Swimming with Dogs

The Moral Psychology of Interspecies Rivalry

I have been surrounded by domestic animals most of my life — not only dogs and cats, but also horses, cattle, and chickens, iter alia — and my interactions with other species have proved to be philosophically important to me. For example, a few years ago I wrote about an experience that I shared with a sea lion, in The Eye of the Other, and I’ve written several posts about horses, including Thoughts from Horseback, The Cognitive Value of Horseback Riding, and Riding a Horse.

Recently I was thinking about how human beings are so attracted to fame and celebrity. I wrote a Tweet about us being attracted to these things like moths to a candle flame, and I couldn’t think of any example of this in the animal kingdom apart from ourselves. It is interesting, then, that such a pervasive feature of human experience seems to be absent even among other mammals.

There is a pensée from Pascal that addresses this:

Glory. Animals do not esteem each other. A horse does not esteem its companion. That is not to say they will not race against each other, but it is of no consequence, for in the stable the heavier and less prepossessing horse does not give up its oats to the other, as humans want others to do to them. Their own virtue is sufficient.

(№ 401 in the Brunschwig edition and № 564 in the Lafuma edition)

Thinking about this reminded me of a particular incident. More than ten years ago I visited friends of friends who have a cabin on a river near Zigzag on Mount Hood, so the river is snowmelt from Mount Hood and very cold. I brought a wetsuit so that I could go swimming. The folks with the cabin had several dogs — large black Labradors, as I recall — so I ended up playing in the river with the dogs, which was great fun.

While playing with the dogs in the river, someone threw a stick in the river for the dogs to fetch. I started swimming toward the stick also. One of the dogs looked at me, I looked at the dog, and we both instantly knew that we were in the race to get to the stick first. It was an authentic rivalry. The dogs didn’t care that I was a human being in rivalry with them to fetch the stick, I was just another rival. For the moment, we were peers; I felt like I was one of them.

Of course, his happens in the wild all the time. Predators of many different species compete for the same prey, and scavengers of many species compete for the remains of predation. What distinguished the above incident for me was my personal experience and the feeling of being in immediate rivalry with a dog.

When you ride a horse, the last thing you want is to experience a feeling of rivalry, as your horse may seek to brush you off on a low tree branch. But rivalry with dogs is enjoyable and understandable. We can play with dogs almost as effortlessly as we can play with other human beings, and perhaps it is easier to play with dogs than with other human beings, but horseplay is something you do not want to be involved in as a human being (if you have ever seen horses at play you will immediately know what I mean).

There is much that we can learn from our experiences with other species, both from what we share with them and from what we do not seem to share with them. That we share so much with dogs, and yet dogs are utterly indifferent to status (at least, indifferent to human status), is interesting. We are reminded of this every time we see a happy dog with a homeless person. Our moral lives overlap and intersect, but they do no coincide.