Some people think so….
At the age of 12, Tompkins named that dog – a hungry mutt with a “copper-colored spot on her shoulder” – Penny. Decades later, in his latest book, “The Divine Life of Animals,” he briefly describes how he adopted Penny during a family vacation to Mexico.
“Penny and I had connected. I had looked into her face and seen something there,” he writes. Later, he concludes, “Penny, then, must have had a soul.”
On the face of it, this seems like a pretty straightforward equation – if you believe that dogs are conscious and capable of love, as most of us do at some level, it would make sense they have a soul. And it remains an unspoken maxim that a being with a soul is ultimately immune from mortality.
Why does it seem somehow easier to imagine dogs being eligible for heaven, or “a heaven”, than it does for people? Because dogs are, at a basic level, immune from evil, that persistent disqualifier (in some people’s eyes) from eternal life?
We may be okay with this. One is lead to wonder, though, if ‘heaven’ for dogs means being allowed to be free of humans? Or, if a dog genuinely loves its abusive owner in the material world, is he reunited with the same abusive owner in the hereafter? Do he have a choice? Can he make a choice?
We’ve lost pets, dearly beloved and seemingly too kind and good for the cruelty we know as death, and we have imagined them healthy and happy in some kind of hereafter as well. Sure.
But the questions still linger. And isn’t it worth exploring the questions? Even at the risk of dowsing the poetry and comfort with something as mundane as mechanics?
