When I first got Rosie, she was largely a mystery to me. She was somewhat trained, knowing how to shake hands and sit for about half of a second. I, in turn, had next to no training; I knew that when her tail wagged she was happy, but that was about it.
We are two completely different species, in fact, we're from two completely different orders, I of the Primates and her of the Carnivora. It is not that usual for two such disparate creatures to try to live together. When people from different cultures live together, they can run into problems: language, customs, &c. When two different species live together, they run into many of the same problems, but they are harder to overcome—no matter how hard we work, Rosie and I will never speak the same language, and I will never be able to convince her that old pizza crusts and chicken bones on the sidewalk are not worth eating. Those are things that cannot change, but when we first lived together all of our obstacles seemed insurmountable.
The simplest differences are essentially cultural ones. Rosie pees on the floor, and I pee in the toilet. Rosie yells when she hears voices in the hallway, and I trust the locks on my door. Rosie is annoyed when I yell at what seems like nothing, and I like to get excited when I watch sports on the TV. If this were two people living together and having these problems, we could learn just enough of each other's language to get by and explain our differences and work out our compromises but (as stated earlier), this is an impossibility for Rosie and me.
Recently, I had cause to consider how far Rosie and I have come. I feel like we each have a much greater and more innate understanding of the other's actions and frame of mind. For the first year or so of living with her, it seemed like Rosie spent most of her time staring at me, trying to figure out exactly what I was doing, and I would do the same with her. Now we just co-exist, mostly aware of the other's movements and behaviors at all times.
So what changed? Rosie knows some words of English: "sit, stay, down, paw, high-five, over," but more importantly, she knows some of my body language, and I know more of hers. I can tell what her movements mean, and I have learned to look at her tail to read her expression—no easy feat, even though I was aware of it constantly—and she has learned to read my face for my expression. She responds when I smile, or look upset, and I can see the subtle ways she's lowered her head, or rounded her eyes, or pulled back her mouth and swung her tail in low, arching movements. We have, just like two roommates who speak different languages, learned enough about each other to get by; we've developed a kind of interspecies pidgin communication.
Love does not usually cross species, which is why we find it so remarkable (and enjoyable) when it does. By and large, most species on this Earth are far too busy fighting to survive to ever enjoy each other's company, and the closest we can come to setting aside our competitions is to find companionship amongst members of our own species. Some species only allow that kind of alliance long enough to procreate and then they either kill each other or part ways forever. Humans are different. Certainly, Rosie's breed was first developed to hunt and help provide food for their human companions; it was a calculated symbiosis, but that's changed. I don't keep Rosie to hunt, I keep her for love. I keep her purely for the companionship, and no more.
This is one of the ways in which humans buck the portrayal that so many people like to paint of us, and of the world. The world (or, at least, our world) need not exist simply as a black-and-white struggle for survival, against the world, against the other living creatures, or against each other. Certainly, it is in our nature, but we have transcended our nature time and again, and we may do so in the future. This is what I remind myself of when I see how divisive our political realm has become. If Rosie and I—two completely distinct species—can live together, communicate, and love one another, then maybe there is hope for us yet.
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