Dog Training, Human Agency and Original Sin

The fight against something eternal

I have recently come into the role of caretaker of two old dogs, for business reasons of noneofya. They are couch dogs and pet dogs, and have never had much discipline. Seeing as they are old dogs, I have had very low expectations in terms of what it would be possible to achieve in terms of dog training. I like to think we all came to the table as dog realists. They are very doting and human-focused, but it is especially difficult because they are two. Dogs are exponentially increasing work the more you have, because when you have one dog, it more or less thinks its a human. If you have two dogs they constantly remind each other that they are dogs. There is more animal in both of them, that there would be if they were alone. That’s just what it is.

The younger female is very easy. The older male is a barker. He likes to run up to the window or out in the yard and bark at things. My limited hope for dog training has been limiting that, and just making them respond to calls, coming to me on command. They hear “here boy” more as a suggestion than an instruction. I didn’t even set out thinking I could get him to cut out the barking, just to limit it. It is going beyond my wildest expectations.

All I’ve really done is yell at him when he does it, and then reward him when he stops. I think I saw the exact moment where his dog brain internalized it. He got up and ran to the front window, because there was a car or something outside, and started barking, and I just yelled louder than him and got his attention. then I called him and he slowly walked over to me, and I overly praised him and gave him half a dog treat thingy. I feel like I could see the dots connecting in his eyes. It helps that he likes me quite a bit.

Training that over the days of normal day to day, I’ve now reached a point where he doesn’t go on a barking spree every day. Huge progress. But the really curious thing is, when he does. I can tell he is fighting his own animal nature. When I yell at him, I can see his ears twitch. I can see his synapses firing. He doesn’t like that I yell at him. He wants to make me happy, but he also, deeply, wants to bark at the perimeter of our territory, and he has two positively charged desires at the same time competing for dominance.

When I was still living with my parents, I had a dog. English Springer Spaniel. Hunting dogs bred for fetching. The instinct to run-grab-deliver was so profoundly ingrained in her that she literally could not stop herself, if you threw a ball. You could have literally killed her by just repeatedly throwing a ball over and over until her heart exploded. Instinct is extremely powerful in dogs, and our breeding them has really done a number on them. She’d be completely out of breath, barely able to walk, and if you threw the ball again, she could not stop herself from instantly going into a full sprint.

Animals can’t overcome their animal nature on their own. It requires higher consciousness. Responsible dog ownership is in large part providing higher consciousness for them, because they are incapable of it. This is why it’s harder to have two dogs.

Look at it from his perspective. His whole life, the rules have been that its fine to protect the perimeter by patrolling it and barking. That’s what he’s been doing for 9ish years. And before that, he did it for 10.000 years in his genetics. Now all of a sudden, its not allowed any more. That’s a hard habit to break. And habits are all dogs have.

I think he is a very, very good dog, because he is fighting his own animal nature for me. That is very brave and very loving, and very trusting, which is very noble.

Human beings are different, but we share the same having an animal nature. This is a way of understanding the christian doctrine of fallenness and original sin.

Like the dogs we also have 10.000 years of bad habits. We have a human nature we default towards, without higher consciousness. We are born into it, and raised out of it, in best case scenarios. But we are born into it. A baby is full of human nature. Unlike the dog we have the capability to fight our instincts. We can look at the ball in flight and decide “No”. But when we see it moving in that tasty, delicious way, arching across the sky, we do feel the instinct. That is all original sin is. Animal nature.

More and more we live in a world today that is designed specifically to entertain our animal natures. To attract and appease our animal appetites. The reason phones and the internet is so dangerous, is because it is clickbait. It is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, because that is, quite simply, how you optimize content for clicks - spreading the widest net that catches the most attentions. But the trouble is, that the lowest common denominator is our animal nature. Our fallenness. The things that attract our clicks and eyes and attention are always at some level porn. It has gone out of fashion to call it that, but for a good long while, people were accidentally honest about that - now we are so far into the machine, that people have become self aware a little bit, and embarrassed about it at some level, and we no longer ironically call it “food porn”, when you look at pictures of meals, etc.

Agency and self movement is not the ability to say yes to life. You do not exist in a vacuum, outside of life and history and time, where you have to “opt in” to existence. You are always already in time and space, in dasein, and you are never in laboratory conditions, where you are unmoved spirit, choosing or not choosing to move. You always find yourself in the middle of life, in medias res. And the first act of agency and self-moving, is, paradoxically, to chose not to act.

The internet and “content” is a product that stimulates and provokes reaction. It is playing with your animal nature, simply for the please of movement, of reacting. When you come home after work and sit on the couch and scroll the timeline, that is not something you do to “relax” - it is a way of achieving stimulation without acting. You don’t feel rejuvenated after scrolling for 2 hours, you feel even more tired. That is because it is just throwing a ball to make yourself go fetch, for two hours.

Agency is the ability to say no to your animal nature. It is rational and rationally optimizing to be an alcoholic or drug addict, if you can afford it. It is rational to masturbate when you see a picture of a naked woman. It is human nature. Go fetch. Until you die.

Unlike a dog, you can stop before you die. In alcoholics terminology, people call that “rock bottom”. Its when you realize, at a fundamental level, that you are going to die if you keep going.

The ability to say no is the entirety of human agency. Agency is not choosing between A and B in a vacuum. There is no such thing as a vacuum. Its a vacuum. It’s empty. Just thinking about it for 2 seconds. It’s empty. It literally doesn’t exist.

Agency is choosing between yes and no. 1 and 0. Not 1 and 1a. Not two equal options, but between yes and no, + and -, to a single option. And you don’t even know how to “say yes to life”, if you can’t first say no to nature.