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 is why we love dogs.
I can speak to the notion of a dog's fidelity that extends beyond its basic needs as an organism. I can speak to its profound love for its family that it will lay down its life to save them. I can speak of all of these things, but the dog doesn't need to. It merely needs to show its own nature, which is its devotion to our own species. I know that this sounds somewhat anthropocentric, that I would cherish an animal so much because it cherishes us, but that is the dog's essence. It is their main strategy for survival. Love man, and hope he loves you back.
I don't know whether cats truly love people, but I know that dogs do. They love other dogs, too, and some even love cats. Love is their master emotion, argued Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson in Dogs Never Lie about Love. Like man, the dog has had to love and trust others to survive, first as wolves living wild upon the land and, again, as a domestic animal. A wolf is not the strongest animal in nature, and during the era of the mega-fauna, it was certainly not. However, the wolf was able to spread throughout world because it based its survival upon the survival of its family. It is the same thing that has made our species so successful. This our kinship with the dog that we can
I am for the dog. I know he is for me. I will cherish the dog, and he will love me back one thousand fold. Together, we will live as a team. One is half ape/half child; the other is half wolf/half naughty puppy. The dog is my partner. He is not my pet. He is not my subservient groveling before me. I am not his liege. I am his beloved. And together, we shall be.