Yet Horowitz recognizes, too, the threat of the overly humanized view of the dog. She loves dogs in general—and her own mongrel hound, Finnegan, in particular—but throughout the book are rueful hints, perhaps partly inadvertent, that what the science shows is that the entire dog-man relation is essentially a scam, run by the dogs. Certainly, the qualities inherent in breeds—nobility, haughtiness, solidity, even the smiling happiness of the Havanese—are tricks of our mind, where we project primate expressions of inner mood into canine masks. The Havanese isn’t happy and the Shih Tzu isn’t angry and the bulldog isn’t especially stolid or stubborn; they are just stuck with the faces, smiling or snarling, we’ve pinned on them through breeding. And the virtues we credit them with—whether the big ones of bravery, loyalty, and love or the smaller ones of happiness, honesty, and guilt—are just as illusory. “Maxie looked so guilty when I found her chewing the treat box that it was just hilarious,” a “mom” will write on the Havanese forum—but these are illusions, projected onto creatures whose repertory of consciousness is very much smaller. Loyalty, longing, and even grief are, the evidence suggests, mere mimic emotions projected into two far simpler ones that dogs actually possess: adherence to the food-giver and anxiety about the unfamiliar.

We’ve all heard the accounts of dogs leaping to the rescue, pulling children from the water when the ice cracks, and so on, but Horowitz points out that, in staged situations of crisis, dogs don’t leap to the rescue or even try to get help. If a bookcase is made to fall (harmlessly, but they don’t know that) on their owner, they mostly just stand there, helpless and confused. The dog may bark when it sees its owner in distress, and the barking may summon help; the dog stays near its family, even when frightened, and that may be useful. But the dog has no particular plan or purpose, much less resolution or courage. This doesn’t mean that the recorded rescues haven’t happened; it’s just that the many more moments when the dog watches its owner slip beneath the ice don’t get recorded. The dog will bark at a burglar; but the dog will also bark at a shirt.

Maybe, though, Horowitz and Bradshaw are too quick to accept the notion that the dog is merely a creature of limited appetite and reinforced instinct. Not so many years ago, after all, people in white lab coats were saying exactly the same things abut human babies—that they were half blind, creatures of mere reflex and associative training, on whom their dottle-brained moms were projecting all kinds of cognition that they couldn’t actually process. Now psychologists tell us that babies are intellectually rich and curious and hypothesis-forming and goal-directed. One wonders if something similar isn’t about to happen with pets. The experts, Bradshaw especially, tell us that Butterscotch sits by the door all afternoon because she has been unconsciously trained to associate Olivia’s after-school homecoming with the delivery of treats. But what would be so different if we said that she sits by the door because she is waiting patiently for Olivia, has a keen inner sense of what time she’ll be home, and misses her because they play together and enjoy each other’s company, which, of course, includes the pleasures of good food? This is the same description, covering exactly the same behavior, only the first account puts the act in terms of mechanical reflexes and the other in terms of desires and hopes and affections. Our preference for the former kind of language may look as strange to our descendants, and to Butterscotch’s, as it would if we applied it to a child. (The language of behaviorism and instinct can be applied to anything, after all: we’re not really falling in love; we’re just anticipating sexual pleasure leading to a prudent genetic mix.)

But, if the reductive argument seems to cheat dogs of their true feelings, the opposite tendency, which credits dogs with feelings almost identical to those of humans and with making the same claims on our moral conscience, is equally unconvincing. In the forthcoming “Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy,” Kathy Rudy, who teaches ethics at Duke, makes the case for dog equality just as strongly as Derr does in his more narrowly evolution-minded book. Rudy believes that dogs have been as oppressed and colonized as Third World peoples have, and that what they need is not empathy but liberation. She has a confused notion of something that she calls “capitalism,” and which is somehow held uniquely responsible for the oppression of animals, including dogs. Of course, only advanced capitalist societies have started movements for animal rights; precapitalist societies were far crueller to animals, as are non-capitalist modern ones. (Consider the state of zoos and animals in the Eastern bloc or in China.) But her love for dogs is evident throughout. She tells us that “it would not be an overstatement to say that most of the important and successful relationships I’ve had in my life have been with nonhuman animals,” and she makes a passionate case for treating animals as equals in rights, not as commodities to be cynically exploited for research or even, I suppose, for family bonding.

The trouble with arguments for treating animals as equals is that the language of rights and responsibility implies, above all, reciprocity. We believe it to be wrong for whites to take blacks as slaves, and wrong for blacks to enslave whites. Yet animals themselves are generally far crueller to other animals in the wild than we are to them in civilization; though we may believe it to be unethical for us to torment a lion, few would say it is unethical for the lion to torment the gazelle. To use the language of oppression on behalf of creatures that in their natures must be free to oppress others is surely to be using the wrong moral language. A language of compassion is the right one: we should not be cruel to lions because they suffer pain. We don’t prevent the lion from eating the gazelle because we recognize that he is, in the fine old-fashioned term, a dumb animal—not one capable of reasoning about effects, or really altering his behavior on ethical grounds, and therefore not rightly covered by the language of rights. Dogs, similarly, deserve protection from sadists, but not deference to their need for, say, sex. We can neuter them with a clear conscience, because abstinence is not one of their options.

This is why we feel uneasy with too much single-minded love directed toward dogs—with going canine, like Rudy in her dog-centered love life. It isn’t the misdirection so much as the inequality, the disequilibrium between the complex intensity of human love and the pragmatism of animal acceptance. Love is a two-way street. The woman who strokes and coos and holds her dog too much unnerves us, not on her behalf but on the dog’s. He’s just not that into you.

The deepest problem that dogs pose is what it would be like if all our virtues and emotions were experienced as instincts. The questions about what a dog is capable of doing—how it sees, smells, pees, explores—are, in principle, answerable. The question of what goes on in the mind of a dog—what it feels like to be a dog—is not. In this context, Horowitz cites a classic article by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, “What Does It Feel Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel’s point was that the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be one. He writes:

It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

Though we can know that dogs live by smells, not by words, we can’t really imagine what it would feel like to be a creature for which thoughts are smells. We, creatures of language who organize our experience in abstract concepts, can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the head of a being that has no language. To have the experiences while retaining our memory of humanness would make us a human in a dog suit, not a dog. We would have to become a dog, for real; then, reborn as a human, we couldn’t explain to ourselves, let alone someone else, what it’s like to be a dog, since the language of being-like isn’t part of what being a dog is like.

Yet, for all the seemingly unbridgeable distance between us and them, dogs have found a shortcut into our minds. They live, as Horowitz and Bradshaw and Rudy, too, all see, within our circle without belonging to it: they speak our language without actually speaking any, and share our concerns without really being able to understand them. The verbs tell some of the story: the dog shares, feels, engages, without being able to speak, plan, or (in some human sense) think. We may not be able to know what it’s like to be a dog; but, over all those thousands of years, Butterscotch has figured out, in some instrumental way, what it’s like to be a person. Without language, concepts, long-term causal thinking, she can still enter into the large part of our mind made up of appetites, longings, and loyalties. She does a better impersonation of a person than we do an approximation of a dog. That it is, from the evolutionary and philosophical point of view, an impersonation, produced and improved on by generations of dogs, because it pays, doesn’t alter its power. Dogs have little imagination about us and our inner lives but limitless intuition about them; we have false intuitions about their inner lives but limitless imagination about them. Our relationship meets in the middle.

One day, around Christmas, I got a mixed box of chocolates—milk for Olivia, darks for me—and noticed, in the evening, that some were missing, and that Butterscotch had brown around her muzzle. “She’s eaten chocolate!” Olivia cried. Chocolate is very bad for dogs. She went at once to the forum. “My hand trembles as I write this,” she typed, “but my baby has eaten chocolate!” Blessedly, we got an avalanche of counsel from Havanese-lovers all over the world: check her, watch her, weigh a chocolate, weigh the dog, keep an eye on her all night. Finally, I put her to bed in her back room, and promised Olivia I would monitor her. Olivia chewed her lip and went to bed, too.

It can’t really be dangerous, I thought; I mean, these creatures eat out of garbage cans. At four in the morning, I went in to check on her. She stirred at once, and we looked at each other, shared that automatic enigmatic gaze that is the glue of the man-dog relation. I stayed with her until the light came, annoyed beyond words at the hold she had put on our unwilling hearts. She made it through the night a lot better than I did.

Dogs aren’t the Uncle Toms of the animal world, I thought as dawn came; they’re the dignified dual citizens who plead the case for all of mute creation with their human owners. We are born trapped in our own selfish skins, and we open our eyes to the rings of existence around us. The ring right around us, of lovers and spouses and then kids, is easy to encircle, but that is a form of selfishness, too, since the lovers give us love and the kids extend our lives. A handful of saints “love out to the horizon,” circle after circle—but at the cost, almost always, of seeing past the circle near at hand, not really being able to love their intimates. Most of the time, we collapse the circles of compassion, don’t look at the ones beyond, in order to give the people we love their proper due; we open our eyes to see the wider circles only when new creatures come in, when we realize that we really sit at the center of a Saturn’s worth of circles, stretching out from our little campfire to the wolves who wait outside, and ever outward to the unknowable—toward, I don’t know, deep-sea fish that live on lava and then beyond toward all existence, where each parrot and every mosquito is, if we could only see it, an individual. What’s terrifying is the number of bad stories to which I was once inured, and which now claim my attention. A friend’s dog had leaped from a window in a thunderstorm and only now could I feel the horror of it: the poor terrified thing’s leap. Another friend’s dog had been paralyzed, and instead of a limping animal I saw a fouled friend, a small Hector. My circles of compassion have been pried open.

We can’t enter a dog’s mind, but, as on that dark-chocolate night, I saw that it isn’t that hard to enter a dog’s feelings: feelings of pain, fear, worry, need. And so the dog sits right at the edge of our circle, looking out toward all the others. She is ours, but she is other, too. A dog belongs to the world of wolves she comes from and to the circle of people she has joined. Another circle of existence, toward which we are capable of being compassionate, lies just beyond her, and her paw points toward it, even as her eyes scan ours for dinner. Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity. They sit within their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there. Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great unending circles of Otherness that we can barely begin to contemplate.