Thoughts As My Dog Is Dying

Things my old, dying dog has taught me.

Dying isn't easy, even when it starts out painless.  It isn't like in the friggin' movies, it is searing and heart wrenching and cruel, no matter how minimally painful. But I already knew something like that.

Dying doesn't have anything to do with original sin, dogs never listened to the snake and ate the fruit.  And their deaths are just as tragic as any human's.  And it will always happen on a long holiday weekend when the vet takes Saturdays off.  It's the fourth time that's happened in my family. 

Dogs are in just about every way our moral superiors, loyal, nonjudgmental, non-discriminating, even, perhaps, to a fault.  I always said that if they bothered to be nice to him first someone could break in and steal everything with him here.  He'd probably want to help with what looked like an interesting project.   Well, until they touched his food dish, maybe.  I suspect there is no person so repulsive, so abject, such a miserable specimen of humanity that some dog wouldn't love them as faithfully as if they were St. Francis.   Which is a lesson to us all.  If such a morally superior creature can love someone we primates would reject and loathe, if a dog can love us, then there must be something to love in us as well as those we find it impossible to love. 

I won't, though comment on how dogs treat cats because I'm not qualified.  I can say that my younger cat who grew up with my dog when they were my mother's pets definitely prefers him to me.  She has been sleeping on his bed with him the last couple of days, something she also did with my mother just before she died.  Something she never had done before that.  The other cat has even shown signs of being concerned with his dying and she didn't grow up with him.

I can't believe, for a second that dogs don't have an afterlife and, due to their moral superiority to us, that it isn't at least the best we can imagine for ourselves.   The often stated accusation that Christians didn't believe animals have souls is wrong, from my slight reading on it.  Early medieval thinkers believed animals did have a soul.  It's certain that there are passages in The Bible that indicate animals do and are more than mere automatons.  As I've pointed to before, God even said he made covenants with animals, just as he did with people.

The idea that animals don't have souls isn't endemic to Christianity, it is the product of early science when people like Descartes declared animals were just machines made of meat without souls.  Considering his incredibly cruel and barbarous treatment of dogs as research subjects, my guess is that he told himself that to keep any of his better side in check in the interest of science.  I have to say that I've really come to rather despise Descartes.  The asshole nailed his wife's living dog down so he could cut it open as it was till fully alive and conscious.  He did it in an attempt to gain fame as a philosopher.  And that poor dog wasn't the only one he did it to.  Can you imagine that level of cruelty as natural philosophy?   Well, you should because it is a model that is even more widespread, today.  If that scumball could go to heaven, I'm sure any dog so cruelly crucified could.  If the poor creature survived its torture I would bet he'd have been nicer to Descartes than Descartes was to anyone else, animal or human.

Update:  My little dog died this afternoon.  I buried him on the side of his favorite trail, putting lots of rocks over his grave to prevent his cousins robbing it.   I'm amazed how much harder that is now than the last time I did it twenty three years ago. 

It's so strange how empty a house immediately feels when there's no dog living in it.   Even the two cats don't make up for that.