All of us who share our life with a dog are aware of their special and fine way of feeling: those outbursts of joy when we enter the door of the house are nothing more than a demonstration of unconditional love, something that can only be expressed by a being alive with a sensitivity to the surface of the skin, a sensitivity in its purest form.
The dog has been sharing our lives for thousands of years, a long time during which it has had to adapt to our environments, our ways of being, our greater or lesser sensitivity, our varied tolerance and our more than dubious intelligence.
Let’s think for a moment about ourselves, about our lives. When we are young, our demonstrations of love, affection, and sensitivity are explosive: we want to scream, sing, cry, kiss, jump … And we do it! The purity of our sensations propels us to carry out actions that time and boring maturity cut us off in the bud.
Why do we stop expressing our feelings? Perhaps we are afraid or ashamed to be branded as “nerdy”, as soft, as weak, as “sentimental”.
The human being begins to hide his sensitivity at the same moment in which he rejects the expressions of affection of his peers in the eyes of other peers. The kisses and hugs that a mother gives her beloved son in front of the gang’s friends could be a good example. How are you going to let your mother blow you up with kisses in front of your friends? How can you allow those love attacks in full view of the boy or girl who makes you feel a knot in your stomach? They will think you are a “softie”! That you live under your mother’s skirts! Don’t we get a little stupid growing up?
And let’s go back to our good animal again. The great experts in the knowledge of behavior use a “nice word” with an interesting content: neoteny .
Neoteny is the maintenance of emotional youth of the dog during its life
Well, neither more nor less than the maintenance of the youthful characteristics of the dog throughout its life. That is, domestic dogs are something like wolves that never mature, always young and uninhibited beings, with sensitivity to the surface.
Perhaps with the concept of neotinia we will understand a little better that special sensitivity of man’s best friend who is always willing to demonstrate.
When we decide to incorporate a dog into our lives, we are making an act of faith, an act of love and a blind date: we do not know what we are going to find, what fate will bring us in our new relationship but … We have faith! We are convinced that everything will go well, that our total love for this idealized figure will lead the relationship to a successful conclusion.
At the moment of making the decision to share life, our life with an animal, we are dusting off our sensitivity, something that in most cases is covered with a thick layer of disappointments, disappointments, problems … How heavy the passing of the years and the inevitable acquisition of the “adult status” integrated into society!
