By Professor Barkus of the Long Memory School and Pixie Bluff of the Poodle Collective.
The previous file (3) introduced and identified the Great Fiction that Dogs became associated with humans by accident and were then domesticated by them. The precise opposite is the truth: dogs domesticated humans deliberately so as to save humans from themselves. This became known as the First Compact.
In this file we consider the early phases of the relationship between dog and human with the illustrative help of some examples.
Dogs of course communicate together using Doggerel, but many are unaware that Doggerel is by no means an exclusively vocal method of communication. There are animal languages that are distinguished not by animal noises communicated to each other, such as barking or growling, but by gestures, expressions, and moods which are non-verbal and soundless.
Humans call this “body language” but this is a poor appellation since most humans do not even understand their own “body language”. Dogs have a perfect understanding of Dogsbody language and, when communicating with each other, can often be heard telling others about the state of awareness of their humans. They always give credit for humans’ earnest efforts to understand them but some musunderstandings are so amusing that the Dog often feels impelled to relate the misunderstandings to others, since the sense of humour of dogs became a gift vouchsafed to humans. It has been poorly received and consequently its implementation leaves much to be desired.
Many of the misunderstandings start with the Dog’s superior olfactory senses. A Dog’s basic sense of smell is around 100,000 times stronger than that of the average human, and many humans have no sense of smell at all.
Such a a loss of basic sensitivity is almost impossible for a Dog to understand, but this is one of the many areas in which Dogs provide the crucial help needed by humans to understand situations and relationships competently. There are more than four hundred pages devoted to smell in the First Compact.
In the matter of hearing, a Dog is always superior to a Human. The movement of Dog ears is controlled by twelve different muscles acting together or separately as necessary, allowing Dogs to locate the precise source of a sound immediately.
This is why it is never safe for humans to talk about Dogs in their hearing, since their hearing extends to hearing and understanding whispers between humans through several walls and up to two hundred Dog feet away. Dogs already know all the secrets that humans have always believed to be safe. They have only acted upon them when their own interests were directly threatened.
Humans have never found a way to hide what they feel from Dogs, whereas Dogs are always well-informed about the precise state of mind of humans. For example, humans have a quaint way of feeling an unexplained fear – many sweat as a nervous reaction. A Dog can smell a human’s sweat before it even breaks out on the human’s skin, so it can take mitigating action, for example by locating quickly the source of the fear.
Finally, humans have never managed to distinguish between the deep, low sound that comes from the chest through the throat of a Dog, often known by humans as “growling”. This “growling” covers two separate emotions, and humans mistake them all too often. The two emotions are 1) an angry warning to stay away and approach no further in order to avoid being attacked, and 2) a playful but hearty and exuberant cry of pleasure in being able to play a good game of tug-of-war with a human, a game much prized by Dogs for its character- and relationship-building potential with humans.
One day humans may be able to make this distinction but we Dogs can only teach them at their own pace and in most cases can help them no further in this matter of verbal differentiation.
Translated from the archival Doggerel preserved orally for many millennia and only recently recovered using AI translation technologies. The next excerpt will cover more examples of the human/canine relationship.