Page 31 - Buddy Life

The United Negro Colleges Fund has as its motto: “The mind is a terrible
thing to waste.” Even more terrible, I feel, is wasting the heart. The heart
needs exercise to expand, to be healthy as it were. You need to exercise
your compassion and feelings daily - and the most effective aerobic exercise
is to empathise with creatures not of your species but those that have to live
at your mercy in a world in which they have less and less of a role to play -
except to be used and eaten. Empathy develops with knowledge. I know
people who refuse to believe that one animal is different from the other in
personality, that animals feel pain, fright, regret, sorrow, anger, love, joy, rage
- even boredom. That they have moods, they talk and weep and remember
things that have been done to them. Let us start with trying to understand the
animal that lives with us: the dog. It has a specific body language and learning
it is to open your eyes to a completely new world. I went to Mussoorie once
to address a school. I was staying with a parent who had a Doberman. As I
entered the gates of his house, I saw the tied dog at a distance and told the
owner, who had come with me from Delhi, that the dog was telling him that
he had hurt his foot. The owner laughed. At that distance, he said, one could
not even see the dog properly. We arrived at the house and the owner’s wife
informed him that their dog had stepped on glass that morning and wouldn’t
let anyone near it to clean the paw. The owner recounted the story several
times, but it did not seem at all unusual to me. What would be unusual about
understanding Marathi or Telegu - if one had spent time learning it?
Let me give you a few easy lessons in the language and once you master
it, you will find your third eye - the eye of knowledge and compassion and
curiosity about their world - begin to open.
(a) Dogs also purr when they are content. Their favourite route to nirvana
is not being scratched behind the ears, which, incidentally, irritates a good
many, but in the small hollow where the neck meets the chest marked by a
raised tuft of hair. If you gently rub round the tuft you may hear a deep low
noise halfway between a snuffle in the nose and a grrrrr. That’s happiness
talking,
(b) Don’t look a dog in the eye. It is a direct macho challenge.
If it belongs to you, it will look away immediately. But if you are introduced to
someone else’s dog and, in the process of patting him, you see him staring

Jan - March, 2018 BUDDY LIFE 31