If you ask me what a dog’s purpose is, I can’t give you one answer. Because they don’t serve this earth in just one way. They serve it on every level at once.

1. Biologically, They Are The Guardians of Balance

Long before they were our pets, dogs were nature’s clean-up crew and security team. Their wild ancestors, the wolves and canids, were designed to keep everything in check — controlling rodent populations, clearing away carrion, and stopping disease from spreading. And they still do it. Our street dogs do this quiet, thankless job in our cities every single day. They are nature’s original sanitation workers.

2. Historically, They Chose Us

This is my favorite part of their story. Some 15,000 to 30,000 years ago, it wasn’t us who went and tamed the wolf. The wolf chose to walk up to our fire. No other animal in history has domesticated itself for us in quite the same way.

From that moment, their purpose became partnership. They helped us hunt when we were hungry. They guarded our homes when we slept. They herded our livestock, pulled our sleds across snow, found the lost, and learned to lead the blind. The truth is, a large part of human survival is because they decided to stay.

3. Emotionally, They Are Our Greatest Teachers

And I think this is their deepest purpose of all. A dog lives entirely in the present. He doesn’t hold a grudge about what you did yesterday, and he doesn’t lie awake worrying about tomorrow. He loves without asking for your religion, your bank balance, or your past mistakes.

They came to this earth to teach us what we have forgotten:

How to love without keeping score.
How to be loyal without being asked to be.
How to find pure joy in a simple walk, a patch of sunlight, a full bowl.
How to grieve with your whole heart, and still have the courage to love again.

They teach our children empathy. They give the lonely a companion, the anxious a reason to breathe, and the elderly a reason to get up in the morning.

4. Spiritually, They Are A Mirror

Many old traditions say that dogs sit at the doorway between two worlds — not quite human, not quite wild. And if you’ve ever lived with one, you know it feels true. They see what we miss. They sense illness before we do. They feel our sadness, our fear. They come and rest their head on your lap when you cry, without you ever having to call them. Perhaps they are here to remind us of something simple but profound: Our humanity is not measured by how we treat the powerful, but by how we treat the voiceless.

A dog’s purpose was never to become more like us. It was always to make us more human.

Hena’s Blog For Paws © 2019 by Hena Osman is licensed under CC BY 4.0