Our Best "Invention": What Dogs Reveal About the Metacrisis | Frankly 156

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. I have an upcoming, frankly, on the best and worst technologies or inventions by humans ever. And I expect what I might come up with might be surprising, but what won't be surprising, because I'm going to spill the beans now, is my inclusion of dogs among the top inventions by human ever, inventions. Of course, dogs aren't really an invention or a technology. They were wolves that co-evolved with humans. A fascinating story in its own right. But I had an intense experience with one of my dogs the last few days, or nights to be more precise. And so I wanted to share that story, but also a bit of wide boundary context and perspective on man's best friend.
So I have three dogs, Frank, Kai Kai, and Murphy. Murphy mostly goes by Muffy because the neighbor's five-year-old girl, when Murphy was a puppy, had her front baby teeth removed, and Murphy became Muffy. And it kind of stuck. And it turns out Muffy is probably a much better name for her. In any case, she is a swamp collie to the core, swims in the duck pool with or without the duck poop in it. She's incredibly sweet and passive and completely food motivated. And as most of you know, I live in a farm. And when I'm on a Zoom call or a podcast or whatever, she variously sneaks out and partakes of the leftover chicken and horse food buffet. So despite having her on reduced dog food rations, she is 90 pounds, a full figured golden retriever gal. And I dearly love her. Last week, my partner had thrown some corn cobs out for the chickens and ducks to peck at and I was up north few hours away and I got a call from her that she was taking Muffy into the emergency vet clinic because she had ate the cobs and was throwing up, stumbling around, etc. And apparently, I learned on the Google that corn cobs are extremely dangerous for dogs because they don't digest and they can get stuck. Of course, I'm turning around, driving back, envisioning emergency surgery, which isn't great for an aging dog, nor one's checkbook. And I'm being open with you admitting that that was one of my first thoughts after getting the call. Bit more on that later. Long story only slightly less long, two nights at the ER dog clinic up in Minneapolis. X-rays were negative and she stabilized and is now at home resting, but there's still something I need to research. But I haven't talked about dogs here in a while, and they have been on my mind 24-7 since Thursday night. So here are some observations and insights. I've only somewhat joked in the past that I like humans, and that many of my best friends are humans. And this is to imply that some of my best friends are not human, which specifically refers to dogs. This has been the case my entire life since I was a toddler. For over 50 years, I've never been without a dog other than the brief times I lived overseas. I can be my total full self with a dog. They give and receive unconditional love. They are, at least for me, among the few true full escapes from the increasingly psychopathic expressions of our current socioeconomic system, along with, in my case, perhaps Old Growth Forest, an evening with really close friends or a great fiction book. But before I go further, I think it's appropriate for this channel to give a macro perspective. There are over one billion dogs alive at this moment on planet Earth, and the weight of man's best friend globally weighs about the same as all the wild land mammals on Earth, all the mice, all the elephants, and everything in between.
And as much as I love my dogs, that sentence gives me pause.
And if I was writing this, instead of speaking it, I would have spelled it pause, P-A-W-S.
To picture a billion dogs conjures an image of various muffies on couches around the world, but that would be incorrect. Turns out only around 200 million or 20% of the world's dogs are what we might refer to in the global north. And around 750 million of the 1 billion dogs are classified as street dogs or village dogs, animals that have no owner in the way we typically express it. And they're either scavengers or fed from scraps or community dogs.
Of the 100 million dogs in India, around two-thirds are street dogs. And I befriended and adopted temporarily many of them when I was there for six weeks in 2024 I hope I can show a pic here of Rafi and Sammy and some of the others. I got in repeated trouble for feeding them because they get habituated to whoever was staying in that particular hotel room. But it was like a little bit of a band of Pied Piper. I would go for a walk in the Oroville forest, and there would be several dogs following me. Of course, I loved it. But I think the dogs in India, at least in Oroville, are typically well fed as the hotel and tourists' place, the excess idlis or rice or scraps, are fed to them at night.