The Blackberry Walk

There is something tragic in dogs. Some time ago, I was sitting on a bench in a local nature reserve, wasting the hours by, reading my book, and - once I became bored of my book - occupied myself with that time-old pleasure of people watching. Dog-walker after dog-walker passed by, each dog leashed to their owners. And despite dog-walkers' insistence, each dog who walked this path insisted on barking and harassing the swans. Each time I watched as the dog pulled the leash taught, barked his lungs out, and then the swan puffed his chest, broadened his wings, and hissed that silent snake-like hiss unique to the swans. And each time without fail, the dog's brow arced pitifully, his tail drooped, his ears flopped and he backed down. The dogs were afraid. Of a swan, I thought; what a silly thing to be afraid of. A dog could get his maw around a swan's neck with relative ease, surely? It can't be too difficult for a dog to take out a swan, surely? But the dog was afraid of the swan's show of strength. 'Oversocialised': was my thoughts at the time. Not merely oversocialised, but bred to oversocialisation. It's not just by its upbringing that this dog was unable to retaliate: by the upbringing of their species, of the phylogeny, not just the ontogeny, they were unable to retaliate. Dogs are domesticated to obey, never able to actualise themselves, possessing a kind of stunted growth like an axolotl. The pig, when unleashed into the wild, become boars again: they grow tusks, get hairy, and their ontology reconnects them with their wild ancestors. It's as if a genomic switch is activated, turning on 'boar mode' and they remember how to live in the forests. Dogs, by comparison, are stuck in this more infantile state; they have a kind of permanent father complex where they look for authority figures but can never mature to become one. Much like Shinji, dogs are prone to fits of anima-possessed dispair - you can see the shame and lack of self-worth in their eyes! You can see the depressed frustration in their eyes! You can see the despair of their inability to compute why they can't become great wolves. Maybe my previous appraisal of dogs was negative because I saw a bit of myself in them. Dogs, I've discovered, may not be able to become wolves (Great Men), but they can be trained to happiness by a good master. My grandma's late dog Dale was an Airedale Terrier. I remember seeing this dog and thinking, "this dog reckons he rules the household". Despite being so meek, Dale thought himself the house's chief defender; every time a person passed the window, he leapt from the sofa, ran to the window, and began his chorus of proud barking, to inform the house that a person had passed. My late grandfather used to shout at Dale too terrible, and if he wouldn't stop barking, he got the fly swatter out to try and make him shut up. Often even this was ineffective. These dogs - for Dale was one of a few - were heavily pampered. They had chicken breast with gravy to eat every day, plus whatever my grandfather fancied feeding them under the table. One of their dogs, Gypsy, an almighty pony-sized friendly giant of a dog, used to plonk his head on the table by my grandfather with those pathetic glistening dog eyes, begging for scraps from the table. It was quite revolting. These dogs were also incredibly unfit, for this was South Africa, and you don't really want to go out for a walk anywhere. These dogs had no law; they were a law unto themselves. And they were encouraged in their indiscretions with these tid-bits. There's another dog I see most mornings on the way to work. I walk along a canal on my way to work, and each day i walk past a kindly old man who's walking his dog and say hello. And this dog is full of life! He runs ahead of his owner with such enthusiasm, his clean thick white hair waving in the wind like an incredibly dense cloud: he brings a smile to my face each morning. You can tell this dog is loving life, and that he loves his owner. You can tell this dog can't beg for scraps by the table, for he doesn't have an ounce of that pathetic pity in his face. You can tell this dog was raised right. Because dogs have no pack leader to follow, they follow men. Because dogs are stuck as juveniles, they will forever see you as their master, and your responsibility as a dog owner is to lead them with responsibility and competence. Dogs are much like men, in fact. Much like how a person with nothing to do will descend into 'mere life', so too will a dog. The ego-trip of barking at the window, or living solely for the passions of one's stomach: each of us can relate in a sense to these experiences when we are at a spiritual low. This is Nietzsche's last man. The happy dog, on the other hand, is one who grows, and who works. The panoply of strangely shaped dogs we take for granted today all emerged from the selective breeding of dogs to specific ends. Sausage Dog, for instance, is so strangely elongated to bury himself down rabbit holes and badger holes; the Yorkshire Terrier was bred to be so tiny and agile in order to kill rats in fields and in dockyards; and the Sheep Dog was bred to be smart enough to herd sheep. When you see dogs at work, they are concentrated and focused. They aren't necessarily having fun, but there's a sense that through their work, and by following their master's training, they're fulfilled. In the ancient world, the family was very different. The father was in a very real sense the master of the household, and his word was law. The children must obey the father, and the wife must obey the husband: this was how social relations worked. And God is the Father. As aspirant children of God, we must obey the father and follow his commandments. C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain describes how, very crudely, our relationship with God is like a dog and his master. Given that the relationship of son and father is quite different now than it was in the past, Lewis uses this inferior connection - inferior insofar as the dog is not in man's image - of man's relationship to the dog as one which is also of absolute obedience. Reading that passage, I realised that a dog's obedience is something truly noble. A well-trained dog will never if rarely disobey his master's command. And a dog is a far more simple organism than a man, and as such I can only imagine that his animalistic urges are also far higher. And yet, the dog through right-training can become either a fulfilled white wool-ball frolicking down the towpath, or a tired-looking, often-farting, creature of pity begging for a scrap at any opportunity. It all depends on the master. And the goodness of the master towards his dog all depends on the law and the training. Through worship of passions, worship of idols, or the worship of God, we choose our master in a way a dog can't. We choose our highest end around which all our efforts shall point; and if that end is an idol like money, we limit ourselves to achieving no more than material wealth. Worship is submission. The transcendence that is above us only makes itself known to us through the humility of the intellect, the humility of the desire, and the humility of the will. Dogs perfectly prove that submission to a good master begets a good happy fulfilling life - and that's without bearing God's image!