September 20th, 2019.

Dogs gave us a gift. It was not their intention that humans would become seven billion destroyers of the biosphere. It wasn’t their intention that we would become anything at all. But the alliance dogs made with humans made everything else possible. I can type on a computer today and post pictures of dogs on the internet all because dogs gave humans a competitive advantage. Before we allied ourselves with dogs, we were scattered primatives scraping out an existence, happy to dig some termites out of a rotten log. After wolves discovered our trash heaps, and wolves with a higher tolerance to the presence of humans evolved into dogs, everything started happening for humans. You could say it is just a correlation that the domestication of dogs coincides with all of the acheivements of human recorded history, and human expansion around the globe might have happened without dogs. There is ample evidence that the human-dog alliance for the past 15,000-30,000 years was a central cause of our cultural evolution. Certainly I believe it.

If dogs contributed to or enabled our success, it does not mean that they are responsible for humans destroying the biosphere. However, their history will come to an end, through no fault of their own, when humans torch the planet. Obviously, humans ought to stop destroying the planet for many reasons. One more reason is that we shouldn’t do that to dogs. The human canine coevolution is unique on the planet, two species choosing to be together and being wildly successful, more than either would be alone. We shouldn’t destroy that unique relationship by destroying the planet. We certainly have the knowledge and the ability to stop killing the earth, if we just find the will. We shouldn’t waste the gift we have been given. It shouldn’t be the dog’s legacy that dogs invented humans and humans blew up the world.