Running with the Pack by Mark Rowlands Page A

there is to it. This love of running is indifferent to breed. Unless the dog has been ruined by its human owner — and, admittedly, that is not uncommon — it is going to want to run. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a greyhound or a poodle, once it knows what running is, it is going to love doing it.
    The real answer is that Nina and all other dogs are built on something much older. While she is, in some small part, what the last 15—30,000 years have made her, more than that, much more, she is what the preceding millions of years made her. Yes, she is happy when I feed her; and she likes her bed in front of the fire in our draughty cottage. But Nina is happiest when she is charging up that lane in search of rabbits. Nina is still fundamentally a wolf: she is at her happiest, and she is at her best, when she is doing wolfish things.
    Nina and I are both built on something much older. I may be a rational animal, but I am therefore an animal. And the animal that I am is one that was made not by the last 10,000 years but by the millions of years that preceded them. Running with this pack is the clearest possible expression of my humanity: the perfect congruence of what I am and what I am supposed to be. Along these gusty, winding, plunging country lanes, with wolves and dogs, I am returned to the formal and material cause that I am: a big-arsed ape that has been designed to run.
    The thoughts that join me on my runs — my other running companions — are not always entirely serious ones. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the thoughts that are tinged with parody are the best ones to have, not because of what they tell me but because of what they show me. This is undoubtedly true of the big-arsed-ape hypothesis.
    Explanations in terms of efficient, formal and material causes are all species of historical explanation. When the emphasis is on efficient causes, the history is very recent — the fruits of the destructive efforts of Brenin, Nina and Tess are events that litter my recent history. When the focus shifts to formal and material causes the history is far less recent, and consists in the biological and cultural forces that shaped a lump of meat into something that can run distance. Nevertheless, whether recent or distant, proximal or distal, the focus is on that which has, in the past, led up to the present. That the big-arsed-ape hypothesis has an air of parody provides an important clue to just how problematic these sorts of explanations can be.
    The big-arsed-ape hypothesis emerged from a game my thoughts sometimes play with themselves — the ‘I am built on something much older’ game. But once you start playing that game, it’s not clear why or when you should stop. When we came down from the trees, for example, it was as scavengers rather than hunters. So why think of myself as a big-arsed ape born to run any more than a shy, sly, scuttling eater of carrion left by animals that really were born to run. Before that, before we came down to earth, we were brachiators. Why should I consider myself a running ape over and above a brachiating one? Is it temporal proximity — I am closer in time to the running ape than the scavenging or brachiating ape? But if it is temporal proximity that is the key, then why am I not a couch-potato ape, an ape that has developed a keen, manipulative intelligence which it uses to get others to find its food — an ape whose large arse is really meant for sitting on? One day, I must play this ‘I am built on something much older’ game to its logical culmination and see where I end up.
    Even if there is a way around this problem — even if thereis a legitimate reason for privileging the hunting ape in the constitution of what I am — there is another, more general problem. The ‘I am built on something much older’ game assumes that biological history can yield an unequivocal answer to the question of the