Woof! (just kidding)

            Among the unsung glories of dogdom is immurement from interminable human debates. Free will, for example. Are we creatures programmed, our every living move ordained by some all-knowing maker, or have we been plopped onto earth without a user’s guide, obliged to find our own way, or somewhere in between? Are we living someone else’s story or working through our own? Am I composing this sentence or taking dictation?

            We dogs, with our superior sense (albeit inferior elocution), see this debate for what it is: a wearisome waste of breath. The question, while not without intellectual interest, bears no relation to animal experience. No animal I know of, neither ladybug nor Tyson chicken nor rumpled metaphysician in his rimless specs, imagines themselves plodding helplessly through another’s script. Where’s the game in that? Shoot me! We imagine, in the words of that inane Victorian doggerel (doggerel! – the lexical abuse we must endure!),

Rising in the morning, we’re convinced – correct me if I’m wrong – we’ve got choices. Sure, we’re constrained – who isn’t? – we can only be one in this one moment with these circumscriptions; but within that stockade we get to do what we decide. In the phrasing of Jane’s and Carll’s adorable diminutive descendants, I’m “the boss of me.” I am composing these sentences on this topic (via CAI – Canine Artificial Intelligence – transcribed by Carll). I could have been writing about – don’t get me started – or gnawing my infuriating nonetheless amusing peanut-butter-stuffed Kong. (More on that anon.) I am free to be me, dammit! Not free to dart into the surrounding woods perhaps, where I’d soon starve, freeze or be devoured by a slobbering coyote (the idea!), but to be obedient or compliant, lovey-dovey or stand-offish, epitome of my masters’ dreams or nadir of their nightmares, depending on “what I feel like.” Whence those feelings derive is not, unless you’re a behavioralist or shrink, a question we mess with. We feel the way we feel because – who knows why – and that is that.

            The confusion here, as with so many human perplexities, arises from your preternatural preoccupation with time. Dogs keep time – we know when to wake, eat, play, poop, etc. – our “caninical hours” (get it?) – but few if any of us concern ourselves with time that does not exist. Past time – where has it gone? Future time – who knows? Speculative time, past or future – what might or should have occurred or will surely – where’s the good of that! These improbable temporal realms meddle with human brains. Humans sigh – with tedious predictability – “We are where we are” – only they don’t mean it. That idiom implies its opposite: we’re not really here, only stuck temporarily, as if in an airport with our flight delayed. “We are where we are” by mishap, but we’ll soon be up and away, just you wait and see!

            We dogs really are where we are. This is not a rehearsal and you are not an understudy for some more enviable auditor. We’re here now. And we should not compare this time with others that do not exist because they’ve gone or not come or were concocted from puerile longings. Be here now! – that’s the slogan we’d impress on our colored baseball caps if we felt the need which we don’t. This present is our present and all we’ve got.

            So, in prospect we’re free; in hindsight, doomed. Free will’s free till the die is cast. All we can do about the past is lie about it (but now I’m getting into politics).