Mark Rowlands (Granta Books)
Do you spend a large chunk of your day looking at your dog, asking questions like “what do you think he is thinking right now?” Or “does she understand how much I love her?” If that sounds familiar, then a new book by philosopher Mark Rowlands may be just the thing.
The Happiness of Dogs: Why the unexamined life is most worth living is a fascinating take on what it is like to live like a dog. It touches on the unique bond between humans and their companions, tackles such big questions as the meaning of life and goes on to explore experiments into animal consciousness.
Advertisement
I learned a great deal about how dogs experience the world and why traditional tests of consciousness might be flawed. Take the classic question of whether animals recognise themselves in the mirror – something manta rays and wrasse fish seem to be able to do, while dogs struggle. Rowlands reframes this to suggest it doesn’t mean a dog is less self-aware than a wrasse, rather that it navigates the world in a different way. He suggests a dog might not inspect its reflection because “it doesn’t care about how it looks in a mirror” – something I know I would rather spend less time caring about.
That said, I found the book challenging at times. Particularly tricky were the sections that dived deep into philosophy, which make up a large part of it. While this is to be expected from a philosopher, it can be a bit much for someone unaccustomed to reading about (or even thinking about) the question of what makes life worth living.
Overall, though, I felt that Rowlands made the philosophy digestible by sprinkling in chapters on animal consciousness and plenty of tales from his own life and the canines that have been a part of it. These latter sections were the ones I found most enjoyable, especially due to Rowlands’s unusual track record. He spent years living with a wolf, which he wrote about in The Philosopher and the Wolf.
I also loved anecdotes about Rowlands’s beloved dog, Shadow, chasing iguanas along the canal near his home or getting excited about such trivial daily routines as jumping in the car to pick Rowlands’s son up from school. This is probably because I recognise my own dogs in them – whether it is my greedy Jack, who is full of joy and surprise every day when I feed him his dinner, or my precious Peanut, who trembles with fear when she leaves the house but comes alive when running along an empty beach.
As an owner of a very anxious dog, some of the sweeping statements about dogs and their joy were hard to swallow. Rowlands writes that “for a dog, happiness comes effortlessly”, and he talks about “unbridled happiness – in their love of life and their utter commitment to their actions”. Of course, this is the case for a dog with a happy life. But I couldn’t help but think this isn’t true for all dogs.
Peanut, for example, was born on the streets, abandoned when she was a few days old and spent the first two years of her life in a kennels. Six years later, she does experience joy every day, when we take her to her favourite field or she is playing with her housemate. But plenty of her time is also spent in fear, when there are loud, unexpected noises, such as a van driving past or when I rustle a plastic bag. In these moments, she seems to embody a phrase Rowlands uses to describe humans, “uneasy creatures, never quite at home in the world or even in our own skins”.
In any event, the take-home message from The Happiness of Dogs is that we humans should be more dog. Instead of reflecting on and endlessly wondering about everything, we should live more in the moment. “What we know, if we know anything, we know through thinking,” writes Rowlands. “Dogs in comparison know through living.”
Generation pup
Learn all about canine science from Rachel Casey on 12 October
Â鶹´«Ă˝ book club
Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.
Ěý
