Dogs — really, all pets — are fluent in a language that needs no words. I speak of Goofy specifically, because he currently embodies most the dog energy in my life: that beautiful thing I refuse to call unconditional love, since it is very much conditional on being fed. Still, there's a trust here, a bond, something almost sacred. Does he love us because we feed him, or do we feed him because we love him? Possibly both. Possibly neither. He isn't saying.

I feel a little sorry for him, honestly — however kindly we treat him, however much we insist he's family, I can't imagine living out my days as the honorary member of a loving troop of baboons.

Goofy leads a life of basic, unearned luxury. He's so acclimated to living with us that he's practically forgotten his own kind — except when he's in heat.

But he has his own take on the complicated mess we've built for ourselves.

His motivations are simple, primal, and loud. If he could talk, he wouldn't bother with subtext. We are so central to his existence that he assumes his needs are our needs — food, play, the occasional squirrel-based emergency. No mincing words. No spin.

He wears no clothes, though we do try to humanize him with the occasional sweater. This simplifies things considerably. To be naked, John Berger once observed, is to be seen without being recognized — it's the nude that turns a body into an object for others to look at. Goofy skips this problem entirely: for him, nudity isn't a statement, it's just Tuesday. Fashion, meanwhile, is either escape or imprisonment, depending who you ask — Alexander McQueen spent a career on that very tension, clothing as armor versus clothing as apology. Goofy has no such conflict. He is exactly what he looks like, weaknesses fully itemized, no PR team required.

Clothes are, in fact, how Goofy has figured out that humans are mostly pretending. He can smell our real selves right through the outfit — and we tolerate this only because he can't tattle to another human. What baffles him is why we go to such lengths to look a certain way for an audience. Humans have gotten remarkably good at disguise; clothing is just the beginner course. The advanced degree is perfume — an entire industry built on masking the smell of what we actually are. Goofy remains unconvinced. He still gets the real signal underneath: the moods, the last meal, the things we did and would not want others to know. Goofy gets to know. He even gets jealous when another dog's scent turns up on my trousers, which is frankly a more honest reaction than most humans manage.

If dogs ever discovered perfume, it would be civilizational collapse. A dog's sense of smell acts as a complex chemical language that conveys detailed information about identity, mood, health, and environment. Wearing an artificial scent is like mass denial, individually and collectively — same as us, just with better noses.

Narcissism is lost on Goofy; he's fairly sure the dog in the mirror is a rude stranger who won't stop staring. He cannot fathom why the naked apes spend so much of their one wild life shaving, plucking, and generally apologizing to mirrors. He will never understand why size, colour, and build carry so much weight with us, when they carry none with him.

Dog breeds vary wildly — a Chihuahua and a Great Dane look poles apart— yet no dog has ever doubted another dog was, in fact, a dog, still fully eligible to mate and mingle. Goofy exists in total harmony with every variant of his own kind, which makes it hard for him to grasp how Homo sapiens ( means "wise human,") managed to wipe out its own cousins — the Neanderthals among them — and then, having run out of other species to be cruel to, turned on itself. We call it racism. We've built entire economies of cruelty on top of it — war, discrimination, and every flavour of acrimony you can dream up, over race, faith, sexuality, and whatever else humans decide to draw a border around. We can look nearly identical and still find each other unbearable. Dogs, notably, do not body-shame their own.

I picture Goofy delivering the closing lecture: "Civilization is your curse — it made you complicated. You're more connected than any species in history, and yet you've lost the plot on your own selves. You chase applause instead of joy, and when you run out of real reasons to be miserable, you invent new ones. You take it all so seriously. A handful of rich humans keep the rest of you poor, and still they starve themselves just to look young a little longer. Me? I'm happy being a dog."