Of dogs and men

Are the dogs that rescue abandoned babies from garbage dumps selfish? It’s not easy to say because we can only speculate on how they think (or “feel” in case you don’t believe animals really “think”). We can assume that “selfish genes” may play a noble part when, say, a mother throws herself in front of an oncoming car to protect her child. When a man sacrifices himself for a woman he loves, it’s also subtle selfishness, because he instinctively knows that his act will enable someone he cares about to go on.

What do the dogs get? Scanning news websites today, I can make educated guess on what motivated Mr A to do B, or Miss C to do D, but a two-year-old male dog named “Pui” got me. Why did he bring home a plastic bag with an abandoned baby girl inside, so his owners could find her on the doorstep? 

Surely, he could never have known he would become popular, or be remembered in a good way, could he? We also doubt that the act made him feel proud, with all friends in the neighbourhood barking their compliments. Have “selfish genes” played any role? The baby girl’s survival by no means affects his own, his siblings’ or his species’ survival. And certainly he couldn’t have been thinking, “I’m going to go to heaven when I die” or “I’ll have a better next life”, could he? What on earth did he do it for?

If helping the baby girl came from the need to “feel good” about himself – if that’s possible for a dog – some similar stories on the Internet don’t back the theory up. Last year, a farm dog in Ghana reportedly found a two-week-old baby under a bridge and, apparently unable to drag him to safety, curled up next to him for the night, refusing to leave his side. The two were found in the morning because the dog’s owners got worried. The baby was nuzzling into the dog’s fur.

Did that dog “feel good” by not returning to the comfort of its home and choosing instead to be out in the cold? Was that farm dog possibly thinking, “Geez, the weather sucks but helping this ugly little thing makes me feel great”? I doubt that.

In Kenya eight years ago, a stray dog found a female infant while foraging for food. The dog brought the child back to its own family, which included a few puppies. The dog was said to be quite protective of the baby when nearby residents, alerted by the child’s cries, found them.   

Darwinism favours the survival of the stronger. Animals with “hearts of gold” help the weak. And unless scientists have been utterly wrong about animals’ brains, they act with “kindness” without pondering the long-term consequences of their actions, like how an additional mouth to feed will affect the family’s wellbeing. They may ponder the consequences of leaving a little human being to face peril (or why else did they decide to help them in the first place?), which makes their whole “thinking” pattern even more mysterious.

And we can further wrack our own brains trying to figure out why the brain of a two-year-old animal tells it to do something that a two-year-old human could never duplicate. Of course, life spans have something to do with it, but doesn’t that just add to the intrigue? Moreover, aren’t ours supposed to be the most advanced brains of them all? If it takes just two years for an animal’s brain to develop a firm “moral code” without that brain having been exposed to prior teaching or religious concepts, what does that say about them and us?

Religion and ideology, some say, were invented so that we didn’t have to feel alone or worthless in the universe. We can never know if “Pui” and his fellow four-legged heroes felt “lonely”, but we can be almost certain that it was not loneliness or fear of being useless that drove them to do what they did. That much we know. 

To guess any further probably requires a thinking pattern that we are not in possession of.