I Trust My Dog More Than Most People

I worked retail through Covid. If you did too, you’ll know exactly what I’m about to say, and if you didn’t, you might not believe it. People coughed on me on purpose. People screamed at me across a counter over things I had no control over. Grown adults, frightened and furious, decided the person in front of them was a safe place to put all of it — and stood there in their worst self, and aimed it at me.

Something shifted in me around then. I started seeing humans differently, and I haven’t fully gone back. I’ll be honest about where that left me: these days, I trust my dog more than I trust most people.

What the dog knows

My dog has never once lied to me. Never performed. Never sized me up, decided I didn’t look disabled enough, and rolled his eyes. He doesn’t care what I’ve done, what I earn, or what I’m worth to him. He’s just there — honest, loyal, exactly what he appears to be, every single day.

People are rarely that. We perform. We posture. We’re kind when it’s watched and cruel when it’s safe. After enough of the cruel-when-it’s-safe, a man can be forgiven for preferring the company of something that doesn’t have an angle.

What the clinic taught me

Here’s where it gets more complicated, and more hopeful.

My own long road — the pharmaceuticals, the pain clinic, the psychologist — turned me into a bit of a student of the human body without ever meaning to. I’m a curious bloke. I know a little about nearly everything and I’m a master of none, and when something matters to me I go and learn the actual mechanics of it.

So I ended up properly understanding things most people never look at. How neurons fire and pass a message across the tiny gap to the next one. The chemicals that carry those messages — serotonin and dopamine, the mood and reward messengers — and the receptors they have to dock into to do anything at all. Why the antidepressants I was put on, the SSRIs, work the way they do: they’re reuptake inhibitors, which is a fancy way of saying they stop the brain from mopping the serotonin back up too fast, so a bit more of it stays in play. I learned how the nervous system carries information around the body, and — because I had no choice — exactly how pain travels: up the nerves, into the brain, where the brain itself decides how loud to make it. With chronic pain like mine, the alarm essentially gets stuck on, still screaming about damage that’s long since done its worst.

And once you understand the machine, that shop counter looks completely different.

Those people screaming at me weren’t evil. They were terrified — and a terrified brain isn’t a reasoning one, it’s a hijacked one. Fear floods the system with stress chemistry, shoves the thinking part offline, and hands the controls to the oldest, dumbest, most defensive wiring we’ve got. A frightened human is just a frightened animal, lashing out at whatever’s closest. It doesn’t excuse it. But it explains it. And understanding why people are at their worst is the whole difference between hating them and pitying them.

So why be kind at all?

You’d think all that would push me further from people. Some days it does. But mostly it did the opposite, and this is the part that matters.

If I understand that people are often just scared, conditioned, in pain, running on autopilot — then I have a choice about which version of me I bring to them. I can mirror their worst, or I can refuse to. I believe in karma, and in the oldest rule there is: treat people the way you’d want to be treated. Not because they’ve earned it. Because that’s the person I’ve decided to be, regardless of what they do.

My dog, funnily enough, is the model for it. Unconditional. Honest. Present. Not naive — he knows who to be wary of — but not poisoned by it either.

So yes, I trust my dog more than most people, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But he’s also the one who reminded me how to be with people: honestly, loyally, judging a little less, and giving the good in someone a chance to show up before I assume the worst. That’s the whole game, really. Be more like the dog.