How Dogs Add Value to Both Life and Death
And what a Natufian hunter-gatherer woman has to do with it
I write about several core subjects here at What then?
Today’s is my third dog essay. The first is here and the second is here.
There will be more to come…
A Natufian hunter-gatherer skeleton was found beneath a large slab of limestone in the settlement of Mallaha in modern day Israel.1 The woman is lying on her right side.2 The back of her left hand rests beneath her head. The bottom of her hand, however, rests on the chest of another skeleton – that of a dog. And so they have laid together for twelve-thousand years.
Why? Why was she not buried with tortoise shells and bits of eagle wings like those found beside a female shaman in her grave some twenty miles away?3 Or with nothing at all like most Natufian hunter-gatherers?
I was thinking about this woman while walking with Carson on one of our regular trails. The thought struck me that I did not want to walk without him again. Not just on trails, but across my yard, from my office to the kitchen, anywhere and at all times. It feels empty in the rare moments I am not with him but I cannot put it into words.
What then is it about Carson – about the dog – that makes life better?
Is it that he does not harbor a grudge against me for taking him to an apocalyptic visit to the vet to have his nails clipped? Is it that he does not judge me for the unnecessarily loud arguments I hold with myself while walking or betray me for my politics? Is it that he does not complain about the snow in winter, or the humidity in summer, and loves it all equally? Or maybe it is simply because he does not blame God for his lot in life or for the leaves to be any more golden, red, and yellow than they are.
This is true. But it is not just subtraction that makes a dogs presence divine – it is addition as well.
He is the bounding leap from stone to stone across a running creek. He is the splash of water as he plunges chest first on a hot day. He is the black-lipped grin when his heart rate rises walking uphill. He is the pointed tail and lifted left paw when the scent of a rabbit floods his nostrils and he is telling me which direction it is hiding as if it is a matter of great concern to me. He is the flicker of eye contact we make when he is checking to see if I am aware that he is about to chow down on a pile of bear dung. He is the inevitable bout of zoomies when he enters the tunnel-shaped bower of rhododendrons as if it were a particle accelerator. He is the slacker who, when I come out of my thoughts to look for him, might be a hundred yards behind me walking next to an elderly man at a preferably slower pace. He is the frosted whiskers when it is below freezing, and the milk-white fur that glows in the dark as he chases a deer at dusk. He is the brat who ignores my repeated calls while staring me full in the face from a hill surrounded by picker bushes that he knows I will not walk through to get him.
He is also the smile that hijacks my face when he sprints through the mud that he could have easily walked around, and the sigh I give when I know I have to give him a bath. He is the four-legged silhouette against the setting sun. He is a mud paw print. He is the fulfillment of everything I want on a walk when I wake up in the morning and the memory of a good walk as I lay down to sleep. He is the minimum dog – the white furs that I find woven through my jacket and gloves. He is the maximum dog – the brown smears of fox feces from neck to tail that he blissfully rolled in before I could stop him.
This, then, is the answer to the question: with the dog, a moment is no longer merely another moment in the flow of time, but a thing to be savored and shared, a sense of we-are-living-this-second-of-life-together. A walk to the kitchen might turn into a foot and paw race to see who can get there first, or simply a reminder that even this ten meter walk to get some water is a once in a lifetime experience to savor fully.
The dog presents us with a divine dilemma: If I end up well-off and can say that I left the world a better place than I found it, I will want the dog by my side. On the other hand, if I end up broke and a failure, I will still want the dog by my side. What then? What more could I need?
But what will happen if Carson is not beside me? Do we make ourselves vulnerable by devoting so much of ourselves to our dogs? What would Epictetus say?
Epictetus taught a method of logic. He believed our minds recognize an external, in this case “Carson.” Then we experience a subconscious value judgment, in this case “Invaluable.” And the result would be an impression, in this case, “Carson is invaluable to me.” He then gives us three options for this impression: we may assent, dissent, or withhold judgment. So, I choose to assent.
Suddenly I hear Epictetus rolling in his grave outside Nicopolis. He is calling me a fool and a slave. He is scolding me for setting myself up for pain and sorrow since Carson will not live forever. Still, I assent. He will give me an “F”, but my gut tells me he would understand. Why? Because my hunch is that philosophy is the haven for the over-alive; those who have tapped the deepest wells of human emotion and must put words to what they found; those with a maxed out attunement to the human condition. I believe the teachings of Epictetus were so extreme because his adoration for life was so extreme, and that his intent was not so much to turn us into machines as it was to make sure we do not take those we love for granted for an instant. Right or wrong, still, I assent.
Rising above the grave of Epictetus, I can see how minuscule a speck of an ape I am with a white-furred beast at my side, and how futile my devotion to a dog is on this rock hurtling through space. Still, I assent. I can see how we and our dogs can be reduced to mere atoms, and how our lives are a brief swirl of experience and emotion before they end. Still, I assent. I can see myself racked in torment when he is no longer at my side as I sit, and I lose control, and I realize I will never smell him, or see him, or hear his claws clicking on the floor ever again, and yet still I assent.
I would rather live with this pain than die without ever knowing it.
What then? What of our Natufian woman? Maybe she felt for the dogs napping here and there around her camp what I feel for mine. Maybe she accepted the pain of loving and losing her dogs because she wanted them around her as she picked almonds under the sun and sat beside a fire beneath the stars. Maybe, as her life was drawing to an end, the thought of death and eternity became more bearable because the dog, too, would be there at her side once again.
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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Davis, Simon J. M. and François Raymond Valla. “Evidence for domestication of the dog 12,000 years ago in the Natufian of Israel.” Nature 276 (1978): 608-610.
The study could not confirm if the skeleton was male or female, so I assume it was a she.
Grosman, Leore et al. “A 12,000-year-old Shaman burial from the southern Levant (Israel).” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2008): 17665 - 17669.
Dogs are dogs, which makes them the best people you’ll ever meet.
Sam you have perfectly captured the essence of my life with Lola. What a wonderful and mysterious relationship it is. I assent.