It's a dogs life: Why are dogs so universally happy at the smallest of things? Photo: Rhonwyn Newson
Ever wonder why dogs seem to be having so much fun all the time? Philosophy can tell us something about it - and why we're a bit different, an American academic says.
In his new book, The Happiness of Dogs: Why the Unexamined Life Is Most Worth Living, Welsh author and philosopher, professor Mark Rowlands explores a dog's view of the world, and cites the likes of Camus, Dylan Thomas, Plato and Socrates.
He argues a dog's capacity for joy underlies some key differences between us - and maybe why happiness is more difficult for people, in a conversation with RNZ.
Rowlands' best-known work is his international best-seller The Philosopher and the Wolf, about a decade where he lived with Brenin, his wolf, who was unable to be left alone. His work centres around the morality of animals, including dogs. He is a long-time dog owner and has a German Shepherd called Shadow, with whom he regularly goes on walks past Miami's resident iguanas.
Rowland said he started thinking about meaning in Shadow's life, as a result of Shadow's daily self-appointed activity of chasing all of the local iguanas from his side of the canal into the water - after which they would crawl out on the other side of the canal and stay there for the rest of the day.
Philosopher professor Mark Rowlands, with his wolf Brenin. Photo: Supplied
It took him back to the ancient Greek story about the mythological figure of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned to push an enormous boulder up a hill, before it would roll down again, and he would be forced to repeat the activity again endlessly.
The story is taken as an allegory of the mundane repetition and limited power of human lives, Rowlands said: "Everything we achieve is probably going to be quite modest and quickly going to be erased by time's passage..."
Shadow's task was Sisyphean, Rowlands, decided, but the dog seemed enormously happy with it.
Each day, "I like to make sure the coast is clear, then I'll let him go and he's gone [down the path a long the canal], like a bullet from a gun, 100 metres north, 200, 300, 400 - then he disappears round the corner, and all along the way, these iguanas are peeling off into the water.
"Then he comes back ... as he approaches me he'll get faster and faster and then whizz by me and do the same south.
"I wish I knew what's going through his mind, he just seems incredibly happy, both in the chase and the results of the chase, which sees the iguanas all exiled to the far bank."
"I'm not even sure anymore that he really wants to catch them - just the kind of happiness that goes with being able to do this."
The Greek mythological figure of Sisyphus, who was bound to push his boulder uphill endlessly, as painted by the Italian master Titian. Photo: Public Domain
Shadow's happiness is striking, and fascinating, Rowlands said.
"So in some way, even though he didn't know there was a problem there to be solved - in some way, he'd solved this problem - because I'm pretty sure this is the most meaningful part of Shadow's day. It was this puzzle: how can Shadow find this activity meaningful, given that he does the same thing day in day out?
"I concluded in the end that meaning in life comes easier to a dog than it does to humans, because of certain features of their consciousness that are different from ours."
Shadow also chases other creatures like ducks, and turkey vultures, but seems to prefer chasing iguanas, Rowlands said.
Both Camus and philosopher Richard Taylor explored what the myth of Sisyphus would mean if the man was happy with his task of rolling the rock up the hill.
"I think there's something very right about that [happiness], and something very wrong," Rowlands said.
"I think both of these converge on the same conclusion ... that the meaning of life can't simply be happiness. Our lives can be happy but not meaningful. Sometimes happiness even counts against meaning in life."
Shadow the German Shepherd loves going for walks with Rowlands, along the canal behind their house in Miami. (File photo) Photo: UnSplash - James Kovin
However, Shadow's happiness is authentic in the sense that it is a very pure expression of what he is, Rowlands said.
"When Sisyphus becomes interfered with by the gods and starts loving rolling rocks up hills, this is not an expression of who he really is, it's just the God's intervention that's done this to him."
So Rowlands explores whether meaning in life amounts to a kind of authentic happiness - "where the notion of authenticity is a basic idea - it's an expression of who and what you are."
The catch, he said, is that humans have the ability to self-reflect on their own achievements and the purpose of those achievements - which dogs have only very minimal abilities to do "at best". And that brings troubled and critical thoughts.
(Dogs famously do very poorly at the mirror test - in which animals react to seeing a mark on their head when they see themselves in a mirror, giving us insight into whether they have self-awareness, though Rowlands says it's a very fallible test.)
"Your belief is not simply a belief any more, it's a troubled belief - and you become a troubled creature, in a way that dogs are not.
"Once you're able to reflect, then you sort of have two lives, there's the life that you go about living, but there's also the life that you think about, that you criticise, you scrutinise, you judge, you agonise over"
"So we humans have two lives in this sense, whereas dogs only have one - and I think probably for this reason they're able to love their one life a bit more than we're able to love our two lives, because it's all they have."
Much of humans' success as a species, would not be possible without the ability of self-reflection, but every new facet we can think about, brings new space for it to be troubling, Rowlands said.
"Reflection has been brilliant for us, it's been the source for our success, but it also comes with drawbacks ... most fundamentally that we find meaning in life much harder to achieve than other animals."
Following a serious medical event - an embolism near his spine, Shadow has been on the mend after being paralysed for the last few months, Rowlands said. So now he just trots along the canal, instead of haring off down the track.
"So, I don't know if he's ever doing to get back to chasing the iguanas. He still trots along the bank and the iguanas they peel off languidly into the water and it's as if he's thinking 'yeah, okay, I know I'm crook but I'm still having fun'."
And that flexibility in Shadow's attitude, at still finding joy despite not being able to do his favourite thing, has impressed Rowlands.
But he said Shadow's happiness probably is not a model for humans to find happiness, because we're so fundamentally different.
"Happiness is much harder for me and for humans more generally - I think we don't have a nature in the same way that dogs do. When Shadow is hunting and guarding, the happiness that results from this is just a pure expression of what he is.
"But I think humans are not anything in any straight-forward sense - we're split down the middle - and so there is no simple nature from which happiness can just erupt in us, in the way it does in a dog such as Shadow.
"So for that reason happiness is not a pure expression of who we are - there's always some kind of impurity in it, and as a result we find genuine happiness much more difficult to achieve than dogs."
