I have a small dog. It's name is Porsha (not Portia!). When she first came to live with me along with my other dog, Hayley, she was shy, scared and aggressive. One day I fetched a stick and held it in front of her. Her little face spasmed. I repeated the stick movement twice more, same result. (Aside: I have been to people's house and lift my hand slightly in front of their dogs. If there's a reaction I usually never go back). Other bitches are like this. They've been abused. I know exactly how Porsha was abused because I looked into it. Since then I have always been extra special kind to her. That is nine years. These days she doesn't snap when I put my face close to hers, I can stroke her tummy and where she does have bad behaviour or gets angry she takes it out on poor Hayley. Like the right proper little bitch she is. Being a Pomeranian-Chihuahua cross probably doesn't help. So it's environment and genetics.

You have to be careful how you handle her, certain things upset. She is irrational but loved just the same. She projects, for example if you do something nice, she interprets that differently. In her brain you might say she places the worst possible interpretation upon things. She'll do that even if Hayley comes up and licks her face. This unwillingness to relax hardly ever goes away even though she does look really happy at times, the darkness is always hanging there, she never forgets.

It was not a man but a woman who did this. But it could have been a man. And this person did it because she, too, had a fear that she was being abused in some way; there was something to be afraid of. I know because I met her, understood her in a number of ways and had every sympathy for her.

I don't distinguish much between animals and humans. With dogs and humans in particular, many of the emotions one sees in a human are present in the dog, albeit in a modified form. One sees the modification of sadness, happiness, fear and many others, even subtle emotions. Darwin knew this well and wrote about in in his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. One reads the dog in the muscles of it's face, the way in which it holds it's ears, wags it's tail and carries it's body. I've watched dogs extensively. Darwin's book with it's diagrams is true to life; he was a fine naturalist.

From the dog I studied the human in the same way. The differences between us and Canis lupus familiaris are of degree, not of kind. Our friends have an extraordinary social intelligence that exceeds chimpanzees and small humans, they watch our faces for social cues - often checking a particular side of our faces - and it is considered, have a limited theory of mind. Dogs can deceive. Unlike most humans they are loyal to a fault and will take an extraordinary level of abuse.

Homo sapiens - which is a misnomer by the way - as there isn't much, necessarily, wise or knowing here, is capable of greater love but also a greater nastiness. I've known a number of women who were abused. They too, project, do not trust and are hard to get along with. They wonder what gives, you can see it in their eyes and questions. With me, it is harder because unless I expressly choose a total authenticity they find my quiet ambiguity sometimes terrifying. But trust can be gained. One told me she was sexually abused by her father. Another was in a Christian cult as a child and abused in a variety of ways. Others I've known were clearly abused but some did not even acknowledge it although it coloured their lives in their gestures, responses, sociability and capacity to love. It altered their relations with their children. Some never had children and one, in particular, told me how she was raped on a beach in Italy in the shallows. She did not mind that too much but when he started burning her with a cigarette that made her very angry indeed. What was the point, the purpose? She is an extraordinary person.

Is trust better than distrust? I think so. One can do more with it. If one doesn't trust one will never know. Trusting isn't the issue, it is whom is being trusted that is the problem. If one meets a "bad" person and trust is broken, it was not the trust at fault but the person. The ways in which a human can break trust and engineer manipulation can be exceedingly ingenious. As a child, my mother would collapse to the floor and pretend to be dead. She first did that when I was seven years old. It was most disconcerting and represents a profound abandonment. That behaviour, added to her other stories such as she was very ill and near death when I was born and I supposedly, was born dead and thrown into the sink in the operating theatre conveyed a clear message. But she loved me. Or so I was told by someone else. Very funny. (No wonder books became my real alma mater - if you get the irony)

Now what was Linda saying? Was it about words and how they can be used to manipulate. That's part of it. Perhaps for another time. If I offer love, perhaps it's real. For the fun of the connection, of knowing. Under a menace of time, that it will all come to an end at some point. How much can I charm you? I, in my seeming arrogance and control and reliance upon words and reason? All that, little Porsha is still learning.  >:-P