The problem with this story comes from within Hinduism itself and any
religion with an emphasis on reincarnation. The dog could have been an ant
before, and was so noble as an ant that it was reborn as a dog, so being a
dog would be an improvement. There are many stories illustrating this too,
but when viewed in real life and the way lower caste people and many
animals are treated, one tends to think that in most Hindu’s consciousness
the former perspective triumphs in everyday life over the later. Thus, a
misery is visited upon those deemed to be of less worth than oneself. The
overall element of compassion that one would have expected from a belief in
a universal consciousness is notably lacking in the actual society itself, in
most instances. For Buddhism and Jainism, largely this is not the case as
neither maintains a caste system of thought, and the virtue of compassion is
much more highly stressed.
What Went Wrong?
In the West, although animals were valued, they were not accorded the
same spiritual equivalence as was the case in Eastern traditions. In Egypt,
many gods were identified with animals, and some of those animals were
accorded special status under some dynasties. You have animals taking roles
in many stories, Aesop’s Fables perhaps being one of the most famous.
Indeed most cultures project some degree of anthropomorphism onto animal
protagonists in folk stories and religious stories. Even the Hebrews did this
to a limited extent with the talking legged snake in Genesis and the talking
donkey in Numbers. In Roman and Greek mythology, the gods sometimes
took on the form of animals, often for sexual purposes, which does make the
stories a bit more interesting if you are into bestiality. And transformative
stories played an important role, especially in tales of morality or divine
caprice, as in Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” and Apuleius’s “Golden Ass”. But in
none of these was there a demonstrable spirit accorded to an animal,
equivalent to that of a human.
But the real stinkers in the soup are the monotheists, who for some odd
reason came up with the notion that animals were made FOR humans.
Humans were given dominion over the other animals (Genesis 1:26-28). The
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