Dog Eat Dog

As I noted before, I have two young Jack Russell Terrier puppies: the girl is seven months old and the boy is just over three. I am one of those dog-lovin’ people and I can’t help but enjoy them, especially at this age.

They are two polar opposite though, the girl lives up to her identity as the bitch. She doesn’t relish being petted and really only wants any attention when she wants it (God, I love her!). The boy is a complete suck though. You can’t leave a home without him following you along.

My point here is not to talk about my dogs (which is an annoying trait of dog people – I realize that no one thinks your dogs are as exciting (or even exciting) as you think they are. What is interesting is how dog behaviour and human is not so different.

Of course Pavlov showed this long ago in his famous food/bell torture session, but it goes beyond just conditioning. Whenever the boy starts to play with anything, the bitch comes up and takes it away, even if she never liked it before he was around.. Then she’ll run around with whatever it is in her mouth, run around the boy and taunt him. But if he doesn’t show any interest in it any longer, she just drops it and moves on.

Let’s just say that I too have suffered and inflicted this behaviour at many points in my life. I always seem to want what someone else has. And while it doesn’t (often) extend to the point where I both want it for myself and want to deprive the other person of it, this idea of coveting is not foreign to my soul.

And that desire seems to fade if the other person no longer wants it. There have been many a guy in my younger years that I desired while he was with someone else (Forbidden Fruit! Forbidden Fruit!), only to watch that lust fade when they broke up. I remember craving a friend of mine’s Star Wars toy when I was ten, but when he gave it to me, I suddenly found myself leaving it in that Toybox.



And this weird existence of wanting what you don’t have and not wanting all you do is a disturbing one to me. It speaks of a general lack of content with any state of being. Is it a symptom of shallowness where I crave for desire’s sake? Is it just another version of that old joke, “I wouldn’t want to be the member of any club that would have someone like me for a member”? Or is it a more pervasive trait, something that I couldn’t stop even if I tried?

I remember seeing a TV series a number of years ago called “The Human Animal” which examined human beings and their behaviour in the same way that biologists study other animals (the story about what the size of our testicles say is one for another day) that truly fascinated me. What really got me going what not that we were so similar to them, but that we weren’t very different.