The relationships that humans establish are very complex. This may be why it is so difficult for us to accept and understand the dog as it is, from the “doggy” point of view and without anthropomorphizing it.
Despite the years of living together, it is still very difficult for us to know its interior, to experience it as it is and not to think, for example, that it only needs to speak or that it has deliberately broken our sock.
Our dog is descended from the wild canids and almost certainly from the wolf. As a good descendant, our precious companion keeps many of the customs of his family, behaviors that we do not understand and that we always try to explain by comparing them with ourselves. It is not that they have strange behaviors, they are like that. What happens to us is that we have not cared enough about their “cultural roots.” It is very easy for us to explain “the oddities” of dogs with a simple comparison with our human behavior. A big mistake.
Do we explain our behaviors by comparing ourselves to a platypus? Why don’t we eat iguana food? Why don’t we sleep in nests? We are neither more nor less than men and as such we have certain behaviors, customs, eating styles … The dog should not have to endure that sometimes we try to turn them into small humans with hair for our greater understanding.
Despite the hundreds of years that the dog has been among us, it has not lost its habits: it is a herd animal, it will try to be the leader, it will have moments of greater “toughness of character” … and we must know it in order to live together with him optimally.
A little prior knowledge effort will pave the way and avoid unpleasant surprises. Today we are going to know the great differences with our faithful friends in order to understand them better, decide if we want to live with such a different being and that there are no problems in the relationship.
