My dog August has a tendency to bark at strangers across the street in the park. He does this especially in the middle of the night, when people are not supposed to be there.

With a little reassurance he will stop. He knows that we are his pack, and if the rest of the pack is not worried, than the night watchman can go back to sleep. That is good enough.

He does this because he feels it is his job to warn us of anyone not from the pack. The mailman, for example, actually comes quite close to the house – judging by the frenzy he can produce is perceived as more of a threat. These threats are met with a harsh barking, not the gentle whine with happy dancing tail that greets my arrival back home.

What is most striking to me about this behavior is that it is not all that different from the way humans act. Many people believe that we are far more sophisticated than dogs because we have language, and this allows us to convey more complicated ideas. Certainly, any of this is possible. But what are the ideas we are communicating?

Your average blog takes two forms, generally. One is a raspy bark that defines the limits of the pack. These essays have the growl of outrage, something which comes from deep in the guts. The purpose is to define who is not of our pack, and what makes them not so. The other kind of blog is more of the happy dancing kind, one that welcomes in readers who are “in the know” about a topic.

We certainly can use our language to convey complicated ideas. But what are most of these ideas ultimately about? They are about who is in our pack, those who “get it” and those who do not. We can cloak them in moral imperatives or close personal feelings. We can dump on another blogger or artist because it appears to improve our standing in the pack, too. In the end, however, most of our sophisticated communication is nothing more than an exercise in pack development or definition.

What separates us from dogs like August is that we have a nearly unlimited ability to kid ourselves as to what it’s all about. That seems to be the bulk of what this great thing called “intelligence” is used for.