When I began this blog I had an idea that in looking after my dog I would learn some profound truths about the relationship between man and beast and in the process earn a life-changing epiphany or two about very nature of humanity.
Well that hasn't quite happened but I did learn two things this week.
The first was about the different approaches that man and dog have to the conduct of scientific enquiry and how fatal it can be to mistake our methodology for those of our four-legged pals.
My dog's chief analytical tool is what I call Freddie's Razor. It's an intellectual instrument whose lack of subtlety is made up for by its immediacy and it consists of dividing the world into things which can be sniffed and chewed on the one hand, and on the other hand things which can only be sniffed. It's a taxonomical approach whose narrow focus may be criticised, but its devastating effectiveness cannot be denied.
It is essential when collaborating on a piece of research to make sure that all parties have an agreed methodological approach. Failure in this regard can lead to things like the fiasco that was reported a few years ago when French and American scientists who were supposed to be co-operating on a joint project to Mars found their plans collapse when they discovered that the Americans had been using imperial units and the French had been using SI metric units. Did that really happen? Perhaps not, but these cultural differences can have serious implications for research.
The other day, for instance, on one of our lengthy rambles, we encountered a beetle by the side of the road. It was a large grey-pink thing with a sort of dusty green shimmer, unlike any beetle I had seen, certainly in Ireland, and although I am no entomologist I was curious to identify the thing.
When trying to identify an insect I try to find out as much about the thing as I can looking for clues that will place the insect in a taxonomic order. Ten questions (listed on insects.about.com) can be very useful in providing an approach to indentifying an insect, questions like "If it has wings, are the wings leathery, hairy, membranous, or covered in scales?" "Do the antennae appear threadlike or are they club-shaped? Do they have an elbow or bend?" "What about its goddam mandibles, already?" And so on.
I had just identified it as definitely a beetle by its hard veined forewings but could not decide about the nature of its mouthparts so I consulted with my partner, saying "Hey, Freddie! Look at this! Look at this little fella, eh? What do you think of him, doggy? Isn't that a nice old beetle?" Freddie left his inspection of a nearby gatepost and joined me to examine the beetle, taking the specimen in his jaws and chewing it with an unpleasant crunching sound before swallowing it. Naturally, although it proved to his satisfaction that the creature fell into the category "that which is chewable", it rendered my own work into the identification of the beetle practically useless.
And this is the problem with anthropomorphism: that we assume our own ways are the ways of other species. It's a lamentable arrogance that sets true communication back years and I am only sorry that I had to learn this lesson the hard way.
(The other thing I learned it, by the way, is that dogs should probably not eat beetles. Freddie threw up on the carpet later that day. A direct causality between the coleopterophagy and the vomiting has yet to be conclusively established but early research suggests a direct link.)
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