In a sense, the history of dogs is the history of the human search for compassion.

If you were to ask me what is the single most destructive and dangerous human trait, it is a lack of empathy and compassion – for people and for our sister, the earth.

it kills and harms more people and causes more wars and does more harm than almost anything I can imagine. Just watch the refugee children cry out for their mothers from behind the prison bars where we have placed them.

The history of dogs is, in many ways, a lost history. We love them to death, but so often fail to see their significance.

Historians and sociologists believe the first isolated and violent humans first learned compassion and empathy from the dogs who protected them and guided them in their search for food and who they came to love and nurture over time.

For 15,000 years, dogs have helped teach humans how to love and feel.

Most of us have always known that dogs are good for us, and for our mental and physical well-being.

From them, we learn skills that are essential to maintaining peace and harmony. Conversely, psychologists have found a strong correlation between the abuse of dogs and the abuse of people.

Cruelty towards animals is widely recognized as an indicator of mental illness and psychopathic behavior.

In my work, I have seen dogs comfort the lonely, connect people to one another, and  keep love alive where it is missing or fading. They provide unconditional love and connection in our fragmented and polarized world.

“Dogs,” writes Mary Elizabeth Hurston in her fascinating book The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000 Year Love Affair With Dogs,  “are heirs to a rich, varied heritage reflecting their influence on modern thinking, as well as the thinking of our ancestors.

In this sense, canine history not only chronicles the remarkable story of a uniquely adaptable animal, but documents the spiritual and emotional evolution of the human species as well.”

In our time, the left and the right, those avatars of our increasingly inability to think for ourselves, argue about everything, but not about dogs. Most of us love and need them, there are more than 70 million dogs living in America today, many filling the holes in our emotional lives.

The ability of people to empathize with other creatures has been considered one of the seminal and unique landmarks of human beings, requiring not only a sense of the self but a capacity to recognize others as distinct and separate from the self – in other words, the very essence of consciousness.

As the culture of compassion continues to evolve outside of politics, there is a growing body of anecdotal and empirical evidence to suggest that dogs and other animals have the ability to express compassion for one another and for us.

It is this idea that draws us so powerfully to them, to living with them and rescuing them and loving them back.

In our civic arena, our leaders seem to be losing the very qualities of empathy that have always been associated with great leadership and great civilizations.

Dogs have so much to teach us. “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures,” said Albert Einstein.

In his landmark book, Pets And Human Development, Dr. Boris Levinson, a psychologist and scholar, noted Americans growing disenchantment with the institutions that once sustained them – technology, politics, religion.

They were becoming disconnected from one another, and alienated from the institutions of government, which they believed no longer served them.

Even more than a half century ago, Dr. Levinson wrote, alienation and isolation was resulting from complex stresses created by a technological society whose values and institutions were in many ways dehumanizing. And this was written in 1963, before America became a Corporation Nation that forget what it was that people are for.

He foresaw a time when we would turn to dogs and other animals, when they would provide relief to beleaguered humans, giving much love and pleasure and reminding us of our origins.

I think this time has come. I think dogs are keeping love and compassion alive for so many of us, and may yet teach us how to care for one another.

In my lifetime, dogs literally taught me how to live and care for another living thing. To me, it is no accident that our very cruel and uncaring White House has no dog living in it. Dogs soften us and guide us away from the dark side of life.

It is something of a strained cliche to hear dog people say they don’t trust people who don’t love dogs. That’s too far a stretch for me, I know a lot of good people who don’t love dogs.

But if  you look at this idea another way, there is certainly something to it.

Dogs force us to be good, they challenge us to be patient and empathetic and to listen. A great dog demands that we be better people, and this gives me nothing but hope and optimism for the future of humanity. Love is always alive when dogs and cats are around, and more of them are around then ever before.

People who love dogs are by no means perfect, but they often demonstrate the better sides of humanity: love and compassion and nurture.

There are just too many dogs lovers for us to all drift to the dark side.