Free Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey

overlooking the larchtrees that were beginning to turn, weeping over a dead canary. I watched as he placed the bird’s body in a tin and gave it to a servant to bury in a special lot within the grounds.
    His sorrow eased as we began to play. He did not tire as humans normally do after a while, and took pleasure in the cinnamon smell of my puppy breath. It struck me for the first time that it was a privilege to be a companion species to humans, a term the scientists at the Society had often used.
    My possessiveness gratified him. In each meeting my Master attended, I sat at his feet under the table, waiting for the agreeable weight of his hand on my head.
    One late autumn morning after he had walked me in the forest, I lay beside him in front of the fire to listen to a radio address by a man whom my Master seemed to respect. This man announced that animals were no longer to be experimented on without limits, or killed without concern for our suffering. He said something very beautiful: ‘To the German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy and prove to be faithful and attached.’
    I heard a sound from my Master. He was crying, moved by these words. I licked away his tears, and that made them fall more swiftly.
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    My sister Blondi and I were raised on stories about our grandfather, one of the first of our kind. Our breed was the invention of the scientist von Stephanitz, who believed he was recreating a modern version of the Germanic wolf-dogs that once roamed these conifer forests. Grandfather had taken this responsibility seriously, though he confided to us before he died that he had not known as a young dog how he was meant to behave, what exactly the humans expected of him.
    As he moved beyond the generic playfulness of his puppy days, he had sensed von Stephanitz’s impatience for him to express more particularly his curated genes. Grandfather decided to try being alert and aloof, and all the humans who came to observe him were impressed. Over time, he experimented with other qualities and fine-tuned them. He didn’t lunge at his food, for this seemed to disappoint von Stephanitz by suggesting greed, and he never bonded too quickly with any new human, for von Stephanitz interpreted this as disloyalty. Aggression in the right circumstances was admired, and desire for females was tolerated as long as he only coupled with purebreds. One lonely night, my grandfather howled at the full moon, and von Stephanitz took this as proof of the wolf blood in our breed’s veins.
    Grandfather’s lowest moment – an incident that was not recorded in any research notebooks – was being caught behind a bitch of unknown breeding kept in the same facility for canine medication experimentation, whose hair and teeth had fallen out. He felt the burden then of being the ur-type, and swore off females until von Stephanitz guided my beautiful grandmother into his pen.
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    A few months after our birth, Blondi and I were taken away from the rest of our litter at the Society for Animal Psychology, and transported to a lodge in the woods far outside the city. We had heard of other young dogs from the Society being taken out into these woods, where they were kept on a leash to avoid breaking one of the humans’ new laws on animal protection, banning the use of dogs in the fox chase. The scientists at the Society were very proud of this law, and of the many others we had heard them discuss at their meetings. Yet it was not until Blondi and I met our new Masters that we began to understand the significance of these laws, and the fullness of our Masters’ compassion for animals. At the lodge, she was presented to the human leader of our country, and I was given to one of his close associates.
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    My