My dog, Winston, walks me, tugging me through the breeze on a frozen leash as the sun sets beyond the two ponds, casting warm red blotches on the water that align with my gaze as I walk. Suddenly, Winston yanks on the leash, lurching toward a rabbit that darts across his path and into the bushes along the road. My shoes skid on the loose gravel, and I drop to a knee before another powerful tug pulls me face-first toward the ground. I turn my shoulder just in time, crashing and sliding. The dog across the street is yapping, and the wind shakes the branches of the trees overhead. My palms are scraped from skidding on the gravel, and I’m likely to have a bruise on my shoulder for several days.
I am 60 years old. I muse that I am more athletic than I was in my youth, reflecting on all the days I skipped wrestling in high school gym class. Or maybe not. I have always been clumsy, tripping over my own feet while attempting to move in two directions at once, a metaphor that doesn’t escape me. But every once in a while, my body has shown an intuitive sense of self-preservation. There was a time at the batting cage when I was 17. I decided to try the fast pitch machine instead of my usual medium pitch speed, and an errant throw from the mechanical arm zinged one right at my head. My instinct was to turn my shoulder and fling myself backward, sending my bat and helmet flying, much to the amusement of my buddy.
This intuitive intelligence that is constantly alive to consciousness, a tool at the disposal of both the 17 year old and the 60 year old leads me to an understand other embodied forms of awareness, my dog, for example.
The Paradox of Human Vulnerability
I looked at my stinging palms and the smooth skin on the inside of my arms, pondering how humans might have evolved with the need for clothing beyond mere shelter. The rest of the animal kingdom doesn’t require this dual protection of home and body—only home. If human ancestors once lived in the trees, when did we shed our natural covering? What necessity led to the disrobing of our skin? The environment for the dog stems from my necessities: my economic demands, my ontological being, and my need for companionship. He sheds his skin in our shared surroundings and regrows it within that space. His body recognizes mine, and mine his. Each possesses its own peculiar rhythm and cadence, gait and speed. There is no, “What are you looking at, honey?” as Winston stares out the window, wishing I would take him for a walk. The complexity of his existence is neither revealed nor hidden. His awareness of self—being cognizant of himself—is apparent in his understanding of my behavioral quirks. By waiting a few moments to signal that he needs to go out, until I finish making specific movements he cannot recognize as typing, he showcases his self-awareness. He understands when it’s the right time to ask to go outside. If he lacked awareness of self-preservation, and thus of his own consciousness, he would merely be asking to avoid punishment. However, alongside the threat of punishment is a grasp of why the punishment transpires. It is a rule of the environment imposed upon him that he accepts. Otherwise, punishment for the same action would be relentless. These conditions of mutual dependence create a shared environment where different forms of consciousness intersect.
Winston and I are our own environment. We are not two human minds speaking a similar language of consciousness, yet we each manipulate the world to meet our objectives. Winston has more rules imposed by the environment. But we are each relational in our being to other persons, things, and objects. There are no two humans, each with their own goals and desires, but a person and a dog, each with their own pursuits. Each creature’s body containing a map of its limitations, what it can voice and utter, what movements it can make, what its necessities are, and in the case of the human, its aspirations of becoming and what it can accomplish. Winston’s body is made for play; a propensity nurtured by the adoration and forgiveness of humans, which the dog teaches them. I doubt he wants to catch the rabbit as much as he wants to chase it, like a bully who feigns a punch to make you flinch. I observe his exuberant and reckless energy, hopping, prancing, bounding, and probing this and that, sniffing out yet another spot to lift his leg. He is communicating with the other dogs. A dog learns the history of his fellow canines on the walking trail, each one having left traces of their scent in urine, feces, and fur. This is the dog’s social realm. On the trail, the dog isn’t marking its territory; it is leaving its mark, not so much a greeting but signing one’s name in a guest book. And adding a biological report of recent history, approximate age, what it has eaten, its personality traits—this smell belongs to a small anxious Pekingese, that scent belongs to a German Shepherd, 6 years old, overweight, hungry. Scent conveys a deeper form of language to the dog than it does to humans. With scent, there is no guessing, commenting, or retorting. No disagreeing, no reasoning. Knowledge is inferred directly. And the other dogs along the trail recognize me by my scent, that I belong with Winston. They don’t know what I look like, but they will identify me when they see me. They just will.
Ethics Across Species
Unlike Winston, my cats kill mice and birds for pleasure, not out of necessity, but from instinct—one that humans share and apply an ethics of hunting to. For example, hunting deer to thin out the population and reduce the risk of disease transfer among herds is necessary; otherwise, humans risk losing stewardship of our environment. The cats apply the same principle to avoid being overrun with mice. Additionally, they exemplify ethics within their own realm, adjusting to a human living environment and domestication. I took my cats in as kittens, while they were still outdoors, fleeing just out of reach of feeding hands. My house is theirs. They adhere to rules of domesticity, such as no climbing on the counter, no peeing on the chair, or scratching the molding, etc. However, if they catch a mouse, everything changes. They enter their own brutal world, growling, grinding their teeth, and flashing their claws. The frenzy of a cat reveling in cruelty used to disturb me as a child. How could a cat be so cruel? But when I consider the daily manipulations of the human mind to get what it wants while ignoring basic decency, I don’t see much difference between dogs, cats, and humans. Being in the car in front of a woman who is late for her hair appointment is hazardous, or needing the attention of a man whose girlfriend just dumped him. Ethics is relative in the real world. This capacity for situational ethics across species suggests something more profound about consciousness itself.
The Moment of Recognition
Winston is a pit bull mix. Two years old. His wasteful energy bursting hither and thither belies his youth, lunging, springing, bounding, halting. We are walking along the lake, and he stops. Not suddenly, as if something has caught his attention, but as if he were being led, softening his movements and his facial expression. He looks across the lake, not with attentiveness, but gazes, as though he were reflecting. I am silent. There is contentment, acceptance, and vulnerability in his body. The breeze plumes his fur and my hair off and on as I watch him gaze for about 15 seconds, an eternity for a dog on his daily walk. It was as if he were stamping something on his memory, like we humans do when watching a sunset. This is not anthropomorphism; it is showing that awareness is not anthropomorphic. It is not a human attribution to enjoy beauty or to be in a solipsistic awareness. It is universal. All animals appreciate beauty in their own way. We have to lure an animal with the things that attract them. This isn’t looking at what humans do first and then writing these actions large on the rest of the animal kingdom. It is looking at the similarities that bind us to our world. As he stood there gazing out at the lake, from where our approach had just spooked a swan, Winston’s eyes were not keenly darting back and forth, searching for moving objects. Instead, he reminded me of someone watching a sunset or observing themselves in a mirror. At that moment, I felt a bond, an empathy that connects all living creatures. In this moment—his moment, our moment, the world’s moment—we shared a rhythm, the arc of our lives bringing us together, our existences intertwining and producing intuitions between us, a unique language that belies our intersubjectivity.
Channels of Communication
The language between us operates through multiple channels beyond the verbal. The next day, Winston raises his head from slumber. I had farted throughout the entire walk the day before and I just peeled one off. He lays his head back down, and I unthrottle another one on the wooden chair, its vibrations and timbre resembling a helicopter. Winston lifts his head and tilts it to one side, “Are we going for a walk?” he asks. “Sorry, Winston. We’re not going for a walk,” I say. And he lays his head back down. He understands the word “walk.” He understands voice inflections. He knows I am not asking a question but making a declaration. It reminds me of traveling in China when I was younger. Entire conversations centered around one associative word I knew, while all the other words connected to it were unfamiliar. I would try to pick up the voice inflections around that keyword and attempt to convey my point or understand what was being said. Soon Winston is dreaming and barking, his mind exhibiting a thrownness, the condition and environment in which the person is born, his mind presenting a loop based on the reality of waking consciousness aware of its object orientation, and aware of the mirror of the self observing the self.
Pure Awareness
What I witnessed in Winston’s contemplation was not an anomaly but a glimpse of something fundamental. I think again of him, absent-mindedly gazing out over the lake and then dropping his head, taking a few steps to seemingly reorient himself, and then thrusting down the path again. After the fact, I engage in deduction, where the first person tries to tell himself he is the third person and therefore objective. When I was younger, I mistook the idea that since we could produce an answer to everything, we should produce an answer to everything. But common sense has taught me differently, not to dismiss with deductive reasoning the things I cannot explain. I cannot know what Winston’s body was doing, what his awareness was telling him. Just as I cannot answer how my body knows to turn its shoulder in self-preservation before any voice of reason takes place. Perhaps Winston was experiencing a sensation similar to that which I get looking at a sunset. Awareness not in words. A language not of vocal manipulation, but of direct conveyance. The magical moments between two persons are intersubjective, between all living things. It points to a direct language of consciousness where there is pure awareness, an intuition lock and step with the thrownness of our existence.
This meditation explores the phenomenology of interspecies consciousness through the lens of daily walks with my dog, Winston. Drawing on existential philosophy and embodied experience, it argues for a universal capacity for aesthetic awareness that transcends the human-animal divide.
Further Reading: The Writer’s Phenomenology: Husserl’s Toolkit for Character Development, and Animal Semiotics: Signs of Communication, and Walking Is Thinking: A Phenomenological Essay on Everyday Life.