You don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Period.

I write this as the last series of my last book moves toward release and several stages of a career close with it, this one above all. In the Study Center menu of the website (etologi.dk), for instance, a few of the next steps are already there for anyone who wants to follow where the work goes.

I’m sharing what might be my final public words on this, as I prepare the last of my time and energy on the subject for the round table in LA in 10 days, for anyone who wishes to discuss this in person. I already wrote enough about it, and you can read it in my books and social feed. 

Something got lost along the way, and social media manipulation has a peculiar way of doing it. We were given a square that looks like the whole world and behaves like a very small place, but inside it, the loudest position starts to feel like the true one, and the number under a post starts to feel like evidence. Outside it, there’s a forgotten detail that every country still has its own culture, its own law, its own history with animals, its own limit on what may be done to a body that cannot consent. For instance, what certain trainers do in the United States, filmed and applauded by an audience that will never meet that dog and context, would put them in front of the authorities in my country within days, and the rest would be paperwork, possibly jail time, and a flight home. Anyone who forces one correct way for the whole world is telling you the size of their own.

The same limit shows the people who applaud when someone is being mocked or satirized and canceled, and then object when the identical machinery turns toward a person they like. What they endorsed was the method and principle of it, and they do not care whom it is pointed at. Once it is available, it is available to everyone, and it will eventually be used against them one day by somebody who learned it from watching them. They will have no argument left, because the argument was given away the first time it was convenient to give it away.

Long texts I’m aware I write, and easily accused of, the ones every professional in this field should have worked through at least once instead of trying to diminish them, are being set aside under the excuse that they are too complex. Complexity became a polite name for effort or personal challenge. What takes their place is short, fast, and supported by systems that count attention and nothing else. Cruelty performs very well under that arithmetic, and so it is reinforced, again and again, by people who would never describe themselves as cruel. We recognize a few of the words, actions, feel something, lose the middle, and never reach the whole those words came from. And there we are, staring into the abyss with our arms crossed, in full delivery, calling it a method, a way, a result.

No serious activity puts its subjects on weird reality shows to feed an algorithm. Nobody films a patient at the worst moment of their life and sells the failure as entertainment, and if anyone tried, the profession would close around them, and that would be the end of it. Dogs get exactly that treatment, simple marketing objects, and the footage circulates afterward as if it were education. Here in Denmark, it would not be accepted by society, and the refusal would be quiet (or not) and total, which is the only kind that changes anything.

What are you supporting because it looks right from where you happen to be standing, and how would the same thing look from anywhere else? How ready for change is someone whose first reaction to a request for more study and more rigor is to attack the person making it? If the work you spend your time criticizing is the same work you claim to defend, there is very little left to discuss, and nothing left to teach.

The part nobody counts is the influence itself. Everyone influences someone. Every share, every laugh at another person’s expense, every silence in front of something you knew was wrong, teaches whoever is watching what is permitted. You are making other people while you do it, and while you make them, you are becoming something yourself. Choose your path. If your days are better spent being inventive in contempt, get better at the joke instead of the argument, putting that talent into hate and calling it criticism, be my guest, and please do not follow me. 

More than two decades in this field always went the other way. The fight was against the comfort of moral certainty, against the idea that believing something sincerely is the same as having tested it, and the testing was done in the real world, on every process and every idea I could put my hands on, my own procedures first and hardest. They still go out to students and trainers in several countries, and I still ask for the feedback, knowing that some of it comes back as the answer I did not want. That is the price of the thing being a profession at all, or trying to make a lost field into something more professional and respectful, not an ego-centered satire.

What do you want? A professional profession, or a place to impose your beliefs? The choice is yours, of course. Mine was made a long time ago, and now, with one more chapter closing, I put the same demand back on myself and return to an older one that was left open and still updated as ever. Are you in?

Image from the post: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Parable of the Blind, 1568. Six men held together by a stick and a shoulder, walking toward water none of them can see. Bruegel painted the fall in stages, so the six read as one man at six moments, upright at the back, already down at the front. The church behind them is a real one, in a real village, which keeps the scene from floating free of any place. How far back in the line would you have to stand before the fall stopped being yours?

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