Dog

The most consistent religious role dogs have anywhere is as escort and guardian at the boundary between the living and the dead, and the consistency is striking enough to be worth listing.

Egypt. Anubis, jackal- or dog-headed, presides over embalming and conducts the weighing of the heart against the feather of Maat. The animal behind the depiction is probably the African golden wolf, formerly identified as a jackal, and its habit of frequenting cemetery ground is the likely origin of the association.

Greece. Cerberus guards the gate of Hades, ensuring that the dead do not leave. Hecate, goddess of crossroads and of the threshold, is attended by dogs and receives them in sacrifice.

Zoroastrianism. The dog occupies an exceptionally high status. The rite of sagdid, the dog's gaze, requires that a dog look upon a corpse, an act understood to drive off the corpse demon and to confirm death. The Vendidad devotes substantial passages to the treatment of dogs and prescribes penalties for harming them. Dogs also guard the Chinvat bridge that the soul must cross.

Mesoamerica. Xolotl, dog-headed, accompanies the sun through the underworld each night, and the hairless xoloitzcuintli was buried with the dead to guide them across a river in the underworld journey. Dog remains are recovered from burials across the region.

India. The dog Sarama and the four-eyed dogs of Yama guard the path of the dead in the Rig Veda. In the Mahabharata's closing episode, Yudhishthira refuses to enter heaven without the dog that has followed him, and the dog proves to be Dharma.

Why dogs so consistently occupy this position is not mysterious: they scavenge, they guard, they are the animal most likely to be found at the edge of settlement, and they are the one animal that chose to live with us.

Dogs were the first domesticated animal, and the only one domesticated by hunter-gatherers rather than by farmers. Genetic estimates of the divergence from wolves range from roughly fifteen to over thirty thousand years ago, with the wide range reflecting real disagreement about mutation rates and about whether domestication happened once or more than once. The Bonn-Oberkassel burial in Germany, in which a dog was interred with two humans about 14,200 years ago and shows evidence of having been nursed through distemper, is among the earliest unambiguous evidence of the relationship being more than utilitarian.

Domestication changed the animal cognitively. Dogs follow human pointing and gaze in ways wolves raised identically do not, and they look to human faces when a problem becomes unsolvable rather than continuing to work at it. Mutual gaze between dog and owner raises oxytocin in both, a loop otherwise documented between parents and infants.

Islam. The position is more nuanced than either its critics or its defenders usually allow. Most schools of jurisprudence treat the dog's saliva as ritually impure, requiring washing before prayer, and keeping dogs indoors without purpose is discouraged; the Maliki school is notably less restrictive. Hunting and guard dogs are explicitly permitted, and the Quran approves of what trained dogs catch at 5:4. Against this, the Quran speaks warmly of the dog of the Companions of the Cave at Surah 18:18, lying at the entrance with them, and a well-known hadith describes a sinner forgiven for giving water to a thirsty dog. Cruelty is prohibited. The blanket claim that Islam regards dogs as unclean animals to be shunned flattens a genuine range of positions.