What an animal expresses is not necessarily their real thoughts, just like you.

If you have the funds, think you should donate to the ASPCA. I do. Yet, their new commercials leave me scratching my head, and it’s not the fleas. They suggest that the dogs can’t remember when their last meal was, or whether they’ll have a full bowl again. This puts the plight on a human scale, in order to elicit feelings of sympathy, but there’s no way for us to know what a starving dog understands or remembers. A hungry dog will seem grateful when being fed, an abused animal may show something like gratitude when a human begins to care for them. But those are human traits being projected onto the dog, not an accurate assessment of the dogs own feelings.

I know, I know. It’s pedantic. But the denial of a complex and, largely inaccessible interior canine life is one of the ways we (yes, we – if dogs are dogs, then people are people) we rationalize the abuse we inflict upon them. By thinking we understand what a dog (or any animal) thinks and feels, we essentially infantilize them due to our own human-rated scale of intelligence, which (let’s face it), a lot of us scale well-below average.

The ASPCA’s commercial sounds so awkward and oddly passive. By focusing on the bowl, you remove the fact that this is intended cruelty. Are they afraid that we’ll empathize with the abuser or feel preached to? So strange.

Act with kindness and care, helping others find their way toward safety and happiness, and require no acknowledgement in return. I think that’s the best way to interact with a life you cannot fully understand.

Image by Martin Bauschke from Pixabay