What We Did to the Dog

In 2025, there are one billion dogs in the world.

That’s not a triumph; it’s evidence of something quietly horrifying.

It means we found a species so exquisitely attuned to our emotional frequencies that we could mold it entirely around our own unmet needs, without ever considering its own. And that’s precisely what we did…at a scale that is insane.

What doomed the dog wasn’t strength or intelligence. It wasn’t even loyalty. It was something far more dangerous: a profound, innate sensitivity to feedback.

Dogs read us before we know we’re being read. They detect the slightest shifts: voice tone, micro-expressions, breathing patterns, even the faintest hormonal cues. They are biologically wired to respond, adjust, attune, and synchronize themselves to our internal states.

And that is the trait we preserved. Bred for. Cultivated. Called “good.”

Every other trait, the wild ones, the inconvenient ones, was systematically muted. Pushed down, cut out, trained away, medicated, pathologized, or selectively bred into dysfunction.

You don’t need a nose that can track a wounded deer through snow when your life’s work is lying motionless on a dog bed.

You don’t need stamina when you’re carried in a purse.

You don’t need to guard, roam, lead, or even bark. Your job is simple: stay.

Stay close. Stay calm. Stay cute. Stay quiet.

Tail too long for confined spaces? Dock it.

Ears too big? Crop them.

Instincts too “much?” Neuter, sedate, or send them to someone who promises to sever that feedback loop until there’s nothing left to respond to.

We say we love dogs, but what we love is compliance.

Availability. Pliability.

Silence.

What we love is that they keep trying. That they keep watching us.

They still desperately want to get it right, even when we don’t know what we’re asking for.

Even when the room is filled with contradictions, tension, and noise we refuse to acknowledge.

That’s their role now: to absorb the static we live in.

To be the one creature in the house tasked with responding to emotional signals that no one else will admit exist.

And we call that companionship. Therapy, even.

We used to call it training. Now we call it behavior modification.

But what we’re doing is selecting for servility. We’re domesticating by attrition.

Shaving away trait after trait until all that remains is a warm, emotionally responsive mirror.

The mirror loves us. It wants to please us.

But it doesn’t get a world of its own.

No chase. No pack. No work that matters.

Just a couch, a leash, and a human who smells faintly of desperation.

The dog survives. The dog adapts.

That’s what feedback sensitivity was always for: to read the room and reshape yourself to its contours.

But look at the room.

Look at the system we’ve built, one that prizes attunement only when it submits.

Consider the cost of survival in such a place.

One billion dogs, each shaped by the same logic.

If we treated one child the way we treat dogs, we’d rightly call it abuse.

When we do it to an entire species, we call it love.

And if that doesn’t tell us something about the system itself, perhaps we’ve been trained even more thoroughly than they have.