A friend recently pointed out how one aspect of human behavior can provide hints about other parts of our personalities. For instance, with people who enjoy spicy foods: might it be interesting to see how they integrate endorphin rushes into other parts of their lives. Might they act in ways that invites pain, in other ways? 

Similarly seeking analogs, I wonder if how people treat their pet dogs says something about their world view, in general?

Fido, Get Over HERE!

Get their attention first by yelling their name, then give them stern ‘BAD DOG’ words. Yell it again if necessary, and again. If they finally show up, then smack them.

This habit of barking orders at dogs over and over, every time that the person feels the need to control their dog makes me wonder how that person sees the world. Physical brutality on top of that, just when a dog has (finally) acted as directed, makes me very sad for those relationships. Does command and control and physical brutality make sense in the larger world to such people?

A Whistle Does It

On the other hand, I’ve seen people who have the most cooperative and loving relationships with their dogs. For instance, a certain whistle brings the dog running, tail wagging. Invariably when asked about how these people got to that point with their pet dogs, they say it took a lot of time and effort. Honing communication combined with positive reinforcement are key. Are people who arrive at such non-violent relationship building with pet dogs also apt to have a similarly well-evolved means of relating to their fellow humans?

What To Do?

I routinely run into this issue and it really bothers me. The Capitola DMV has it. The Davenport US Post Office has it. I bet you’ve seen it, too: signs that say something to the effect of ‘No Animals Allowed Inside.’ What are humans if not animals? Minerals?

This problem of mine also crops up regularly in social commentary and literature when some ‘smart’ person decides to add their (sometimes ‘witty’) comments about what separates humans from non-human animals. Such arguments are generally flawed and baseless.

Social Animals

How might the world be better if we learned from the science of how social animals have worked out social problems? What if our conversations turned that direction regularly? And, what if humans thought a lot about that when adopting social animals into our lives? 

Learning from Nature

There is a wealth of wisdom that Nature can share. Humans have benefited greatly from many of those lessons, and additional learning can take us much further. 

When we see ourselves in the dogs we are trying to acculturate into our lives, we learn both how to better mesh with the dog and better hold ourselves in human society.

We might also apply this kind of learning with other social animals in our lives: parrots/parakeets/etc, deer, crows, cows, goats, quail, etc. 

Cautions and Next Steps

We taught to be cautious about ‘anthropomorphizing’ non-human animal traits. The caution goes that doing so might make you blind to important differences. How about some balance here, and the adoption of a new word? How about cautioning about ‘anthroscism’ – advancing the idea that humans are somehow wildly different than all the rest of the animals? Same kind of reasoning holds: doing so might make you blind to important similarities. 

Your homework: start a conversation this week about some human reaction you see that reminds you of how non-human animals act and why that might be.

-this post originally appeared as part of the online weekly blog BrattonOnline.com – a compendium of important information from around the Monterey Bay and beyond. There are movie and TV review, historic photographs from Santa Cruz, links to great media, and columns from amazingly well informed authors. Check it out! Subscribe!! donate!!!! The Blog Needs Your Support.