It helps me to walk through these tenets in my mind:

1. Stand up to your enemies when their ideas are wrong.

2. Acknowledge your enemies when their ideas are right.

3. Recognize that people with different ideas aren’t your enemies, they’re just people with different ideas.

Snowy communicates what she wants and feels with looks, licks, wags, breathing, beckoning, barking, and other forms of non-speech. At times it can feel like a game of charades. It gets me thinking about the enormous advantage of SPEECH which evolved among humans.

Then I consider SHAME, which has evolved along with that speech. It represses not only communication, but also, often, the wants and feelings inside our own minds. I find myself wondering, on the whole, if we are truly better than speechless yet shameless animals at communicating what we want and feel?

Interestingly, both are societal evolutions. Neither speech nor shame are built into our genes. They are taught and learned.