Universal Passage

The suicides of dogs is a little known fact. Humans, especially biologists, deny this reality, convinced only we are special enough to kill ourselves. But if there's one thing the cosmos likes to do, it's put the lie, every hundred years or so, to the stories we tell ourselves, and the knowledge, specialized or otherwise, that such stories reinforce. It is not yet understood, much less witnessed, how dogs can tie a noose, not having opposable thumbs, which were until now thought essential to the purpose. One hypothesis suggests help from the front teeth, particularly the canines—no pun intended—though the diagrams thus far have proven less than convincing. But the motivation, that's clear enough. Anyone with a four-year-old's imagination knows what goes through a dog's mind, behind those hopeless eyes, once the beloved (they do not think in dialectical terms) is dead—the door no longer opens, the food and water have been licked clean from the bowls, and all that's left is the weird long whine that, if it's heard at all, lands the dog more often than not in some cage at a shelter, along with the other orphaned dogs waiting to be claimed, most of them, forever. Waiting for someone, anyone, to come along and see in them the right fit, the right soul, the right warranting of concern. What other kind of motivation is there for killing yourself other than the feeling of not being at home in the world? What else but the one lock and the one key? What except the insistence on your right to be let out, which demands, in the end, you doing the job everyone else has neglected?