Petitorial

My Dog Teaches … Emotion

Hunny by David McKague Halloween is almost upon us. Soon we will see ghosts and goblins, ghouls and witches, ogres and spiders. People will be flocking to the movies to see Saw 12, (or whatever number we are at now) Elm Street 17, and other films that are intended to scare us. While I am not personally attracted to the genre, clearly it seams that many people actually like to be scared.

While fear can be very genuine and legitimate in times of real peril, such as if we were to be attacked and bitten by a pack of dogs, most of the time any fear or nervousness we may be experiencing has nothing to do with the actual circumstances we find ourselves in. It is usually simply fear of the unknown. There is no reason for us to think that the dog approaching us with his owner is even remotely interested in turning us into a victim. The much, much higher probability is that the dog is looking at us as a potential friend. Yet just by the simple fact that some of us have little interaction with dogs in general and that we don’t happen to know this particular dog in particular, we may feel a bit nervous.

Consider also that some people apparently just don’t want to know the truth about some things. No matter how much evidence you put before them or how persuasive your argument, there are those who, for example, just will not believe that dogs overwhelmingly want to be friends with the people they meet.

This got me curious. What is the relationship between our emotions and our thinking? As Spock, and later, Data, pointed out many times on Star Trek, there is not any doubt that our emotions do influence our ability to think clearly and logically. But the question is, how much?

In my lifetime, I have not met a single person who was seriously hurt in a dog attack. Clearly, it does happen, but it has to be a very rare occurrence. Yet I have met plenty of people who are fearful of dogs.

And these seem to break down into two categories. There are those who know their fear is not rational and who would rather be rid of it if they could. At least they are aware that their emotions are interfering with their thinking and they generally aren’t interested in changing the viewpoints of others who happen to like dogs. I can understand their plight and sympathize with them. When I meet such a person, my impulse is to help them overcome what they know to be an emotion that they would rather not have.

But the other type of person may simply strike out at the object of his fear with no awareness that his thinking is, as Spock would say, “illogical”. This is the person who does not want dogs in his neighborhood “because they bite children”. (Never mind that most children love to interact with dogs and that they are often childhood friends.) It seems that this type of person would rather hold on to his emotion of fear than to seek out any true information that might dispel it.

When we do become familiar with something, even something potentially dangerous, our fear gets replaced with a healthy respect. We just have to look back at our first efforts to drive a car to know this. When we understand something, we gain some ability to exert control over it and we no longer have that fear of the unknown.

While I have been writing about fear as one example, it also applies to other emotions. How about the person who is angry? I think we can all recall how a person in a fit of rage was not at all interested with the true facts. And Lord help us if we dare to try to prove his opinion wrong!

All of us, including our dogs, experience emotions. That is part of living; life would not be life without it. But we can at least be aware that trying to work out a solution when we are embroiled in negative emotion such as fear and anger may not lead to the best result. (The Ontario ban on pit bulls is a classic example where our legislators allowed these emotions to influence the drafting of the “highly illogical” law that we now have.)

We can still go to scary movies for the thrill of it if we want. But solutions to our problems are best reached when we can raise our emotional state to actually become interested and curious enough in something to truly investigate.

Previous "Petitorial" articles by David McKague:

Editor’s note: I would like to encourage dog lovers everywhere to start a PETITION to have this law thrown out or revised to such a form where justice prevails. SFR.