11-year-old Austin Forman, accompanied by the dog Angel that his family adopted, was charged by what he first thought was another dog in the back yard of his home in Boston Bar, British Columbia, in the south central part of the province about 150 miles northeast of Vancouver. Instead, the animal was an adult female cougar. It was dark and Austin was doing his chore of hauling firewood in from his back yard via wheel barrel. Angel had acted strangely, staying uncharacteristically close to the boy. Then Angel began running around the yard, barking wildly. RCMP officers speculated that the cougar had likely been watching and stalking the boy as he pushed the wheel barrel around the yard. Austin said:
Richard speculates that our canine companions likely have some kind of sense of mortality: [blockquote]So the dog saw the cougar and understood that if it got to the boy he wouldn’t be around anymore. When Angel saw that Austin was still alive she was relieved. If this account is accurate, it means that the dog understands the concept of death. I can’t see how such a thing could just be a byproduct of intelligence if the animal has no experience with seeing living things die. That means that the understanding that after a living being is attacked by a predator you’re not going to see it anymore must’ve come before domestication.[/blockquote]
I, too, am convinced that dogs have a primitive understanding of death; indeed, I think this episode in British Columbia highlights an even more profound conscious awareness amongst this breed that shall not dwell alone. For it's important to remember that Angel didn't just grasp that Austin might die, but was actually willing to sacrifice herself for her master.
If a family member or a beloved friend were attacked by a cougar, few of us would hesitate to throw ourselves into the fray and put our lives in grave danger. (If you feel the need to rationalize such natural feelings of kinship, then you can turn to Richard Dawkin's "selfish gene" concept: it's your genes that must survive, not you, and thus you're willing to forfeit your measly little life so long as your family and tribe can proper. Such gut feelings have motivated many a soldier, often times consciously.)
If, however, a complete stranger were attacked by a hungry cougar ... well ... we wouldn't exactly pull a George Costanza -- "women and children last!" -- but we'd probably reason to ourselves that it'd be best not to multiply the loss of life and that we should go find someone with a gun.
If a family member or a beloved friend were attacked by a cougar, few of us would hesitate to throw ourselves into the fray and put our lives in grave danger. (If you feel the need to rationalize such natural feelings of kinship, then you can turn to Richard Dawkin's "selfish gene" concept: it's your genes that must survive, not you, and thus you're willing to forfeit your measly little life so long as your family and tribe can proper. Such gut feelings have motivated many a soldier, often times consciously.)
If, however, a complete stranger were attacked by a hungry cougar ... well ... we wouldn't exactly pull a George Costanza -- "women and children last!" -- but we'd probably reason to ourselves that it'd be best not to multiply the loss of life and that we should go find someone with a gun.
Now, since genes aren't at issue in the case of Austin and Angel, I'd conclude that Angel felt towards her master the kind of profound sense of friendship that we humans feels towards our spouses and lovers (and the animal was adopted no less!) Such affection is often reciprocated. Not a winter goes by that we don't read some sad story of an owner who perishes in Central Park after diving into a frozen pond to save his elderly pouch who happened to slip in.
And maybe there's even more to it.
There's an old joke that when you feed a dog dinner, he looks up from his bowl and thinks, "My master is god!" And when you feed a cat and change her litter box, she gazes at you and concludes, "I am god!" (Whenever I hear this, the pets are gendered as such.) This joke has always reminded me why I hate cats! And one reason why it's funny is that a dog's relationship to his master is often strikingly analogous to that which humans have to their deities.
Perhaps dogs don't just grasp their own mortality but have a sense of the divine as well? Revilo Oliver actually took up this idea in the first chapter of his rather fascinating book The Origins of Christianity:
Religion, which we may define as a belief in the existence of praeter-human and supernatural beings, is a phenomenon limited to several human species, since it depends on rudimentary powers of reason and relatively developed powers of imagination. We may agree with Xenophanes that if oxen or horses or lions conceived of gods, each species would, like men, create its gods in its own image, but there is no slightest reason for supposing that mammals other than man have any conception of superior beings other than an instinctive recognition of predatory species that can prey on them and an instinctive suspicion of whatever is unfamiliar and may therefore be dangerous.
Anatole France, to be sure, identified dogs as religious animals, and he had a basis for doing so. A dog does venerate his master as a being with powers vastly superior to his own. He worships his god in his own way, seeking to conciliate his favor with propitiatory motions and caresses, learning to obey his wishes and whims, and even having a sense of sin when he knows that he has yielded to a temptation to do something that will displease his deity. A dog tries to appease his god’s anger, as men do, by humility and fawning and he will fight for his god, even at the risk of his own life. But we must not carry France’s analogy too far. The dog’s god is a living being, who normally feeds his canine worshipper, punishes him physically on occasion, and, if worthy of devotion, pets him affectionately. No dog ever worshipped a being that he could not see, hear, smell, and touch.
I've yet to meet a dog who was a convinced monotheist.
