Thursday 5 April 2001

Pic of the day: Graphic novel by Alan Moore. One of the characters is a talking dog wearing a human-shaped exoskeleton. When confronted with the fact that he has seen a female coworker naked, he replies: "I am sure you have seen lots of naked dogs. Did you ogle them?"

Loving dogs too much

By sheer synchronicity, I came upon that book the day after I had found the online comic Freefall. It is basically a sci-fi story with robots and a carefree and careless alien. But the character that gradually becomes the most important is a woman-wolf. A genetically engineered "Bowman's Wolf", she has basically human proportions, hands and intellect, but the less crucial parts remain mostly wolf (like fur, ears, tail and digestion).

The woman/bitch comes along as the most sympathetic person in the comic. Perhaps because of this, she is seen as rather attractive by some people. In one recent strip the veterinary sums up the dilemma like this: "It is questionable for a doctor to get involved with one of his patients. For a vet, it's right out."

I have to admit that some of the comments on the message board were a bit ... uh, sensual. I mean, Florence is not drawn in a provocative way. And her personality is friendly in a comrade way. She is more modest than she needs to be - she remains dressed whenever possible even though she is covered in dense fur from head to feet. I like her, I think she is cute ... but I cannot think anything untoward would happen if she and I were sharing a bed. Dense fur does not turn me on. Others may not be so fortunate.

***

Dogs have lived with us for tens of thousands of years, since before any other animal was domesticated, since before the dawn of civilization. Dogs are common all over the world. And so long have the dogs lived in symbiosis with humans, that they became a distinct species. There is no "ur-dog" that is the wild ancestor of our dogs. In fact, dogs may be descended from two or more canine species, related but living in different parts of the world. The first was probably a fellow scavenger on the African plains, while the second may have been a northern wolf. The wild dogs that live today are descendants of tame dogs, not the other way around. The dog as we know it is, in many ways, man-made.

Tolerance and even sympathy for dogs may have been bred into us as a survival trait, though obviously there are always some people who are afraid of dogs (perhaps due to childhood incidents). A growing body of modern research shows that the presence of pets has a strong positive effect on the mental health of many people. The dogs, having much shorter generations, may have been even more bred to favor us.

Even so, I would like to think that when it comes to romance (and its equivalent among dogs) each species would stick to its own. Great was my amazement therefore, some months ago, when I accidentally came upon a FAQ which detailed how a woman should behave to seduce her dog. I am not going to link to it - actually I did not even bookmark it - but it was definitely one of the stranger things I have ever seen on the Net. I'd like to think that the dogs were not so easily deceived; but if you have had one of those critters trying to hump your trouser leg, you probably realize that they are no more discriminating than human males.

***

Now there are no "Bowman's wolf" in real life, or Vargr or other humanoid furries of fiction. They are however not as unlikely as they were a few years ago. In my youth, we had no idea what made the various species develop their distinct body plans. Why did chickens grow wings where we grew arms? We did not know. Today, we know a lot more. It all seems to boil down to a toolbox of genes that are more or less common for all critters with a bisymmetric body plan, from slugs upward. The "homeobox" genes.

When the world was younger, multicellular life suddenly exploded onto the shallow sea bottoms in a multitude of forms. Some of the creatures of the Burgess Shale and other precambrian fossils look like something out of a far acid trip (not that I would know, of course) or a fever dream. But someday the Creative Force came up with a critter that was vaguely oblong, with the left and right side symmetric to each other. The creature, now known as a slug, had different openings for mouth and anus, a safe distance between them, and the mouth in front. It was a resounding success, and the concept was re-used again and again in insects, vertebrates, and eventually us. The "box" genes have changed only a little during all that time, because a major change would leave the poor critter without a viable body plan.

This indicates that once we get some time to study the human genome and some of our traditional allies, it might be possible to give them a vaguely humanoid body plan without changig all the small details and body chemistry. Just change the settings of the toolbox during early embryo development, and then let the creature grow. But will that be enough to become sort of human? The brain in particular is a big question. Just enlarging a canine brain to humanoid size would probably not help, as it is structured in a different way. We might have to transplant a fairly large number of human genes that deal with the brain, and this would leave us with some really big ethical and philosophical problems.

And evidently, it would leave some otherwise normal humans romantically confused. Or perhaps not. I'd like to think that seeing such a furry in the flesh would creep out most people enough to make them think of other things than hot passionate doggy loving.

But I don't know. I guess I'll be long gone before that, but you know what the drug guys say: "Where there is a demand, there will be a supply" ...