Enforced patting

It's been a long time -- so long, in fact, that I'm not sure whether this blog actually functions anymore. We will see.

I'm starting this sucker up again to encourage me to write stuff down. With luck, the ideas that I'm going to throw around on here will be good fodder for articles eventually, probably published in obscure journals if I'm lucky. However, that should be no obstacle for a writer.

Anyway. Since I last wrote on here several years ago, I've lost one dog (my first) and gained another couple. This piece is based on my thoughts about one of these dogs, named Marlon.

Marlon, like all dogs, enjoys being patted. He's a dog of the 'gently roughing up' school -- nothing too precious. Yet one quirk of his behaviour got me thinking about an important difference between their consciousness and ours.

When I stop patting Marlon, he tries to force his head into the gap between my arm and my body. In other words, he will try and instigate a pat by force. In once sense, this is perfectly understandable: pats are pleasant, and all animals seek to maximise pleasure.

If this action were performed by one human to another, though, it would be profoundly odd. This, of course, is because an affectionate touch between humans only has meaning due to its voluntary nature. The sensation itself is not the point -- a hug, for example, is special not because of the physical sensation it engenders, but because of the feeling behind it.

In order to take pleasure from a hug, one must understand that one is being shown affection by another person. The gesture of a hug represents the recognition of another person as a 'being in itself', rather than a 'being for others'. (I am rusty on Satrean terminology -- if I've got this backwards, I'm sure my non-existent readers will correct me.)

The dog, on the other hand, does not seem to experience me as a self-contained being. True, he understands that I don't always do what he wants me to. To Marlon, I have more autonomy than a plastic toy or a slipper.

But I'm still not fully autonomous for him. The strange feeling that we get when we suddenly think about all the self-contained perspectives that exist in the world doesn't occur for a dog. Judged on Marlon's behaviour, I guess that I don't really exist for Marlon when I'm not standing directly in front of him. From a dog's perspective, humans resemble the radical sceptics' idea of objects: they only really exist when you look at them. After that, you cease to be a part of the dog's universe.

The enforced pat brings this home vividly, because the willingness of me to pat Marlon clearly doesn't enter the equation. It's a strange disjunction. From my perspective, I'm patting Marlon because I'm fond of him. Yet from his perspective, a pat from a patting machine that shared my physical characteristics would do just as well.

When I'm doing the patting, the illusion of two perspectives that recognise and respond to each other is inescapable. Yet as the enforced pat suggests, this may just be a human way of projecting more agency onto the dog than he actually possesses.