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Upon the passing of his beloved bulldog Otto, Dennis Prager reflects on the special bond between people and their dogs. What role should dogs play in our lives? And more importantly, what can we learn from this relationship?

Script:

Otto, my beloved English bulldog, died just before I made this video. His presence in my and my wife’s life for twelve years was an unmitigated joy. He also, amazingly, became the best-known dog in America; he was on camera for virtually every one of my PragerU Fireside Chats and became the hero of a series of PragerU books for children.

And, as I have often noted, none of this fame went to his head.

The sadness we feel at Otto's death and the outpouring of condolence messages have caused me to reflect on three long-held concerns about pets.

Concern No. 1: I have long feared that many people are replacing love of humans with love of animals. For decades, I have asked high school students, “If your dog and a stranger were both drowning, which would you try to save first?”

In nearly every instance, one-third of the students voted to save the stranger, one-third their dog, and one-third declined to vote. In other words, for more than 40 years, two-thirds of high school students have not voted to save a human being they didn't know before their dog.

The primary reason they have given is that they love their dog, not the stranger.

I realized two things as a result of this answer. One was that we are living in an Age of Feelings. Feelings have replaced values as the guide to people's behavior. The other realization was that, as a result of society increasingly abandoning Judeo-Christian—that is, Bible-based—values, the belief that humans are special because only they are created “in the image of God” has all but disappeared. Secular society has no basis on which to declare humans inherently more valuable than animals—especially an animal one loves.

Concern No. 2: Many people who announce that they do not want children—then refer to their dogs or cats as their children. But they are not children.

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