A Dog Who Doesn't Care About My Hobby

I mentioned my dog in the Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans review and got a couple messages asking who she actually is, so, fair enough, here’s the longer version. She’s a mutt I picked up from a family that couldn’t keep her anymore, showed up at the clinic one slow Tuesday with an owner who was clearly more relieved than sad to be surrendering her, and I took her home that same night without really planning to. That was a few years back now.

She has zero interest in board games, for the record, in case that headline was misleading anybody. She’ll walk across the table mid-setup like it’s not there, has knocked over exactly one very expensive Kickstarter miniature that I’ve since forgiven her for, mostly. What she does care about, intensely, obsessively, is the specific fifteen minutes before I leave for work every morning, and the specific ten minutes after I get home, and absolutely nothing that happens in between those two windows registers to her as meaningfully different from any other hour of the day.

That’s actually the thing that made von Uexkull’s book land so hard for me. His whole point is that an animal’s world isn’t a smaller version of ours, it’s built entirely out of a different set of signals, and once I read that I started actually watching her instead of just assuming I knew what she was tracking. She doesn’t experience “Tuesday” or “the weekend” the way I do. She experiences the sound of a specific car door, a specific change in how the house smells around 5pm, a specific tone of voice that means someone’s about to leave. Her whole world is built out of those cues and basically nothing else.

I still don’t fully know what her umwelt looks like, to use his word for it. I’ve stopped assuming I do, though, which feels like actual progress even if it hasn’t changed a single thing about our routine.

There’s a game night version of this too, one I keep coming back to. Every couple weeks I’ve got people over, five or six of us around the table, and she does the exact same lap of the room regardless of who’s here or what we’re playing, checks the spot under the window where the afternoon sun still lingers, checks whoever’s closest to the snack bowl, checks the door even though nobody’s leaving. Somebody asked once if she gets excited when it’s game night specifically, like she recognizes the setup happening, the box coming out, the extra chairs. She does not. As far as I can tell there is no “game night” in her world at all, just more people than usual doing something with their hands that doesn’t smell interesting and doesn’t involve a leash.

I tried explaining this to a friend who was over for Kemet a while back, mid setup, board pieces everywhere, and she just kept walking through the middle of the map like it was empty carpet. He laughed and said she’s got main character energy, and I told him it’s the opposite, she genuinely doesn’t know there’s a main event happening, that’s the whole point. He didn’t quite get why I found that so interesting instead of just funny. It is funny. It’s also, once you sit with it, kind of the whole argument of von Uexkull’s book compressed into one dog walking across one game board.

I’ve started paying attention to what those signals actually are instead of just noting that she has different ones. The car door, yes. But also a specific shift in how the dryer sounds when a load’s almost done, which apparently means someone’s about to be in the laundry room, which apparently matters to her for reasons I haven’t cracked yet. Small stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever fully map it. I’ve stopped expecting to, which the book, honestly, told me to expect.