In literature, there is a device called personification by which a writer attributes human characteristics to animals or inanimate objects. An example of this would be to say "the wind was angry" or when people say owls are "wise".

I'm not sure where people got that idea about owls, but maybe because they have huge eyes and look like they're wearing glasses. And people who wear glasses are supposed to be smart. I'm not sure where that idea comes from, either, or how eyesight equates to intelligence. But whatever.

My point is that, in literature, these animals and objects and forces are used as kind of hieroglyphs to represent certain characteristics. If someone says "the wind was angry" then certainly we can all understand what kind of wind it was, and hopefully the emotions or thought processes it might evoke in us are universal. That's how it works in literature, anyway: We put things in our frame of reference as a means of understanding ourselves.

In real life, we do exactly the opposite. In real life, we insist that everything be understood in human terms. I mean, we say "the wind was angry" and everyone knows what that means, but no one really believes that an impersonal meteorological force is capable of emotion...it's just how we talk, and how we understand things.

What Motivates Humans

Humans are motivated by three things: Survival, Pleasure and Duty. Survival's an easy one. It's why we eat when we're hungry and come in out of the rain. Pleasure is a little more complicated. Its not as simple as saying we do things we like, or even that we always do things we want to do, although that's a big part of it. Its why we eat when we're not hungry, and why we cook our food and not just eat maggots and grubs out of trees. It's sex and obsession, but its also ambition that drives you to become the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company (even though that's hard work, and not fun most of the time), and its love of money and power and revenge against your enemies. Duty is hard to define exactly, but basically it's when we do things we don't want to do just because we should. It's why after Pearl Harbor everyone signed up for the army. Its why a married man turns down a proposition from a beautiful girl even when he knows he won't get caught. It's why someone might rush into a burning building to pull someone else out. If some alien landed on earth and had some understanding about how strong our instincts are--the instinct for survival, or sexual urges--but had no idea of our moral sense, they would think these things were crazy.

Which brings up a side note of things people do because they can't help it. Like obsessive-compulsive stuff, or serial killers. But first of all I don't think this is as common as most people think it is, and secondly, as sick as it is, I think most of it falls under the heading of "pleasure". This sounds odd, I know, because an obsessive-compulsive doesn't like having to straighten the fibers of his carpet every morning or touch the doorknob 25 times before leaving a room, and I'm sure there are many "serial" criminals out there who would stop if they could. But we do things because we like them and maybe we don't see any harm in them, and they grow and snowball and pretty soon everything's out of control and yet we still keep doing them. Ask anyone who smokes or drinks how that works.

What Motivates Animals

So that's humans and that's how we are and that's basically how we understand things. And when we look at ourselves or other people, we get it. I mean, we understand how other people are because we're that way, too. The problem is, we think everything is just like us. Everyone thinks that, even people who should know better.

Like scientists who think dolphins are talking to each other, and then try to understand what they're saying. Or gorillas and sign language. What could they possibly tell us?

"Hey, you know that movie Congo? I could really relate to that."

"I can hold my breath a really long time! Boo Ya!"

But people are really bad about this when it comes to their pets. Couples call each other mom and dad to their dogs and buy them dorky sweaters. Old ladies talk to their cats and give them the run of the house.

I love dogs myself, but I don't suffer any illusions that they think like me. I think dogs are motivated by two things: 1) To eat things, and 2) To not get eaten by other things.

Dogs like to eat things. This is a huge motivation for them. They probably think about food like men think about sex. Like when a dog attacks, they always tell you don't run. That's because the dog will run you down and try to eat you, just like his instincts tell him to. If you rush the dog, they don't know what to do because they don't have an instinct to tell them what to do. For a better example of this, watch a lion-tamer in action when he walks toward the lion and the lion completely freaks out. It's not because the lion-tamer is a bad-ass; it's because 1) nothing in nature will charge a lion and he doesn't know what to do, and 2) the lion apparently can't remember the last time the lion tamer took out the chair and how easy it would be to eat him. None of this is done in malice; its just their instinct and how they survived. By eating things.

So to avoid being eaten by their dogs, people buy dog food in cans that has really cheap cuts of meat in it like stomachs and throats. This is actually not as gross as it sounds, because when a pack of dogs attack something the first thing they eat is the throat, and then the organs. Rich people don't understand this and they think "Only the best for my Fifi" and buy their dogs steak, which a dog of course will eat but I don't think they like as much. And this is all because, like I said, we insist that the dogs are just like us when in reality they aren't.

The second thing dogs love, of course, is not being eaten by other things. To do this they have developed a Pack Instinct, which is kind of like the Herd Instinct you see in cattle and birds in that they travel in groups, except the Pack Instinct allows for a Pack-Leader which the Herd Instinct does not. Although birds I guess have their own "pecking order" but I don't think that's the same thing but what do I know? Anyway...........

When a person gets a dog, the person becomes the dog's pack. In fact, the person becomes the Pack-Leader and is responsible for keeping other things from eating him. Any other dogs or periphery humans might be considered part of the pack, but there is only one leader.

It's like that movie Old Yeller. Travis was the older brother and perceived as the Pack-Leader, and Arliss was the one Yeller played with and so he was part of the pack. When that big bear attacked Arliss, Old Yeller's pack instinct told him to attack the bear. Disney would have us believe that this was an heroic act to save a defenseless young boy, but the fact is that Yeller probably saw the bear and Arliss (i.e., the rest of his pack) about to go at it, and he was probably fully expecting to join his pack in attacking the bear, not take the bear on alone. And so when Arliss was hugging him and saying "Good boy!", Yeller was probably thinking "Good boy, my ass! Where the hell were you?"

I think that these two things can pretty much explain all of dog behaviour. I don't think dogs love or hate or feel happy or sad or frightened or angry the way that we understand it. Like I said, we observe their behaviour and we explain it in our own terms, but I don't buy it.

Of course, dogs also have simpler instincts, like staying warm when its cold out and procreating and protecting their young, but what I'm talking about is how people explain it one way when its likely there are other explanations we never thought of.

How Humans Think of Dogs

People think dogs love them. Like when Timmy fell down a well (which he did at least twice a week) and Lassie went to get help, maybe Lassie wasn't thinking "Timmy can't die! I love him!" but rather "If Timmy dies, things will come eat me!" Dogs lick our hand, yeah, but only for the salt on our skin.

My theory, naturally, is unprovable, but any theory would be when we can't actually talk to dogs. Do dogs have language? Maybe. But I think their vocabulary is limited to a few phrases:

"Let's get something to eat."
"I'm going to eat you."
"Don't eat me!"
"HEY! HEY HEY HEY HEY!"

We don't even really know how dogs' memory works. It occurred to me one day that maybe dogs don't think about or remember things that aren't right in front of them. My dog used to stop eating if I left for a few days, but it may have been more from her lacking a Pack-Leader than from pining for her master. C.S. Lewis once wrote that Heaven is one great, boundless Now with no past and no future, and it occurred to me that maybe this is how dogs see the world. If it is, then this is probably the most alien of all their thought processes. The reason it occurred to me is that my dog was eating her own vomit and maybe she just forgot where it came from.

You might think that this conflicts with my theory that dogs have their own form of government of which we are unaware (see entry dated June 17, 2001), but it doesn't. It doesn't even make them less intelligent than us. Just different.