The Philosopher and the Wolf

You should have seen the looks on the faces of my three canines when I started dividing up the pains au chocolat each morning. The quivering anticipation, the rivers of saliva, the concentration so intense it almost bordered on the painful. As far as they were concerned, it could be pains au chocolat from here to eternity. For them, the moment thei

People say all the time that they love their dogs. And I’m sure they think they do. But, believe me, until you’ve cleaned your dog’s smelly, suppurating, disease-ridden arse every two hours for well over a month, you really don’t know.

Hell would be far worse if it were not a place where you are tortured and brutalized but, rather, a place where you are forced to torture and brutalize those you love most.

That night marked the beginning of our gradual withdrawal from the world of humans. This world—and I have to be honest about this—had begun to disgust me. It disgusted me that there was, in effect, a shoot-to-kill policy on Brenin. It disgusted me that I had to be a running man—constantly ready to pack my bags and take flight. These thoughts were,

If I can only be as strong as a two-month-old wolf cub, then I am a soil where moral evil will not grow. An ape would have scurried away to darkly plot his revenge; to work out ways of manufacturing weakness in those who are stronger than him and who have humiliated him. And when that work is complete, then evil can be done. I am an ape through acc

The wolf is art of the highest form and you cannot be in its presence without this lifting your spirits. No matter what sort of foul mood I was in when we began our daily run, bearing witness to that kind of silent, gliding beauty always made me feel better. It made me feel alive. More importantly, it is difficult to be around such beauty without w

Just as true human goodness can manifest itself only in relation to those who have no power, so too is weakness—at least relative weakness—a necessary condition of human evil. And it is here, I think, that we find the fundamental failing of human beings. Humans are the animals that manufacture weakness. We take wolves and we make them into dogs. We

I always judge a person by how they treat those who are weaker than them.

There is, however, another kind of duty involved: something that philosophers call epistemic duty. This is the duty to subject one’s beliefs to the appropriate amount of critical scrutiny: to examine whether they are warranted by the available evidence and to at least attempt to ascertain whether or not there exists any countervailing evidence. Tod