Thinking’s for the birds, only birds are smart enough not to.

I’m sitting here watching the finches fussing at the birdfeeder. They look delicious. If only I could fly! But I can’t so I sit here watching them, the way Jane and Carll watch that noisy picture in the box. The box only interests me when it barks, which it does quite often, have you noticed? Dogs should form an actors’ union. Maybe they have, I wouldn’t know, I’m more a library than a movie dog.

Thinking’s a humans-only thing, and not all humans by a long shot. By thinking I mean pondering – if A is true, and B, then C – that sort of thing. I do not mean figuring out, which is a different kettle of fish. Dogs – and birds – and fish, I’ll wager – figure out like nobody’s business, way faster than humans. How long does it take humans to quit pooping where they shouldn’t? It’s not rocket science.

Jane and Carll think, or think they do – read, write, discuss, they can’t help themselves. The more they think the less happy they get yet they keep at it. Crazy, no? Same with eating. They eat more than they need then get on the scale and howl like coyotes, you’d think the world was ending. If they thought – a big if – to optimize their contentment and/or minimize their misery, wouldn’t they either eat less or eschew the scale? Obvious, right? Similarly, if thinking lands you in a funk, why torture yourself with news? I’m mostly happy and Carll’s mostly not. Who’s smarter, eh?

Thinking leads to bad thinking. This doesn’t happen to dogs. Dogs can be puzzled, but not flummoxed. Humans can think killing one another is a good idea – or harming one another – or befouling their nest. They kill themselves – is that smart? They think up gods then convince themselves their gods are better than the other guy’s. I mean, really.

Thinking is stupid – q.e.d. – but that’s not what humans think. “Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge, but an active aversion to knowledge, issuing from pride, cowardice, or laziness of mind,” harrumphed a human named Popper, who was known for his thinking. Then there are the humans who boast of their ignorance, as if it were a big-deal achievement. “I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was,” crowed Descartes, also famous for thinking.

The hell of thinking is it’s irreversible. There’s no return to the kingdom of Dogdom, a.k.a., Eden. Thinking is humans’ only defense against thinking. They have to discover what us dogs and other critters already know: we’re nobody special, we die after we live, fed’s better than hungry, glad than angry, here and now are the whole ballgame. They wrack their brains and wring their hearts wrestling problems of their own making. They write books, for heaven’s sake.

I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t so cocky about their defect. They claim there’s this ladder from least to most, the Great Chain of Being they call it, with creepy-crawlies at the bottom, God at the top and humans leading the parade of lives that exist. And what evidence do they adduce to prove their superiority? That they think! -- or, even better, that they see God! Seeing what isn’t strikes me as uh-oh not whoopee, more hornet’s nest than cat’s pajamas, but then I’m just a dog.

What hope for humans? Not much, I fear. A shame but so what, I don’t give it a thought.