by Scottie Westfall

Created on: July 15, 2008

Of the two common household pet species, dogs have something special, something innate, that cats really cannot give us. Part of this must come from our evolutionary past when we began to form relationships with wolves and other wild dogs to survive in a hostile world filled with all sorts of beasts like saber-tooth cats, cave lions, and giant bears. The dog fills my soul with feelings I cannot quite explain. These feelings of primordial joy are the reason why I can never be without a dog.

I know I am not the only person who feels this way, but to me, dogs are not cute, little child substitutes. They are partners with which I share my life. I respect their wolfishness, and they respect my humanness. I train them to make them to help them understand me. They communicate back to me their needs, and their desires. In the forest, they smell the birds and other wild animals, and I, standing from a higher vantage on my bipedal frame, spot those that run out of the thickets. This is how we all once lived. Dog-smelling. Man-sighting.

The cat is a more recent addition to man's home. It is a creature that came in from the deserts of Egypt or the cliffs of Malta (if you believe one theory) to take advantage of one of our many agricultural disasters. Rats have always known where our food is, and they know that we are fool enough to it all in granaries. The rats came ate the food and befouled what they did not eat. The cats came along and ate the rats. The cats became venerated as beasts that saved agriculture.

We needed both animals to survive, but we needed dogs at an early part of evolutionary past. When we were a clamoring, naked ape, exposed to the great predators, the ancestral wolves that became dogs joined us, because they saw something in our species. They were curious about us, I am certain. I doubt than any wolves would have seen anything quite like us as we left Africa. But there was something that drew us together.

Curiosity may have brought the wolves there. As man learned to hunt the large game species with efficiency, the wolves began to come for something else. They loved to eat our scraps, our bones, and, more disconcertingly, our waste. The wolves started to guard where we laid down our heads as their own territory. And soon the two species became inseparable.
Later, on our relationship extended to hunting, with dogs alerting us to game that we could not smell and us alerting them to game they could not see. That's how the ancient partnership began, and this

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