What We Know About Dogs: Poetry and Analysis

"What We Know About Dogs," begins with something most of us understand instinctively: a frightened animal carries its history in its behaviour. A dog that flinches from a hand, makes a mess after being left alone, or steals food after going hungry is rarely condemned as simply “bad.” We look backward. We ask what happened to it. We recognize fear, neglect, and deprivation as explanations for what we see.
Then the poem asks a much harder question: Why are we so reluctant to extend that same understanding to human beings?
Accompanying the poem is a research-based analysis exploring trauma, attribution bias, adverse childhood experiences, scarcity, neurobiology, and trauma-informed care. It examines the uncomfortable tendency to interpret an animal’s frightened behaviour as evidence of its history while interpreting similar behaviour in a person as evidence of their character.
The piece does not argue that trauma eliminates responsibility. Instead, it asks us to distinguish accountability from condemnation, and to consider how differently we might respond to struggling people if, before asking “What is wrong with you?”, we were willing to ask “What happened to you?”
At its heart, What We Know About Dogs is a poem about compassion, consistency, and the stories hidden inside human behaviour. We already know how to recognize a flinch as history.
The question is whether we are willing to recognize it when the frightened animal is one of us.