My dog’s a dog and I’m a monkey

Dogs and humans have a lot in common. 

In the most basic sense, we’re both mammals. Both our species are vertebrates, have hair/fur, and give birth to live young that are then raised on milk. 

Both humans and dogs are social species who feel a wide range of emotions that are expressed predominantly in body language as well as vocalisations. After millenia together we’ve developed a shared understanding of one another’s language.

All of which is pretty remarkable, when you remember that dogs are canids and humans are primates. 

I was recently reminded of this fact as I was reading Patricia McConnell’s ‘The Other End of the Leash’. It was so obvious once I read it, but I’ll be honest in saying that I had never paused to consider it before. 

Anaïs Nin says, ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’

We see our dogs through a distinctly human lens, interpreting their behaviours, motivations and emotions as ours. We see a wide mouth as a smile indicating happiness, when it could just as easily be a mouth drawn back in anguish, or actually just a hot dog panting.

There are also so many of our own behaviours that we see as human, when they are distinctly primitive.[1] Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans are all very tactile animals, using hands, cuddles and kisses to express affection and relate to one another. 

Despite domestication, dogs still do weird stuff because of evolution (I can’t imagine rolling in poop was any more acceptable around the campfire than it is now), and so do we, maintaining behaviours passed on to us from our primate ancestors. 

Our tendency to touch, whilst now firmly embedded in human culture, has its roots in a long evolutionary lineage that started when we were apes. We’re monkeys who like to kiss and hug, only now we’re much less hairy and wear shoes.

The book explains how this fundamental difference impacts the relationship between human and dog, and how many of the breakdowns in communication between our species occur because of this major difference.

For example, McConnell writes how humans love to pat dogs, familiar or unfamiliar, right on the tops of their heads. But canids aren’t fans of big monkey mitts patting them on the head, where all of their most sensitive and important organs are kept. We do rude, primate things like that to dogs all the time. It’s why those dogs that have had enough end up feeling forced to communicate in a way that you can understand, which unfortunately tends to be growls, barks, or teef. 

Human beings communicate by being tactile and talky, but that’s only one way to share information. A dog’s natural inclination is to get information from scent and body language, yet they do so well to learn as many of our words as they can, and remember which of our weird touches to tolerate, which to avoid, and which resonate with their canine preferences.

I try hard to see Mango as she is. To put my primate perspective aside long enough to understand that she sees the world through her nose, delights in stenches I can’t stand, and displays her wide range of (big) emotions through her posture and expressions. 

After millenia of our species walking side by side, dogs have come to understand us to a far greater extent than we understand them. 

How embarrassing that after all this time we still understand so little about canines. 

We’ve made real monkeys of ourselves.

[1] There is an etymological relationship between primitive and primate. Both from the root word primus, meaning first.