For some reason I became curious about dog psychology so begoogled a bit and thus came to read Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door, a memoir about his time with a stray/wild dog he adopted, by name of Merle. As someone who always grew up with dogs, I found it pleasingly unsentimental and passionate, and I became once again resolved to at some point own a large dog once more, but only provided I have the leisure & space for long walks and runs and hunting. It’s a beautifully-written book, part of the beauty derived from the evident character of Merle the dog, a dog he picks up as a stray in some remote American wilderness and brings to his home in rural Wyoming to romp in the snow and eat elk meat. If you’re uninterested in dogs it’s not the book for you; if you are, you’ll most likely love it.

I especially enjoyed Kerasote’s take on the materialist-reductionist view of not merely animals but all life forms as mechanistic and predictable beings, devoid of free will; and of the idea that all dogs are basically the same. He refutes it Dr Johnson-style.

In my experience, every life form has a broad range of potential from birth and early development, and just as some human beings are genetically determined (IQ, impulse control, time preference, etc.) to certain ends, so with dogs. Merle is on the higher end of doghood – a dog with something of a wolf’s cognitive capacity and a dog’s ability to read human behaviour. Just as Merle was clearly an exceptional dog, so there are exceptional human beings, and exceptional genetic manifestations.

Here’s a nice video montage of Merle and Kerasote: