Crying Wolf

A tracing of a cave painting showing a wolf-like canid from wikipedia. Bee added by me.

Since Barbie has taken up the hobby of standing over the gap in the foundation of our demolished garage in which a colony of bees is living, she’s caught 10-15 and spat them out. 
She am become death, the destroyer of their worlds.

I’ve just watched one bee gently trying to negotiate the conservatory door to get to the chive flowers next to it.

The storyteller in me wants to say the bee was considering her options as she bumbled around the threshold, “That horrible black shadow lives in there, I fear for my safety, she has taken many of my sisters, I best not go inside.”

But… it was just that the bin, propping the door open, was in the way of the flowers and she needed to approach from a different angle.

There is an argument for the evolutionary function of narrative storytelling within human society. To be able to hold an idea and build a narrative around it allows us to share information that is advantageous and makes cooperation within a group much easier. 
Remembering where all the Good Resources are when you can’t write down directions? Build a narrative of the landscape and share it.

To be able to ascribe intent to others we live with means we can at least try a little to relate or understand what they are thinking or feeling from their actions by comparing them to our own lived experiences.
“Oh, his sister got eaten by that giant cave bear that got my nan, no wonder he’s in a mood, I get it.”

We build gods and monsters with our minds using narrative. What we don't understand we can build a story about. It helped us to feel safer in a largely chaotic environment and to keep us safe through building a social structure. Landslide? Trolls.
Don’t want your child to die from landslides? Don’t let them stray too far from the settlement - tell them trolls will get them if they do.
“If we all get together to have a party we can sacrifice that big cow and leave some out for the trolls so they don’t send any landslides at us.”
Community cohesion.

Our minds can transcend our current time and condition, they allow us to imagine the past, the future, the present but in a different locale. They give us the tools to plan, modes of insight, ways to develop as a group. Our minds and the stories they produce are why we are where we are today.

Our minds also mean we ascribe intent where it is not present.
We build stories around the inanimate, “The printer hates me."
We construct goals for non humans, “That bee is frightened to go into the conservatory because of my bee killing dog.”
We build back stories and schemes for other humans, “That person has parked over the lines with the express intention of ruining my day.”

THIS skill.
Gets in the way of objective observation.

THIS skill. 
Is why we struggle to understand our dogs.

Dogs are not storytellers, they do not exist in our world of complex world building, world dominating narrative. 
They exist in the world that we have built around them, they interact with the strange environments of our homes, they walk the artificial lines of our towns and cities, they are expected to comply to the social norms that we have constructed in order that we (largely) don’t off each other at every turn.

They have lived with us since we began to tell stories, but have never developed the capacity to match us in that regard. They are just happy to be on the team, sharing our homes and resources and furthering their species by the fortunate accident of being, like us, social living animals.
If dogs did not fundamentally get along with humans, they wouldn’t live in our houses, they wouldn’t help us to do tasks, they wouldn’t cope with their status as “man’s best friend.” To evolve as closely in tandem with humans as dogs have, they had to not die by our hands, every generation since whenever it was that the first shared wolf ancestors realised it made sense to eat from our middens.
Their story, their actual story, is one of being nice enough and helpful enough for our hunter gatherer ancestors not to kill them all. So they were able to stick around long enough to see us farm and then forge bronze and iron and build cathedrals, steam engines and nuke things.

The story we tell ourselves of dogs is one that fits our own narrative, one of domination and exploitation. It is the human condition to see them as other, to build them into creatures who act with moral intent in order that we can smash them down and control them. To leverage othering in order to control is to be human. It’s those storytelling, time travelling, intention applying brains doing what they have always done.
We have to create monsters in order to cohere against a common enemy, we share the adversity of life with a “house wolf” in order to excuse abuse towards them in the name of “training.”

In the year of our lawd 2025, with access to all of the planet’s knowledge at our fingertips, we can see from multitudes of scientific, behavioural studies of dogs that they are not, in fact, attempting to overthrow their opposable thumbed overlords. 
Though, simply scanning their shared history with us should be enough information to glean this. They’ve had more than enough time to bring us to our knees, being as it is they have shared their lives beside us for maybe thirty thousand years. Some of those years they were more than capable of ending us, what with those big teeth they have.

By building complex narratives of intent around our dogs, we lose objectivity. It’s a quicker and easier route to simply label behaviour as dominant, attention seeking, aggressive, trying to rule the roost. When actually these behaviours often are a result of a lack of communication between dog and guardian, misunderstanding dogs being dogs and calling it belligerence.

The only way to safely cohabit in contemporary society with pet dogs is to make an effort to understand them in their dog-ness. It is a difficult thing to do, it takes time and effort and we have to throw away our prior, broad brush, easy answer misconceptions about dogs.

To paint them as creatures seeking to overthrow their human keepers can only put us into a position of conflict, and we know from experience, observation and scientific study that dogs can only handle conflict up until a point, at which they resist. And resistance from a dog looks a hell of a lot like a dog attempting to overthrow their human keeper through violence.

So the cycle continues.

We have to stop telling tales.

We have to stop Crying Wolf and start to take the time to understand what our dogs want and need from us. We will never be able to hit every goal, but by taking a step back and considering them as they are, rather than as we think they are, we will make strides to help them live as they always have done. 
Right there with us, just happy to be part of the team.