Apparently I had no choice but to back off. I did so, but sanctimoniously. After all, I was only doing this for him.
8. Friendship and Equality
I NOW REALIZED that Darwin's feelings had to be considered. He had become my constant companion, my friend, and in its noblest form, friendship requires equality, that Holy Grail of Western civilization. The American colonies, in declaring themselves independent of England, even went so far as to contend that "all men are created equal." A civil war, a hundred years of resentment, and a less-than-civil movement later, the concept of "men" was remodeled to include all human beings. And what has this to do with Darwin?
It has to do with the peck order, or dominance hierarchy, first noted in the behavior of the chicken, and taken to supreme complexity and refinement in the human being. The peck order has its roots in the limbic system of the brain, also known as the reptilian complex. In the course of evolution, the mammals arose from the reptiles, and as the mammals evolved, the cerebrum region at the front (or top) of the reptilian brain expanded and expanded and folded back over itself, forming another layer that completely covered the section from which it arose. That layer, the cerebrum, now envelops the older reptilian brain, so inside the mammalian brain lies the reptilian complex, literally, an inner lizard.
The cerebrum gives us reason and thought and language and awareness of the self. It is Hamlet's cerebrum that contemplates Yorick. The reptilian complex gives us our appetites and lusts and sexual drives; it also gives us our competitive urges and our aggressions and fears. It is the inner lizard that drives us to participate in dominance hierarchies, rising up huge and scaly in the minds of us all, clothed in the barest bikini of rational thought and gesturing with its middle digit at political correctness.
***
What we conceive as equality is actually a special expression of the peck order—or, rather, its suppression. In social creatures like wolves, lions, hyenas, monkeys, mandrills, baboons, chimpanzees, gorillas, and on throughout the vertebrate world, groups are structured more or less according to rank, usually with some form of top dog, or alpha, to which all others defer most of the time. Beneath the alpha lurk the betas, which defer to the alpha but not to others, and so on down the ladder of dominance, finally descending to an omega creature which defers to all and which all others bully, harass, disrespect.
In human societies, those on the lower rungs of the ladder find the experience most unpleasant, and the civilizations of the West are dedicated to suppressing the more physical and brutal methods of asserting dominance. And that essentially is what Mr. Jefferson addressed in his declaration that all men are created equal, that they have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In order to achieve these ends, it is necessary to create the laws of civil and human rights so that we are all, in the ideal state, crowded as equals onto the same rung of the social ladder.
Which brings us, finally, to the topic of friendship and equality. Bearing in mind that personal interactions lead to peck orders, but that friendship implies equality, it follows that you cannot pull rank on friends. You cannot bully friends, because to do so is to put them down, to place them on a lower rung and render them inferior. If friends do not agree with your position, you must restrain the urge to force your will upon them. All humans contain the most sensitive put-down sensors, which detect the slightest challenge to one's rank and to one's self-esteem; self-esteem is fundamentally linked with how successfully one defends one's rank.
I didn't like Darwin's refusal to grant combing rights, but if I valued him as a friend, I had no choice but to acquiesce. Oblivious to their good fortune, the fleas continued to prosper and multiply on Darwin's rump.
***
There was, however, one exception to all this equality and consideration in our relationship, and that concerned the good old-fashioned practice of teasing. Now teasing is an interesting activity because, reduced to its fundamental essence, one party dominates the other, as with tickling, and for the duration of the bout the relationship is decidedly unequal. Teasing can be malicious, as with schoolyard bullies, but within any good relationship it is usually an expression of affection, even love, the aggressor respecting limits and stopping short of pain.
Consider it from the reverse point of view: whom do you not tease? You do not tease the king. You do not even think about teasing the queen. Nor the Mafia don, nor the gangbanger, nor the police officer. You do not tease those you fear, those with power greater than your own.
Nevertheless, presuming a relationship grounded in love and respect, it can reasonably be said that teasing is part of a normal, happy childhood and leaves one with fond memories, the weaker trusting the stronger to control his strength in the name of love. The father tickles the child; the husband tickles the wife; the older sibling tickles the younger; and universally, children tease the dog, the cat, the hamster, whatever is available on the lower rungs.
Over the course of my boyhood we had two dogs, an Airedale named Duchess and later, a Doberman-shepherd mix named King, and one of my enduring pleasures was now and then to inflict irritation in a lighthearted way. This was nothing less than a fledgling act of human dominance, for I was learning the trade of my species. An essential aspect of that trade is learning to square one's deeds with one's self-image and emerge as an angel. Rationalization is the great genius of the human creature. Even as a young boy I was a prodigy.
I was six or seven when Duchess arrived as a little bundle of kinky, wiry hair, and already I was quite capable of rationalizing the act of teasing. I was just having a little fun. I never wanted to hurt my puppy. The thought of causing physical pain, much less injury, horrified me. I teased in the spirit of affection. Teasing was a bonding experience; it implied an intimacy that one could not have with a strange dog, and in my unbiased opinion, Duchess enjoyed it as much as I did.
A relationship with dogs, far more than with cats, is based on subordination, not equality. It is a master/subject relationship, and there is no helping it. The dog will not have it any other way. Its mind has been calibrated to exist within the structure of a pack, and the pack functions as a team, a predatory and domestic machine. Within which rank and role cannot be separated and are continually changing in relation to age, health, social situation. The dog depends for survival on its ability to adjust to the moods and needs of its pack mates and is highly sensitive to them.
And so we peer down from our intellectual height upon that writhing, licking, yapping, quivering, grinning, cringing, salivating, yelping, urinating display of appeasement gestures known as man's best friend. It is like the wristwatch that takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin', except that the dog takes a kickin' and keeps on lickin'. And what do we see? Why, we see terms of endearment, of course. We see a creature expressing its unwavering loyalty, its unquestioning acceptance, its complete forgiveness, its unequivocal love. Whether we like it or not, we are supremely dominant in this relationship and, though most of us would never recognize or admit it if we did, dominance makes us feel very, very affectionate.
What drives the dog to such incontinence? The answer lies in the behavior of lower-ranking wolves as they address wolves of higher rank. There you see that these appeasements are not expressions of euphoric friendship, loyalty, character, and other human projections. No, these are expressions of the most desperate anxiety. This is primal supplication to the pack's good graces, for which the dog will endure any insult and accept the lowest rank.
Not to belittle the dog. Who cannot love this earnest, innocent creature? Compassion is more appropriate than ridicule in contemplating its excesses, as it is in contemplating the excesses of us all. Like any creature, the dog thinks and feels in the manner its brain is constructed to make it think and feel; in the natural overview, its behavior is no fault of its own.
The brain and mind of the dog are fashioned for politics—the pursuit of one's agenda through the exercise of power and skill in the society of one's own kind. Politics is
the inevitable upshot of group living, because to live in a group is to give up the territory one would have as a solitary creature. Another way of seeing it is to imagine the territory of each member consolidated into one large territory that must be shared. The individual territories are, in a sense, stacked up, one upon the other, and this forms a hierarchy, a dominance hierarchy, and where you sit on this structure depends on how well you ply your political strengths and skills. The dog is therefore similar in its sociopolitical orientation to that of its human master, and its behavior speaks naturally to our gregarious emotions.
The cat, however, is an interesting case because its basic nature is solitary, yet it too fits the human mind. The solitary animal is usually a territorial animal, so most encounters with other cats are militant. Confrontation produces the basic emotions of threat and violence, and these in turn inspire broad gestures, strong motions: the snarl, the long, virtuoso yowl, the lashing tail, the laid-back ears, the arched back and expanded tail. Aside from that, the cat in nature has little need to express itself, particularly in facial gestures, for it has no one to face and no one to communicate with. Consequently it lacks the equipment to display the mercurial nuances of feeling and mood that distinguish the dog. The machinery is simply not there.
This is not to say that cats cannot communicate peacefully with one another, face to face, for clearly they can. But communication is simple and broad, like ritualized grooming or sniffing of the anal glands, and usually serves to identify the individuals and help establish dominance or subordination. Such gestures of action and posture and olfaction have probably remained in place from infancy and kittenhood, the brief interlude when cats are social creatures and must interact with mother and siblings. It is a relatively crude and rudimentary suite of behaviors compared to the nuanced communication among dogs; and it is the consequence of solitary life. That is why the cat simply stares and stares at its human benefactor. The human may frown back, he may smile or grimace; he may clown and mug and act the complete fool, and the cat, without the machinery to respond, stares on, without expression.
And that is why it finds a home in the human mind: the cat relieves the solitude of the self, for the self, sealed in the bell jar of the skull, is in a state of solitary confinement. The cat is a kindred spirit to the private, ruminating side of our mind, and it slips unobtrusively in and out of our solitude as it will. The cat draws us into contemplation and introspection. By its nature, the cat respects the privacy of the mind, and in this deference, reveals how invasive is the mind of another human—"What are you thinking?!If "None of your damned business!!!" In the asocial nature of the cat we find the deep, silent pleasure of simply being in the presence of another living thing, communion.
The social nature of the dog, on the other hand, brings with it not only the behavior to communicate its fluttering emotions and sliding moods, but also the mental equipment to read the signals. The brain of the dog, like the brain of the human, is constructed to look for sophisticated visual cues in the face. In this it is fundamentally different from the cat.
To illustrate, consider what happens if you confront your dog with no facial signals, at the same time placing it in a high-stress quandary by simply staring. This is perceived as a challenge, an act of aggression. (The eye challenge also exists among humans and can provoke an aggressive reaction, particularly from strangers.) The dog scans your face, compulsively looking for cues. You continue to stare. The dog tosses its head. It yaps plaintively, imploringly. Then it drops its forequarters to the ground, and with its rear still raised, attempts to draw you into play, defusing the confrontation. Motionless, expressionless, you stare on. The dog lies down and rolls on its back in a posture of submission, beside itself with anxiety at the inexplicable aggression from a dominant pack member who refuses to communicate.
The dog, then, draws us out of the self and into the social world of action and reaction, allowing us to forget the fears and doubts and cares and sorrows of solitary confinement and throw ourselves into the rough-and-tumble competition of a hierarchical life.
A proper dog is therefore good with children. It will take their abuse with its good, subservient nature and not strike back. Which makes this affable creature a fine subject on which a young human can practice its humanity.
***
Which brings us back to the topic of friendship, equality, and teasing. A quality tease had to meet certain criteria. It could not inflict injury or pain. Irritation, yes, of course, but no pain. It had to be clever, a challenge to the "master's" ingenuity, but friendly teasing was intended only to exasperate, and any sign of real anger brought an immediate halt to the campaign.
An example of my ingenuity was to feed King or Duchess a tablespoon of peanut butter. Incredulous at its good fortune, either dog would lap the stuff from the spoon, then spend the next fifteen minutes with head cocked to one side or the other while trying to dredge the oily gob from the roof of its mouth with the back of the tongue while I howled with glee in my superior intellect.
My greatest triumph occurred when I was seven years of age and had moved with my parents to an old, rundown farm near Doylestown in eastern Pennsylvania. One day, shortly after we had moved in, I was exploring near the barn while Duchess was snuffling about for odors in the grass, holding her short, stiff tail in the air like a flagstaff. I found a short piece of rope, held it in my hand, and stared. Then my gaze traveled to Duchess's tail. And then, naturally, came the inspiration. Why not tie the rope to the tail? Why not? No further reason was needed.
I wrapped the rope around her tail several times and secured it with a simple knot. Looking at my handiwork, my miniature human mind noticed the other end of the rope. Why not tie it to Duchess's hind leg? So I did. I did because I could. Just as I finished the second knot, Duchess took a small step, which drew the rope taut and jerked her tail. This triggered a reflexive leap which nearly yanked her tail from its socket. The first leap triggered a second, which triggered a third, and Duchess disappeared over the horizon as yelps of terror came wafting back.
Why do such events strike us as funny? Why do children, particularly boys, frequently tease animals in cultures around the world? Are we practicing our dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the creatures of the land? Now it is play, but that same intellect will soon abandon all pretext and the game will be for life and death. Years later, after we have lived and suffered and endured the loss of those we loved, animal as well as human, then the thought of what we have visited on helpless creatures makes some of us cringe, for we have come to understand the helplessness in which the animal stands before us.
Despite my ingenuity, however, my favorite tease was simply an act of niggling affection, good for whiling away the idle afternoons, and it was merely to tickle the fur between the toes with a straw or a blade of grass while the dog slept. At first there would be no effect, but soon the toes would begin to twitch, then the foot would pull back in a sleeping reflex, and then, if I persisted, the foot would thrash around to rid itself of the pesky irritation. Finally the dog would raise his head and stare at me with a look of weary patience as if to say "Is everyone having fun?" Usually I would desist, feeling a vague twinge of what I later learned was shame.
***
One night I tried the toe-tickle with Darwin. He had been shedding his whiskers, and I found a handsome, snow-white specimen lying on the brown floorboards. As I picked it up, memories of my youth came up from the archives, and I could not resist the perverse urge to revisit my transgressions.
Darwin lay on his side, submerged in slumber, and I bent over and began working on his hind feet. At first there was no response. I persisted, of course. Then the left leg twitched, then it jerked, then it kicked out spasmodically. I laughed the thin, whiny laugh of the teaser and continued. Aside from kicking out, Darwin appeared to be unaffected. His eyes remained closed and he seemed to be sleeping, which meant his kicking out was purely reflexive, therefore unconscious.
/> That was not sufficient. No self-respecting teaser could let it go at that. Any tease worthy of respect had to bring forth a conscious outburst of perplexity, frustration, irritation. Only then would it have succeeded. So I proceeded to Darwin's forepaws and again applied the whisker to the fur between his toes.
As before, the forepaws began to twitch. Sensing success, I increased the tickle rate. The right forepaw pulled in to tuck itself away from the irritation. I turned to the left forepaw. It twitched a few times. I bent over to redouble my efforts. The left forepaw then shot out ... Followed by the right forepaw ... Followed by Darwin's entire body, including his mouth, which was opened very wide.
It happened so fast that it took a second for comprehension to set in. When it did, I realized that I was in a predicament. Forepaws—foreclaws—were grasping my left ankle, which was also clamped firmly in Darwin's jaws. Pinpoint fangs and knife-edged carnassials were pressing into my flesh hard enough to cause pain, but not hard enough to break the skin. Then, to my astonishment, Darwin turned his head slightly, and while keeping his hold, glared at me from the corner of his left eye, ears laid back, pupil dilated. I found myself staring into a black hole of anger which led straight to the bottom of my ancestry, and there it produced a voice.
"How do you like them apples, Pal?"
***
Now, if you inquire into the nature of intelligence as a biological trait, you soon come to the topic of survival. Like bodily organs—heart, kidney, liver, spleen, and so on—intelligence would not exist were it not vital to survival upon the face of this glorious blue-green planet. Therefore, the essence of intelligence is the ability to make the right decision for the circumstances. Smart is as smart does.
A Cat Named Darwin Page 8