At least in Western jurisdictions, where pets are sacrosanct, dog-owners received a universal dispensation from the Covid stay-at-home orders: they were invariably allowed to go outside at least once a day, to walk their dogs. After all, there was no alternative, other than the unthinkable one of shooting the dogs.
Dogs need to go outside. This hardly needs explaining. A dog who has been housebroken will not piss or shit inside, at least not for a long time. Nor would dog-owners have accepted to clean that mess up. More importantly, it would have been horribly cruel to deprive a dog of its habitual walks. Dogs long for their daily dose of the outdoors, and will become extremely distressed if deprived of it. This can then make them unmanageable pets, angry and even dangerous.
Dogs, like all animals, are stupid.
Dogs, like all animals, are in this sense stupid. They are dumb brutes. They cannot understand extraordinary, or even ordinary, circumstances which are not immediately perceptible to their senses. If you go on a trip, a dog cannot understand that you will be coming home tomorrow: he will only know you are home once he can smell, hear and see you. Still less could any dog grasp that it needed to forego walks, so as to flatten the curve and protect hospital capacity.
Dogs are not clever like us. They do not have culture. They cannot tell themselves and each other stories, and then adjust how they live because they believe those stories. They cannot develop a morality of self-sacrifice, whereby they shall suppress their yearning for walks. Nor can they distract themselves with alcohol or streaming or zoom-calls with other dogs. Nothing will distract a dog who wants his walk from wanting his walk.
How much finer and wiser than dogs are we!
Dogs are base and stupid creatures, led by their belly and their nose. How much finer and wiser we are. We do not need to go outside. Neither, unlike our dogs, do our children. Children are pretty stupid too. But at least they can piss and shit in a toilet. They can also grasp language, and it turns out that they are astonishingly flexible in their pliancy to authority, particularly when that authority is mixed with love. A child may not be able to quite grasp the need to flatten the curve in order to protect hospital capacity. But she can grasp that she has to be good and brave and not kill grandma. She can understand that she doesn’t really need to see her friends or play or breathe fresh air. And a child can be distracted: put her in front of that screen, and she will forget all about wanting to go out, for hours and hours and hours.
We cannot be thankful enough that children are smarter than dogs. Otherwise we would have had to let them out too, and then goodbye to flattening the curve so as to protect hospital capacity.
While we’re on the subject of dogs, here are some lines I like from King Lear, with a dog in them:
KING LEAR
What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?
GLOUCESTER
Ay, sir.
KING LEAR
And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.
Just some lines I like—nothing to do with Covid, of course.
