Does your dog really love you unconditionally. or is it only for the food and shelter you give it? Do dogs have feelings, or merely instincts? These are among questions asked by a psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Mason, in a new book. (He has three dogs). He believes they do love their owners, even when they have been badly treated. Animal behaviourists, he says, have been notoriously resistant to the notion of animal consciousness. Those who disagree are labelled anthropomorphist i.e. ascribing human characteristics thought, feeling, consciousness, emotion - to a non human, incapable of experiencing them.
He claims that dogs have a great capacity for forgiveness. When you step on a dog's foot by mistake, somehow it knows it was a mistake. The dog will make up with you immediately, licking your hand or otherwise making it clear that no offence was taken. Dogs which have been abused have an almost supernatural capacity to forgive. He quotes from an incident described in a French newspaper of 1842, where a man brought his dog into the middle of the Seine in a boat and threw him into the current, intending to drown it. As the dog tried to climb into the boat again, the master pushed it back, until he himself unbalanced and fell into the river. The dog held his master above water until help arrived from the bank.
Some of the argument is inconclusive, but the point that no one who has had a dog will contest no other animal mourns for a lost human friend in the way that a dog does. (As to companionship, a friend reminds of a Kerry Blue which accompanied a child walking to school a distance of about a mile, and then trotted home, sometimes even returning around noon to see the child safely back.) Much of this is taken from an article in The Daily Telegraph of May 10th about a book "Dogs Never Lie About Love" by the above mentioned Mason, published by Jonathan Cape.
Last word from him: "The capacity for love in the dog is so pronounced, so developed that it is almost like another sense, or another organ.