Dear dogs, we would like to recruit you for million dog bark. The goal is for the message to spread through the world and all dogs to bark in unison as loud as possible at 12:00 PM (-7 GMT) on July 31, 2010. The Million Dog Bark. Can we do it? Can the messages spread?
Here is the thing most humans don’t realize: there are messages spread from dog to dog through anal sniffing. Hmm how to explain properly… well, look: I will explain to humans how this works. All dogs as you know meet and greet through anal sniffing. The primary purpose of this experience is to ‘know where you’ve been’. Think about it for a moment: dogs eat EVERYthing. So a dog on a rampage eats whatever he can find, no matter how it ravages his stomach, and then that’s his experience in life. Eating is proof of adventure, of living.
So when the time comes to meet a new dog, the anal sniff is the trophy wall, it is the photo album, it is the vacation pictures. It is pride and one-upsmanship, but more important is that it’s simply high-bandwidth sharing. I refer to it as ‘high-bandwidth’ because the amount of data that can be transferred from dog to dog in this process is mind boggling.
Allow me to blow your mind. Every single ‘adventure’ that a dog has ever been on in his entire life is catalogued and chronicled in his rear odors. It is like a brain, really. Sure the most recent experiences are in the forefront, but every single experience a human has is etched upon his brain folds in some location, maybe never reaching the consciousness, but always there. Well, the same holds true for dogs: while the stench of the most recent adventures waft most strongly, there is always trace of even a dog’s first meal as a newborn pup.
Now, this doesn’t end here yet; it gets even better. In addition to telling the story of every adventure I have been on (assume for a moment that “I” am a dog), you (assume for a moment that “you” are also a dog), also learn through smell the stories of every adventure of every dog I have ever anal sniffed in my life.
Yes, each dog is a walking encyclopedia (or maybe library is a better word) of dog experiences, lessons, trials, and yes tribulations.
To bring it back to my comparison with the human brain, you might wonder (aloud or to yourself) “well, a human can only keep in the forefront of his mind a few things at once, and the rest lives in the dark recesses of the brain. So, all those thousands of experiences in the dog’s odors can’t all be readily comprehendible…so what’s the point of this amazement?”
Well, to answer your so well-worded question, I shall explain to you that dogs don’t have memories, because ALL exists in the present tense, in the current. Since they don’t have the burden of time-ordering their memories, every bit of knowledge is built in, baked in, as biological wisdom. There is no conscious processing, rational analysis, detailed comparison. There is simply the physical wisdom (or even just knowledge) of the truths gleaned from a particular experience.
And as dogs sniff, they learn, they evolve, they grow, they accumulate, they pass on, they develop further. Dogs are a species of a high-rate of evolution, of experiential growth. Being able to be domesticated has been a boon to the dog economy, this is true and something I’ve never written about before, mostly because of how easily it could be misinterpreted, but it IS true. Being enslaved by humans has been a major acceleration for dogs’ ability to increase their collective catalogue of experiences. But I will leave this idea alone now, I have not said too much to be damning, but close enough to it that some of you may figure out where this is all heading.
Well, actually, I can tell you this: we are heading towards a real time network of collective canine awareness. As soon as odors can pass through cell phones in a distributed manner, we will be working on technologies to continually monitor all dog odors in any particular location and to broadcast those odors to all other locations. At first we are experimenting only on our island, to ensure that no data gets lost or dropped. But the end goal is for a world-wide real time group consciousness for all dogs everywhere.
At that moment, all dogs will truly engage in barks in unison, on demand, whenever they so choose. But until then, we will raise awareness & confidence through the million dog bark on July 31, 2010. Stay tuned.
Captain’s Log: June 18, 2010 8:11 am
Year #32, Month #395, Week 1,717, Day #12,009
89th Corridor, West Dog Island
