11/11/2025
Today, as I was leaving a class, I stopped at a red traffic light. In front of me, there was a man with his dog. He asked the dog to sit. The dog didn’t. And, of course, since I was right there watching, he felt observed… so he asked again.
To save him from that absurd loop, I looked away (I think I even started looking at my own hands). Eventually, when I looked back, the dog was sitting.
And that’s where it gets interesting: why? What’s the point? Why do we have so deeply ingrained that the dog has to sit at a traffic light? We wait standing up, no one expects us to crouch down until it turns green.
The answer: we do it for ourselves, not for them. Because we need to feel that they obey, that they “listen to us,” that we’re in control. Even if it has no practical value. Even if it doesn’t help them better understand their surroundings, and instead creates discomfort or makes them associate stopping with tension.
What really matters isn’t that they sit, but that they know how to wait with us, that they’re present and calm, that they understand it’s a moment to pause. They can stand, sniff, observe… that doesn’t mean they’re out of control, because calmness has nothing to do with adopting a specific posture.
When we start questioning these automatic behaviors, we realize how many things we do more to feed our own ego or because we don’t know how to communicate, rather than to truly accompany the dog in front of us, helping them to make decisions instead of simply obeying.
Text by Silvia CINOPOLIS
