dognosis is 5 years old
/on Mother Lily, the births, the deaths, the beginning, the promise/
1554 words (7 mins)
Friday was the fifth birthday of our family’s dogs Lily and Daisy. Sunday, the 28th of June, it will be the fifth death anniversary of Mother Lily. Today, July 1, dognosis turns 5 years old.
I have told the story of Dognosis hundreds, likely thousands, of times, by now. I never grow tired of doing so, it is a story I cherish and one that I am ever grateful for calling my own. But I have shied away from telling the whole story. It felt too vulnerable to whip out in casual conversation and too precious to despoil on the algorithmic market. But to share is also to honor by remembrance. Half-a-decade is a long time, especially nowadays, and it finally feels right to share the canonical origin story.
Everything I say — about growing up in a family of doctors, dog-lovers and dogs, studying Cognitive Science at Cal, seeing my father grapple with being a practitioner of medicine during the Second Pandemic Wave in India, learning at the same time about how dogs were sniffing out Covid across 60 countries, becoming obsessed with the “how” of what they were doing and the “why” of us not doing anything real about it, writing my Berkeley honors thesis on a novel 4E model of canine olfaction, getting my first EV grant post graduation to go on a Dogyssey, crossing paths with Itamar and realizing we were destined to build a generational company together, everything that ensued after — all of this is true. The richest version of this story is tokenized in conversation with Rahul on Dogfeathers, and I tell this story to everyone curious on the origin of how dognosis was willed into existence. The sequence of events and realizations is correct. But it is not canon — missing the beginning of when the idea for dognosis walloped me in the gut and punched me in the face. The real beginning starts with Mother Lily.
Mother Lily died a painful, gut-wrenching death that took more than 48 hours, in pools of blackish-red liquid whose origin I try my hardest to avoid thinking about. She died trying her best to usher the life that she had created in her womb over 60 sun-drenched days into a rainy world that can too often be too fucking cruel. She died a death that was wholly preventable, and for what, at least initially, seemed for nothing. One of her cocker spaniel pups died with her in her womb, another in the birthing canal lodged the wrong way around, another buried in the garden who’s tiny rat-dog body didn’t survive long enough to bear a name. Left behind were the Four — Shadow, Lily, Daisy, and Junior.
A haunting question framed this whole episode — why bring four motherless cocker spaniel pups into the world when millions of indie pups are left on the streets to die under rubber? Twisting the knife was having intentionally gotten Mother Lily pregnant, because we lost our previous dog Ruby to pyometra. Pyometra is a disease of the canine uterine lining, a serious infection that is often deadly in low-resourced settings. We had believed that it is more likely to happen when the uterine lining has never been shed, as when motherhood is never allowed to be a possibility. In places and times when female dogs are not regularly spayed (involving the complete removal of the uterus and ovaries), pyometra can be a serious threat to a female dog’s lifespan. We wanted Mother Lily to avoid Ruby’s fate, and we assumed pregnancy would come with fewer risks than spaying, especially since Belgaum did not have a fully equipped veterinary hospital even in the early 2020’s.
Did you know puppies cannot pee and shit on their own for the first few weeks of their existence? They depend on their mother licking their tummies, the physical stimulation prompting their bladders and intestines to expel the waste they have accumulated. Puppies can die if this stimulation does not occur, their pee filling up their bladders until it bursts, a septic shock that quickly leads to death. In cases when the mother is absent, you are recommended to replicate the motion of her tongue by using a warm cloth and rubbing the belly, at least every 4 hours for the first 4 weeks. This means 6 shifts over 30 days for 180 such “licking sessions” for each one of the Four. It was a good thing that both Vishal and I were around that summer to help Amma and Appa, so they could still go in to work during the day, especially Appa who was managing the Lakeview Covid hospital. I volunteered to do the nights, as I was working in odd time-zones anyways, straddling a remote internship in Japan, so I spent that month staying up every night, besides the cardboard box that was Home for the Pups. That July of night-shifts with the cadence of poops-and-pees was the first month of dognosis, although it would be months before I coined the name.
For in those last days of June - the births, the many deaths, and the Hanuman Nagar runs - the seed for dognosis torpedoed into my psyche. I can still sometimes summon the spray-y chill of the post-rain monsoon breeze of those Belagavi Double Road evenings. I remember running like I was trying to outrun something. One evening, something shifted. It felt like I was running towards somewhere.
People sometimes ask me if I have a personal axe to grind when it comes to the war against cancer. I say yes, but don’t we all? The thing that hits so hard about cancer is that it doesn’t spare anyone. It’s random, a mutational roll of the base-pair that will land on you or someone you love with the force of a gun-shot.
Fuck cancer. We may be winning the War but we continue to lose too many battles, and every one of them is someone whose story matters and that not deserve to end the way it does. We must do better. Yes,
And I am also grinding another axe, one that can cleaver the spiritual chains on our best friends. They deserve better, in so many ways. And they don’t need our pity or sympathy. The dogs can do things for us that more than justify us trying our hardest to give them the best affordances and agency for health of body and mind and soul. If we got out of their way, the dogs could detect almost any disease, including the Emperor, doing it in the most convenient way at the earliest actionable stage, with economics that makes it innately scalable across the globe.
The story of dognosis is one that is being written by the dogs, with the help of humans and AI, for the humans (and perhaps the AIs as well). Yet, it is also about how the dogs started writing stories of their own. Stories from seeing a world unfiltered by the priors of our hypothalamus, one so rich and vivid that our best technology only sees faint shadows where they see retinasal ultra-high definition. They do not have opposable thumbs, paper, electricity, or the internet, to write these stories down. But they do have us. Except we weren’t listening, at least, not fully. We didn’t really know how. Until now.
Mother Lily’s death seemed meaningless, but then we got Shadow, Lily, Daisy and Junior. Shadow and Junior brought much happiness into the world, until they both also died while living with our friends, in freak deaths that we still don’t understand. Lily and Daisy continue to bring warmth, scampers, and joy, and I so hope they do for many more years.
The night before Mother Lily passed, she padded over to the Box with the Pups, gave them a deep look and a sniff, then looked at me with a gaze that lasered through my Umwelt. I cannot ever know what she meant, but I can promise to keep trying to listen.
My endeavour to listen to Mother Lily is one I am willing to make a multi-decade-work in its entirety, a commitment to imbibing meaning into her tragic passing and honor all the Pups since Sarama. I believe this listening must stand for an embodied ethos of dialogical living, a techno-mythicism anchored to the Earth, aligned with biology, and rooted in poeisis, one that is not content with mere narration but willing to dig in, grind, and lay the pipes for self-sustenance, growth and abundance. An ethos that does not fear to soar cosmic heights, yet returns to the human and the dog playing a quiet game of fetch in the park, basking in the spiritual relaxation when you know your best friend is truly watching out for you.
I started calling the attempt to live by this ethos in its most expansive state — dognosis. I’m heartened that 5 years later it’s not just me. We’re a Pack of fifty+ humans & dogs in an Interspecies Tribe that will be 10B in 2040.
Let’s play some generational interspecies fetch together. See you at sunset?
Dogspeed,
aka.dogluk
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