Dog Emotions

 

 

Voltaire and Descartes had a disagreement which they cultivated for some time as to whether dogs had emotions and feelings and whether they experienced pain. It was the contention of Descartes, ever the cold logician, that dogs did not have an emotional life and were such a low order of life that they did not experience pain as we humans did. Voltaire wrote in response to Descartes in his Dictionaire Philosophique:

Judge this dog who has lost his master, who has searched for him in every path, who comes home agitated, restless, who runs up and down the stairs, who goes from room to room, who at last finds his beloved master in his study, and shows him his joy by the tenderness of cries, by his leaps, by his caresses. Now barbarians seize this dog who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship. They nail him to a table and dissect him alive to show you the mesenteric veins. You discover in him all the organs of feeling that you possess. Answer me , Mechanist ,has nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal in order that it should not feel? Does he have nerves to be impassive?

And then we in our language of today perhaps malign the dog to some degree. A winning individual is a top dog. A handicapped or underrated person is an underdog. Pathetic individuals lead a dog's life in a dog eat dog world. We all suffer through the dog days of summer. When things happen in what appears to us to be an inverted way we speak of the tail wagging the dog. A person who hogs resources for which he has no immediate use is a dog in the manger. A damaged book is dog-eared, poor poetry is doggerel and we sometimes get a hang-dog expression. Dutiful workers may be either dog-tired or dogged.

The paragraph above is a paraphrase of Joel Shavishinski in "Pet Ideas". In the same vein Sir John Davies wrote in "In Cineam" in 1594:

Thou sayest thou art weary as a dog, As angry, sick or hungry as a dog, As dull or melancholy as a dog, As lazy, sleepy, idle as a dog. But why dost thou compare thee to a dog in that for which all men despise a dog? I will compare thee better to a dog. Thou art as fair and comely as a dog, Thou art as true and honest as a dog, Thou art as kind and liberal as a dog, Thou art as wise and as valiant as a dog.

Maybe we should all go to the dogs.

As you may have have guessed I miss my dogs. Down Pam! Down Frank! This is not the time for dogs yet.

LOVE

dad, granpa