This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

As Ben Sixsmith’s dog, I’m often bemused by the behaviour of my human pal. Look at me. I relocated from an animal shelter, where I had spent a year sitting in a cage, surrounded by noise and filth. Before that, I had been homeless — wandering the streets of Upper Silesia — and I don’t even want to think about what happened before that.

Despite all this, I’m a happier animal than Ben. Years of pain and loneliness are not going to faze me. Walks make my day three times over. I love my food. I love to play around. I even like taking showers. Him, he gets cantankerous because he had an article rejected.

Our canine joie de vivre inspired Mark Rowlands’s powerful new book The Happiness of Dogs. Rowlands lives with one of my fellow German Shepherds — the latest in a long line of dogs with whom he has lived. One of them, Brenin, inspired his older book, The Philosopher and the Wolf. He’s not just a dog lover, he’s a veritable dog brother.

Rowlands believes that humans have a lot to learn from dogs. If you’re cringing at that sentence, rest assured that he is nothing like the irritating people who frame dogs as wholly innocent and childlike human-oriented animals. (God, I’d like to bite them on the leg.) He writes beautifully about his dog Shadow’s commitment to savagely pursuing iguanas near their Florida home. It is this joyous natural commitment that he thinks you anxious humans should be envying.

Reflection, some philosophers think, is what elevates humans above other animals. For Rowlands, it makes you “troubled creatures, existentially divided, riven by reflection”. There is something to this. It would not occur to me to question who and what I am committed to. Ben sometimes does little else.

Humans seem to be growing more passive and asocial, and it is about time some of you embraced spontaneous experience rather than introspection or screen-mediated annoyances. Go and chase a squirrel now and then. You’ll feel more alive.

Still, I can’t help feeling that Rowlands sometimes exaggerates our qualities whilst minimising yours. If I had a greater talent for reflection, for example, then I could grasp that chewing toys up into small chokeable pieces means that they will get removed.

Interesting though his argument was that moral behaviour can emerge from instincts rather than reflection, it was also notable that he preferred to discuss instances of dogs acting heroically rather than, say, the fierce enthusiasm with which we’ll leap upon a terrified wounded pigeon. (I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but Ben was not amused.)

Rowlands argues that the meaning of life is love — not just love for other animals, but for life itself. As an example, he references his late dog Hugo’s defiant enthusiasm for playing with his biting sleeve even as he was dying. “The more love there is in a life,” he writes, “the more meaning this life thereby entails.”

Well, maybe — but there is love and love isn’t there? I love Ben because he gives me food and scratches. It isn’t much more complicated than that. I can see that love between humans, and the love that humans have for their activities, can be a more frustrating and disquieting force, but the depth that this helps to create seems to mean a lot to you.

I’m sure Rowlands had a lot of frustrating and disquieting moments as he wrote this book, for example, but I’m also sure it meant a lot to him when it had been completed.

Besides, reflection makes you you. Rowlands admires us for our commitment to our doggishness. We admire you for your commitment to your humanness. Look at how we watch you for hours. Yes, sometimes it is because we hope that you will get up and go to the fridge. (We’ve been experimenting with telekinesis for years and believe we’re finally arriving at a breakthrough.)

But it’s also because you’re so darn fascinating. We dogs are fairly predictable; you, on the other hand, are full of surprises (at least when you aren’t on your damn phones). I’m sure it can be a pain but you might as well embrace it. You aren’t going to be dogs after all. For better or for worse, you don’t have what it takes.

Anyway, I think I’ve barked my piece. What’s the time? Are we going for a walk? How much am I being fed per word again?