The first days of being a pet are the hardest. Your brain is used to being active; needing to think about things, work out what to say, and make plans. Your body is used to being upright, bipedal, and dextrous. This is rather at odds with being placed into the role of a mute quadrupedal animal. It’s frustrating, humiliating, and even somewhat scary: There’s the worry about “What happens if there’s an emergency and I can’t use my hands?”
But all the problems adjusting were, like so many of my problems, due to the discrepancy between my self-image and my actual state. A dog doesn’t get stressed about having no hands because it doesn’t feel like it should have them in the first place. Time passed at a crawl to start with, but as days passed I slowly found myself adjusting.
The change in body image was profound and somewhat strange. Slowly I shifted from perceiving myself as having had arms and legs folded back on themselves; to simply having four short, stiff legs. My sealed-away hands almost faded from awareness altogether, going from vital manipulators to useless appendages. Initially, I found this shift noteworthy and perhaps unsettling, but my brain soon followed suit in adapting to the role change....... [6:08 PM] The closest I can come to describing the shift is to recall lazy mornings when you’re awake and up, but have no need or desire to think about anything. In a sort of part-doze, you go about the simple routine tasks – making coffee, perhaps, or fixing cereal – pretty much on autopilot. There’s nothing stopping you from waking up fully and regaining your normal full faculties.. but you don’t want to, you’re enjoying the lazy not-all-awake state even though it’s a comparitively limited and stupid one.
If you’ve ever had such a morning, you’ll be able to have some idea of what it’s like after several days of being a pet. Because there’s no need to think about anything, nor do you have an ability to DO anything even if you think of it, your brain just.. stops bothering. You sleep more, wake up less, stop concentrating, stop thinking, and fade into a zoned-out state where you just.. are. You don’t think abot the future or worry about the past, you just do what’s appropriate in the moment.
You lose track of time. Speech begins to lose its meaning, becomes background noise you pay little attention to. Dignity becomes a foreign concept. Initially, being expected to lick up a bowl of gruel placed on the floor is a humiliation: In time, it simply becomes how you feed. Initially, being told “milking time, cow” and having to crawl to a pumping machine makes you cringe: In time, the words lose their sting and you feel relief that the over-full aching things dangling beneath you are finally going to be dealt with. And so on....
