(This photo, “Friendship,” will be offered for sale for $125 later today or tomorrow, check on Maria’s Etsy Shop, You can also e-mail  her at [email protected])

“I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.” – James Thurber

Everybody picks their own poison, I am a lover and follower of science, even as I relentlessly pursue a deeper and richer spiritual life. The two balance one another.

Understanding dogs and animals is important to me, because it makes me a better human and helps me to understand myself. Paleontologists can help us. They tell us that 14,000 years ago a Stone Age person sat next to a fire looking at an animal that we would clearly recognize as a dog.

But these dogs were anything but pets. They were guards, protectors and hunting partners.

The descendants of these ur dogs would become beloved companions, shepherds, war dogs, search and rescuers, police dogs, guides for the blind and death, and a widening range of service and therapy workers.

They have also moved from the periphery of our lives to the center, they are members of the family, surrogate children, their work has increasingly been to support our emotional lives, they have human names, eat expensive foods, get expensive health care.

In his book How Dogs Think, psychologist Stanley Coren writes “one can imagine that this early man, who had just learned to make weapons and tools out of sticks, stones, and bits of bone, might have paused to look into the dark, soulful eyes of his companion and wondered, “What is he thinking about? How much does he know? Does he really have feelings, and if so, what does he think about me?”

One hundred and forty centuries later, we are asking the same questions, still searching for clear and definitive answers. This question has preoccupied, even haunted human beings.

No less a thinker than Plato had a high opinion of dogs, a radical view in ancient times. He wrote about the “noble dog,” who he thought was a “lover of learning,” and a “beast worthy of wonder.” In one of his dialogues, he even referred to a dog as a “true philosopher.”

The debate about whether or not a dog has a human kind of consciousness has raged on for centuries. The early Christian theologists believed we had dominion over animals, as the Bible suggested, and that it was sacrilege to give them souls and consciousness. In the seventeenth century Rene Descartes, one of the most famous philosophers of his time,  argued that granting dogs any degree of intelligence  was equivalent to admitting that dogs had consciousness.

But according to Christianity at the time, anything that had consciousness had a soul, and anything that had a soul could be admitted to heaven. That was unacceptable to the Roman Catholic Church.

Charles Darwin went to bat for dogs in his landmark book The Descent Of Man, where he wrote that the only difference between man and most mammals was one of degree and not of kind. He argued that  faculties such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, all of which humans have claimed, may be found in lower animals like dogs.

In our time researchers have advanced the argument for dogs and consciousness by proving that the nerve cells in a dog’s brain work the same way as those in a human brain. Like humans, dogs have special areas of the brain that control individual activities. Thus, there is no known biological reason why dogs couldn’t have some of the same intellectual powers that humans do.

So this has taken us another step along this road to consciousness. Since geneticists have found that there is a 75 per cent overlap between the genetic codes of humans and canines. This is consistent with the belief that there should be a lot of similarity in the behaviors and workings of the minds of humans and dogs.

I think this is as far as we have gotten in truly understanding dog consciousness.. Our brains and codes might be similar, but the behaviorists also agree that dogs have minds that are alien to us. They have no human-like language, they don’t use words, and they communicate in images and movements that are not visible or clear to the human eye.

I think in many ways the argument about dog consciousness mirrors the eternal arguments that rage in the political world over issues like guns and abortion and immigration.

I know what dogs think, but I never presume to know what they might be thinking, and I am ever on guard against the human need to transform dogs into mystical, highly emotionalized versions of ourselves.

Many people describe dogs are our “partners,” but I like to remember that dogs are almost totally dependent on us for their existence. They rarely get to make a choice of where they would want to live, given the chance.

I’m going to talk about this more on my weekly radio show, Talking To Animals on WBTNAM137o this coming Wednesday, one to three p.m. You can live stream the show here, e-mail me your comments and questions ([email protected]) or call the show live at 801 442-1010 or 866 406-9286.

The is really no longer about whether or not dogs have a consciousness, but rather how deep and sophisticated it is, or  how similar to ours.

There are many ways to interact with program, this is the people’s program. See you Wednesday, I hope, I’ll be writing about this here daily.