You love to tell all of your friends about Bob. For the first month you had him, he had to wear the cone of shame because he wouldn’t leave his stitches alone after his neuter. He bumped into everything, and you laughed harder than you had in years, as he merrily brought you that little green ball time and again, no matter how long it took him to manage to scoop it up with that thing on his head. That ball might as well have been made of gold for how important it was to him. He was uninterested in dropping it even for his gourmet meals. You wouldn’t have thought he was underweight back then for how stinking snobby he was about his food, turning his nose up at everything but the highest-quality home-cooked chicken dinners. All of these nuances that make Bob and his story unique are a critical aspect of the self. Just like we are, dogs are individuals.

You look down at your adorable, incorrigible, perfectly irreplaceable friend Bob who has somehow trained you to feed him better than you do yourself and to allow a dog in your bed after you swore you would never share it with a furry pet again. You kiss his fuzzy chicken breath dog face as he curls up next to your pillow. You love the little stinker more than anything. He is your dog. He is Bob.

You experience him so intimately, so remarkably, every day. In many ways you may feel closer to him than to many people in your life. And yet, a large part of Bob’s internal world is still impossible for you to understand completely. You can make some educated guesses about Bob’s inner life based on what you can see of his outer life. You know how old he is by the plaque on his teeth. You can assume his male hormones have decreased because he is missing his family jewels. You can determine he doesn’t hear very well because when you broke a glass bowl six feet from where he was sleeping, his ears didn’t even twitch. These are the kinds of facts you are given about a dog when you adopt him, and the kind of descriptions we use to make assumptions about how our dog is feeling and what he might be thinking.

What you experience with your dog—whether he is snapping at you when you roll over on him in the middle of the night, or he’s urinating on the rug just minutes after you took him outside—can sometimes be explained by a unique factor of his internal self. His rear leg is painful and he snapped at you because it hurt when you bumped it. He peed on the floor because he has a urinary tract infection.

Self Tips to Remember