The Shame of the Animal Kingdom

 It is a cruel paradox that, whilst we all seek joy, whenever we meet a person who is truly joyful, we suspect that she must be either stupid or crazy. For how could one be truly happy in this vale of tears? Wouldn’t you have to be completely ignorant about life or, worse, a little mean, to be happy about all the misery that surrounds us?

Zen monks seem to have got used to being seen as eccentrics. According to an ancient koan, when you asked the venerable Ma-Tsou ‘show me what wisdom is’, he tweaked your nose. At least he didn’t get bothered that way. Dogs aren’t so lucky. Despite the exceptional qualities they are renowned for – such as helping shepherds, or hunting, guiding blind people, smelling diseases even – they are subject to extraordinary injustices. Whether it’s Dingo, Pluto, Scooby Doo, or Santa’s Little Helper, our dogs are often unfairly referred to as cowards, clumsy, clowns, not to say imbeciles (Stupid is even the name John Fante gives to the dog in his eponymous novella, albeit lovingly).

There is no ‘dog in boots’. It is Reynard the Fox who appears in a fable that extols animal intelligence, and in the modern fairy tales of Disney cartoons it’s a mouse, Mickey. The marvellous animals in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are the mysterious Cheshire Cat and the March Hare, not the common dog; in The Jungle Book the Serpent Kaa and the panther Bagheera, but not the dog. In the Bible, the lion, the ox, and the eagle are the animals that represent the Apostles – not the dog. The French have their Gallic rooster, the Russians their bear, the Americans their bald eagle – but no country has a dog as its national symbol. Even the English, with their Churchillian bulldog and the Queen’s corgis at hand, gave preference to the lion, although no lion has ever walked the soil of Albion …

There are exceptions. Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, and Tintin’s Snowy all seem like persistent and heroic characters. But are they really? Is their unfaltering faithfulness anything more than blind obedience? We can hardly praise them for it, any more than we can praise watchdogs trained by drug dealers to defend them against the police, or White Dog in Romain Gary’s eponymous novel for attacking black people on sight. In fact, these sanctimonious stereotypes can even render dogs positively irritating. Up to a point, the imbecile may invite leniency and compassion, but anyone so desperate to please is just asking for rejection. Worse, if it turns out that dogs aren’t stupid, then we can only imagine that they must be slackers and cowards. For Jean de La Fontaine, the moral of the fable ‘The Wolf and the Dog’ is that the dog is not idiotic but contemptible. The dog has deliberately renounced his freedom, selling it for a mess of pottage. Unable to fight for its share of the kill, it has had to get used to begging for it instead.

And there is an even worse accusation: the dog is not just cowardly, it is vicious. It actually enjoys being dominated, takes pleasure in it. It genuinely likes eating repugnant stuff and sniffing filthy smells. Why else is the word ‘dog’ an insult in almost all cultures? It was once common practice to name a dog Rex or Prince. During the nineteenth century, Bismarck was a popular name for dogs in France. Before that, many dogs were called Turk. Such names were rarely given in homage, but more often to humiliate the powerful, to bring them down and put them on all fours. Donald Trump, the first president of the United States not to own a dog, knows something about this, since he calls all of his political adversaries ‘dogs’.

The fact that women are often called ‘bitches’ from the moment they manifest any kind of sexual desire comes from the same source. In the male imaginary women must enjoy being ‘dominated’ just as dogs do. ‘Bitch’, ‘woman’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘foreigner’ are all words used interchangeably to designate those beings who have been humiliated and rendered invisible by phallocratic civilisations unable to understand that the values of freedom and dignity may not belong in principle to the male sex in its erectile form.

Unfortunately, although reparations are finally under way to restore the formerly ‘dominated’ to their rightful place, it does not seem that the dog will ever be afforded the same consideration. For the dog has perhaps one additional failing. Dogs never ask for any redress. They truly love the patriarchal order. Like those unfortunate women in the 1950s who agreed with their husband that they shouldn’t be given the right to vote, or like those alienated workers who vote billionaires into government in the honest belief they will defend their interests, the dog belongs to that negative faction that seems fated always to spoil things for the wider minority. Indeed, the dog is such a complex case in our culture that sometimes it puts off even defenders committed to the cause of animal liberation.

Obviously, all animal rights supporters agree that dogs should be protected against mistreatment; the Brown Dog, a statue erected in London in the twentieth century in honour of a canine victim of unnecessary medical experiments, bears historical witness to this cause. But when it comes to knowing how to treat dogs ‘well’, divisions emerge. According to some, the abandonment of dogs should be severely punished, since evidence suggests that a lone dog is condemned to a life of misery. But others believe – and anarchists such as Élisée Reclus and Bakunin already suggested this – that dogs should be ‘liberated’ from their masters and delivered back into the wild, even if this is, in some sense, against their own will.

In his Abécédaire, Gilles Deleuze, who was a great friend of animals, clearly indicates that dogs do not deserve the same respect as the other beasts that roam his writings, from splendid wolf packs to Jakob von Uexküll’s humble tick. The dog’s bark, he says, is ‘the shame of the animal kingdom’. What better way to say that, even if (according to Deleuze) every man needs to experience a ‘becoming-animal, a becoming-woman, a becoming-minor’, the dog is too much of a minority within the animal kingdom for us to lower ourselves to its level? And yet, in this expression of a feeling of ‘shame’, how can one not sense what it is that brings us close to dogs?

Shame is a very specific emotion. We do not feel it in relation to any animal other than the dog, for shame presupposes empathy and identification. To have a dog, to love a dog, and to love it precisely for all the reasons that make us ashamed is in fact equivalent to loving the dark part of ourselves, to making peace with it – precisely to overcoming shame, and therefore overcoming the self-hatred that shame involves. And that would be true wisdom, yes – and perhaps true joy. So much so that it might be better to say, against Deleuze or right beside him, that it is only by experiencing a becoming-dog that one can truly experience becoming-human.

Mark Alizat

Dogs