I’m really not a dog person, like when faced with an actual dog I find they’re just kinda slobbery and noisy and they make weird smells and I’m not a big fan
but I still have super strong feelings about dogs as a concept. I mean we take these animals and we shape them into the perfect companions for our species in a process that takes tens of thousands of years. We make them so that they love us, and serve us, and will learn how to do whatever we need them to do. We make them want to guard us while we sleep, to guard our livestock, to guard our homes, to help us hunt, to act as beasts of burden, to watch our children and our fields. They’ll learn how to see for us. They’ll run into burning buildings for us. Dogs walked beside us every step of the way as we became the dominant species on the planet. And all they ever ask for in return is enough food to stay alive and as much love as we will give them.
I mean, people talk a lot these days about how we’re ‘playing God’ with genetic engineering, or with artificial intelligence, and they make that sound very ominous, but when you think about it, we, as a species, have already created another species. And I am heartened and humbled to know that, when humanity set about the daunting and monumental task of creating another race to be our companions on Earth, we made something as noble and selfless and loving as dogs.
And I feel like the fact that we have created such obviously good creatures who only want to serve us confers upon us a responsibility to be gentle and kind and compassionate with them. In an existential and anthropological sense, they’re humanity’s children. We gotta be nice to dogs. We owe them that much.
I dunno man, I think about this stuff. I don’t gotta be a dog person to be grateful. good dogs. thank you dogs. we might not be here without you.
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