Good Boy

 

“Dogs keep evolving.  You can measure this in many ways.  Look at old movies showing Rin-Tin-Tin.  Rinty is obviously very clever in a canid sort of way.  But he’s inexpressive.  He doesn’t grin for the camera and remains generally inert in terms of his acting.  He’s defined by what he does not how he emotes.  The dog looks like a wolf and fur is dark so that you can’t really see how his face looks – his head is just a blur of black.  When he runs, Rinty doesn’t lope – he dashes very low to the ground with his legs churning under him like pistons.  It’s feral and not really photogenic.”

Harry was sitting on his porch with his dog, Frodo.  The sun was setting in the haze from forest fires burning in the nearby mountains.

“You can detect some increase in expressivity in Lassie.  But, Lassie is pretty much a one-trick pony – she whines to communicate and can’t really act: she’s always disagreeably subservient.  But the dog is gorgeous and has features that the camera can read, at least, to a lilmited extent.

Frodo was a Wheaten terrier.  The smoke in the air bothered him a little.

“Take a look at Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  In that novel, there’s a dog, Karenin, that smiles – in fact, the last section of the novel is called “Karenin’s Smile”.   As far as I know, this is the first dog in history to be described as “smiling”.  When people first read Kundera’s novel in 1984, they were puzzled: “Could dogs actually smile?”  Well, when you look at them, of course, they have learned to smile.  No one would have any question about that today.  Each year, each generation, dogs become more and more expressive, more communicative.  They become more like their masters and mistresses.  Those old working dogs in the 19th century, the mastiffs guarding farms and the pit bulls in the coal mines and the little spit-terriers running on treadmills in kitchens – they turned rotisseries – these animals were pretty much just machines with wagging tails.  They didn’t have much human about them.  But, with each passing generation, dogs become more and more conventionally “loveable” – the more breeds progress, if that’s the right word, away from their origins as working animals, the more human they become.  In the course of single human’s lifetime, you can see this quite clearly.”

The smoke particles that reddened the sun made Frodo sneeze violently.

Harry replied: “You know, Frodo, I don’t necessarily disagree with you.”

Frodo said: “You got it, boss.”