What Having a Dog Can Teach You about Life
Here is wisdom: Have a kid? Get a dog. Want a kid? Get a dog. Don’t want a dog? Get a cat, which is like training wheels for dog ownership.
Have a cat already? It’s probably time to get a dog. Don’t like dogs? You’re wrong. Those of you already encumbered with a very small human in your home — and I don’t mean Robert Reich — might be asking, “Why?”
After all, the humanoid is already making demands on my tolerance for poop disposal and unremunerated feedings. Why would I saddle myself with more and similar obligations — particularly when the four-legged dependent will make demands on me forever and will never carry on the family name or provide me with any kind of tax benefit, or expand the borders of my empire into the barbarian lands of the Gauls?
I can make the practical case. Dogs make good guards, particularly of young children (though this varies by breed; Dachshunds, for instance, are tubular snapping turtles). They are fun to look at and can be entertaining companions. Children raised in households with dogs are less likely to get various immune system–related ailments, such as eczema or asthma.
And I suppose if you were starving to death you could consider a canine an emergency reserve supply of protein.
But such arguments fall under the category of rank utilitarianism or instrumentalism. And I want to make a broader case for the beasts, so let me start with first things.
I am a father. I have one child, and let’s clear the air right up front: She is better than your child. Maybe not on some test or in a meaningless contest of athletic skill. Certainly if cleanliness is next to godliness, she’s a midlist offering, at best. She is better because, as Marines say of their rifles, “This one is mine.” She is my greatest concession to relativism. My kid is more important than your kid because . . . well, just because.
It is an assertion I make in defiance of mere reason and with support of unprovable dogma that runs underneath my feet like veins of granite stretching to the earth’s core. I don’t begrudge you for disagreeing. In fact, I would think less of you if you didn’t.
If you told me that you like my kid more than you like your own kid, my first response would be to file for a restraining order.
I bring this up because there is an old notion that keeps reemerging in public life, each time pretending to be something new: the collective ownership of kids. Plato introduced the idea in the Republic.
Robespierre wanted to create special reform schools — back when the word “reform” had real teeth to it — that would indoctrinate kids into the family of the state.
Hitler famously proclaimed, “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already. . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’”
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Source: What Having a Dog Can Teach You about Life | National Review Online
