Honouring Sasha the dog is a grand example of human generosity

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/29/sasha-dog-medal-british-army-human-generosity

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Animals cannot really be "gallant". They cannot be cowardly either. Neither can they hate, murder, torture or campaign for peace. All these, like war itself, are unique to humans.

That has not stopped an organisation called the PDSA giving its Dickin medal posthumously to Sasha the labrador, who was killed by a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan along with her handler, Lance Corporal Kenneth Rowe, in July 2008. They were on patrol searching for explosive devices when they were shot.

The Dickin medal says on its metal disc "For Gallantry. We also serve". It is a soppy parody of the medals handed out to actual human soldiers that says more about modern sentimentality than about anything a well-trained dog is capable of.

If you really want to anthropomorphise dogs, why not tackle the problem of canine evil? Dogs occasionally attack children in Britain. But no dog lover ever says the dog was wicked. Instead, it is the result of bad training: there are no bad dogs, just bad owners.

Plainly this is true – attributing wickedness to a dog is absurd – so it must also be true that there are no good dogs, just good owners. Animals have no vices or virtues. They do not exist in a moral universe. Only we do, because we believe we do, because our minds are structured to make such ideas possible.

This will seem an extreme response to giving a doggy a medal. But though the Dickin medal is quite a cute example of an anthropomorphic honour, and the story of Sasha and her master is deeply sad, this kind of sentimentality is not harmless. It can easily turn into a contempt for humans, a lofty disdain for the suffering of people.

There is an ugly example of this in the heart of west London. The Animals in War Memorial next to Hyde Park is literally ugly – it's a horrible work of art, a sprawl of arrogant tenth rate figurative sculpture – but it is morally grotesque, as well. Like the Dickin Medal it was created to honour animals in wartime. In spite of the artistic poverty of the monument, this might seem fair enough, until you read the inscriptions. They include this startling sentence: "They had no choice."

This reveals how corrupting and dangerous it is to let animal sentimentality get out of hand. It clearly implies that human conscripts in the first world war or civilians bombed in the Blitz, by comparison, had a choice – that they were all somehow less innocent than the beasts that died. Forget that men in the first world war also died – in Wilfred Owen's image – like cattle.

The reality is that animals do not experience history. They exist outside it. Nature without human intervention is nasty, brutish and the lives of animals are short. In The Origin of Species, Darwin observes with horror how, in his garden, massacres and genocide happen all the time. In a severe winter, almost the entire population of some bird species was wiped out on his lands. This is what nature is like but it is beautiful to our eyes because we ignore the nasty bits. It is beautiful for animals too because they don't have complex memories, let alone history – only human beings can retain the past in a detailed way. The nightingale is not singing for the fallen.

Only we record what is lost. Cave paintings of extinct mammoths are, in some sense, a memorial created by early humans to the animals they hunted.

Ever since cave art, our anthropomorphism of animals is part of our human achievement of consciousness. In images of war's horror, from the screaming horse in Picasso's Guernica to the harrowing puppetry of War Horse, animal suffering becomes a way of comprehending the monstrosity of modern war. But we need to be honest with ourselves. It is human imagination that creates and responds to such images. Sometime between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago the modern human mind evolved with its capacity for such magnificent gestures as giving a dog a posthumous medal.

So yes, honour the fallen dog. Sasha's medal is a grand example of human generosity. But only one true nobility is on display here: that of humans, who can memorialise not only our own species but others as well.