chair is a normal sized cushiony shair - maybe a square meter in area. But it's quite light. I lifted one side of it up, so that it stood, two legs on the floor and the opposite side in my hand. I expected the dog to retrieve the ball. I had the chair up more than 45 degrees from the floor. Guinness wanted the ball; her tail wagged. She didn't get the ball. She looked at me. I pointed to the ball and instructed her, in a language she doesn't really understand but I thought the tone of voice and gesture should relay the message accurately, to get the ball. She just stood there. After a couple more tries it became apparent to me that although she still wanted to play with the ball and me, she wasn't going to get the ball. So I reached down and got the ball. I tossed it; she ran after it and retrieved it, confirming my suspicion that she still wanted to play.

Fury exaggerates my reaction to her behavior, but not by much. She has shown trepidation about retrieving the ball in the past only when it lands near the bicycles, which we keep in the living room. The reader is familiar with bikes falling over, seemingly causelessly but actually because there is a nearly-indistinguishable line between a bike that rests sturdily against the wall and one on the verge of collapse. Guinness is familiar with cataclysmic gravitational bike failure as well. This is my best hypothesis as to why she doesn't like to go near them. I have had to go and retrieve the ball myself on occasion, not because Guinness is physically incapable of it, but because she is afraid the bike will fall on her and she won't risk it. (Future blog post: Whatever Happened to Kickstands?) Her demeanor, as I waited for her to take the ball from under the chair, was identical to that which she wears when the ball rolls to a stop near the bikes. So I conclude that she thought I might drop the chair on her as she retrieved the ball from under it.

One of the things that interest me, but not to such an extent that I have been motivated to try to learn anything about it,* beyond casual empirical observation that is motivated by things other than pure curiosity, like making sure I don't kill my girlfriend's dogs out of neglect, is animal psychology. I am very curious as to what really drives dogs to behave the way they do. And I think animals are much more "honest" than humans, in that they probably possess neither the ability nor the compulsion to lie (well, maybe the compulsion, like after I get home to find the trash knocked over or the cupboard raided). In particular, I wonder about dominance versus submission in dogs. It's plain to see that behavior manifest in any two dogs as they interact. There may be a struggle (I suppose even a struggle to the death, in which case dominance cannot be more convincingly displayed), but one dog will prove relatively dominant, and the other relatively submissive. At the other extreme: dogs that play, and get along, especially in the presence of dominant humans, show a muted form of dominance or submission, but it's there.

Now, we humans can't help but anthropomorphize a bit when we see dogs dominating and submitting to one another. We pity the submissive dog, we admire (or fear, or possibly rue) the dominant one. We fantasize about David slaying Goliath (or at least delivering a solid relationship-reversing bite). But I think we put ourselves in the dogs' shoes (dogs' shoes . . .) inappropriately, to some extent. We imagine ourseles as the submissive dog: head down, tail beween our legs, vanquished. It reminds us of some analogous experience we've had: losing a match, being rejected by a girl, whatever. We imagine the submissive dog feels the way we did after that experience, but does he? The dog can't plot revenge against his vanquisher; he hasn't the mental capacity. He can't dwell on it. And anyone who has ever lost anything knows that the real hurt comes during the dwelling. Submissive dogs are often as happy as clams. We think of humans as having the clear advantage over animals in intelligence, but that there is a smaller gap in our emotional capabilities. Or at least I have thought that, until I thought about it more. Our emotional reactions to events are as strong as they are because of our intelligence. If a girl rejects me, I can think about it and anticipate the same response from every girl I ever approach. I can imagine her being attracted to, and happy with, someone else. I can plot to kill him. A dog can't do any of that; in fact, by the time I've planned where to dump the body he's already had three more lovers.

Dogs are honest; they respond to stimuli however they feel fit. They don't have this outer layer of brainpower with which they can scheme, or even consider how their response is going to look to high society. We imagine the submissive dog being laughed at by onlooking dogs, but dogs don't laugh.

So Guinness's fear of my hurting her, or my inability to prevent her from hurt by the chair suddenly becoming unbearably heavy, was her honest response to the situation. Sorry about the awkward sandwich of a blog turd. But here's my point, my olive-on-toothpick: that's cool, Guinness. Whatever.

* I have read about Pavlov's Dog, which is, to me, the most overrated scientific phenomenon in existence.