By: Jim Taylor

Attributes worth avoiding


Last week I suggested that the bond between humans and dogs might serve as an example for the bond that God wants with humans.

        “Not that dogs are perfect,” I ended.

        Even in their imperfections, though, dogs can remind us of some human qualities we might benefit from avoiding.

        Jesus condensed a multitude of biblical instructions to two—to love God “with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and strength,” and “to love your neighbour as yourself.”

        Dogs, as I suggested last week, offer a model for the first of those commands. They don’t do as well on the second.

        For example, most dogs would rather poop on a neighbour’s lawn than on their own.

        But don’t we do the same? Some of our garbage goes out in trucks, to a distant landfill site; some goes down sewer pipes. Either way, we too prefer to soil someone else’s territory.



Unpleasant habits

 Phoebe will roll in anything that is dead, decaying, or disgusting. Whenever I see her lying on her back, legs in the air, wriggling ecstatically, I know I will find something malodorous underneath her.

        Just like her, some humans wallow in things I find offensive. Like pornography, for example. Judging by the spam e-mails that flood my inbox, there must be lots of people who welcome this stuff, or the spammers wouldn’t bother sending it.

        If Phoebe doesn’t roll in it, she eats it. The other night, she woke us with the sounds of vomiting. She threw up an entire peach. Including the pit.

        I’m told that all members of the Labrador Retriever family act like eating machines.

        Obesity is now a major health risk in North America. The main road in almost any town today is a promenade of fast-food joints. We know that a diet of greasy hamburgers, french fries, and sugary cola is not good for us. But we keep A&W, Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s and their ilk in business anyway.

        Travel writer Paul Theroux wrote a devastating critique of the Chinese addiction to eating rare and endangered species. The rarer it is, the greater the delicacy. When the last living example of some rare species slithers down a Chinese throat, Theroux suggested, the diner will look surprised and say, “But it tasted so good!”

        Phoebe greets all humans with joy. She defers to those she considers her superiors. But she shows no compassion at all towards lesser creatures like field mice and chipmunks.

        She’s as prejudiced as some of us.



Applying the Golden Rule

  Perhaps we can’t expect dogs to practice the Golden Rule, “to treat others as you would want them to treat you.” But dogs might encourage us to take seriously the alternate version found in a least six other world religions. Confucius, in his Analects, put it, “Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.”

        When we find dog behavior objectionable, we might examine ourselves, to see if we’re doing anything similar.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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