Luther (†), Eckhart, Ayrton, Barthes, Holy, Igloo, Lilou, Papi, Koshka, Max (†), Brutus (†), Human, Tobias and Otto (†), Okra, Milk (†) and all the others. As well as Martin Bethenod, Marianne Alphant, and Thomas Lepeltier for their invaluable readings of the text, Laurent de Sutter for his trust, Brune Compagnon-Janin and Suzanne Alizart. Not forgetting Marion Ivy, the Association Celtiques Lévriers I got my beloved dog from, and all those who help abandoned dogs to (re)discover joy in the company of their fellow humans.

One day, dogs will rule the earth.

At least this was the idea that occurred to an American science fiction writer in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Clifford Simak’s novel City, after humankind is annihilated by one too many wars, only animals remain, and dogs in particular undergo a remarkable transformation: over time they stop eating meat, learn to talk, and eventually surpass their former masters in intelligence – so much so that, over thousands of years, they restore order to the planet, establishing a peaceful and harmonious government.

Simak’s futuristic hypothesis may strike some as rather surprising. Not so much the idea of the end of humanity – something with which we are, alas, all too familiar – as the idea that it is dogs that will replace us. If we had to choose an animal (rather than a cyborg) to replace humans, we would usually think of apes as better placed in the order of succession, as suggested in Planet of the Apes. But anyone who really loves dogs will understand Simak’s choice. For dogs have at least two qualities that make them very well suited to the job.

The first is a startling resilience in the face of hardship that could prove invaluable in a post-apocalyptic era: dogs know how to live on scraps, and even on scraps of scraps; they will sleep anywhere and anyhow; they can adapt to any environment; and they are capable of overcoming nearly any kind of pain. This first character trait has no doubt been shaped over millions of years of evolution. After all, when we talk about a ‘dog’s life’, we don’t mean an idyllic existence. A ‘dog of a day’ is not a great day. ‘To die like a dog’ is a nasty way to go. Dogs have grown up the hard way, far away from the wolf pack. They have had to learn to live a life of vagrancy and opportunistic plunder. Later on, coming into contact with the first human encampments, they were driven away (or sometimes eaten) like the unwholesome rovers they seemed to be. But then they discovered something even more ferocious than enemies – masters: they were imprisoned, trained, and beaten. And yet, at each stage, they got up again and carried on.

But it is a second quality that makes them truly suited to replace us, one that is almost the opposite of the first: their extraordinary sensitivity, without which their strength would be nothing but brutality. Dogs are naturally gentle with children, patient with adults, fraternal with other animals; in short, they seem to possess true wisdom and would be capable of expressing it if only they could talk, as the saying goes. Dogs haven’t just gritted their teeth and swallowed all the humiliations that evolution has served up to them. Unlike other animals in the same situation, they have not become hardened, or even ugly, as have the hyena, the vulture, and the rat among wild beasts. And, unlike circus animals forcibly domesticated by humans, they have not turned melancholy or gone mad. On the contrary, dogs seem to have grown gentler. They have met their fate with a certain nonchalance, a kind of joy even. The dog meets everyone and everything with that phlegmatic attitude marvellously expressed in Droopy’s celebrated catchphrase – which is no less profound than Bartleby’s: ‘You know what? I’m happy.’ Of course there are unhappy dogs, neurotic dogs, and timorous dogs. But they’re usually animals that have been ill-treated. A dog needs only find a good master and it will invariably gravitate toward joy just as surely as a sunflower turns to face the sun.

Dogs genuinely seem to have become ‘philosophers’, if we accept the idea of the Stoics, the Buddhists, and Spinoza that wisdom consists in accommodating oneself, with simplicity and gratitude, to what life has to offer.

The following pages are devoted to understanding this miracle, the miracle of the joy of dogs; to understanding it and, if at all possible, to learning from it for ourselves – as all indications seem to suggest that Simak was right to fear the worst for humankind and that we ourselves may soon have to learn to live ‘like dogs’ upon an earth devastated by our own madness.