Here's a familiar story for any college student who has left a dog behind at home.
It was 11 p.m., and I was tired. I had been traveling all day, taking the long flight home from Baltimore back to Las Vegas. As I walked through the familiar door of the home I hadn't slept in for three months, I heard a familiar bark. A small, fluffy bundle ran towards me and rolled onto his back, asking for a belly rub with whines and wriggles. I couldn't help but oblige, and smiled at the bond that has formed between man and dog.
I've often wondered what my dog is thinking. What does he mean when he whines incessantly as he lies on his back? Why does he always contort himself so that he may simultaneously sit on the sofa and on my lap? What does this bark mean, and what does that yip mean?
Yet there is one thing which I wonder about the most. Sometimes, my dog will look at his food with disinterest, and sleep without care for play. We sit by his side, and pet him, and carry him and wonder what is wrong. And my mother always says, "Dogs suffer quietly. They don't let others know they're in pain."
Why is that? Why do our dogs refuse to seek us out when they feel ill? Why do they not bury their snouts in their tails and whimper incessantly to alert us to their suffering?
They stay silent because we asked them to. During the early domestication of the dog, we selected for dogs who would be obedient. A dog who complained of pain was no use to the hunter-gatherer. We searched for the dogs in each litter who were resilient and loyal. Through artificial selection, we have created a dog who sees asking for help as a fruitless task. A dog may not even consider communicating its suffering to us because it instinctively finds no benefit in doing so. It may not even understand the mere idea of telling us about its pains.
Sometimes I find it comforting to consider that perhaps dogs do not feel pain at all. Perhaps they do not experience pain in the ways which we, as conscious beings, do. Many a dog owner will argue that their dogs are conscious and that they experience the world the same way we do. However, humans are born with an innate empathy, which forces us to anthropomorphize and to see humanity in the non-human. We do this with electrical outlets, in which we see faces. We do this with fish, to which we assign personalities. And we do this with dogs. But perhaps it is not that dogs do not communicate their pain to us, but that they do not even know pain. Perhaps the dull ache of cancer in their bones does not stir their doggy minds. Perhaps a sick dog ceases to eat because its body is shutting down, not because it is consciously aware of its maladies. To them, there may be nothing to tell us.
Yet, as philosopher Thomas Nagel once said, we cannot know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. We cannot know what it is like for a dog to be a dog.
But I do know this much: I am sorry. I am sorry for my dog, and for all domesticated dogs. I am sorry that humans are selfish. I am sorry that over 30,000 years ago, we decided that our companions would be silent. We picked out the quiet pups, the ones who did not cry and the ones who never complained. We kept the adults who followed us, saw us as their masters, and seemed to unconditionally love us. We created the modern dog, a best friend who will always listen to us.
And I am sorry that now, I will never know what they think, or if they even think at all.
