Dogs don’t have religion. They don’t need it. Neither are they “spiritual”—at least in the sense that civilized humans use that term. The idea of spirituality is largely a civilized creation to begin with. Notions of spirituality emerge in the human world only when humans are forced to live in ways that diverge from those prescribed by their evolved human nature.
The life of a traditional hunter-gatherer is intimately embedded within the living natural world around them, and from the outside this might appear to be a kind of deep and penetrating spiritual connection. But this is an illusion caused by looking through civilized eyes. Imagine two oranges, where one has a wedge-shaped section cut out of it. If asked what makes the two oranges different, it wouldn’t make sense to say that an extra section has been added to one of them. But this is how the civilized see spirituality, as a separate thing to be added to fill a missing void. Why that void exists in the first place is rarely if ever considered.
This perspective emerges from living a life in which the whole has been violently torn into pieces, a life that was never meant to be separated into parts. From the inside of an authentic human life, spirituality is simply participation in the ongoing cosmic unfolding of the present moment. Which means that everything is spiritual to the same degree. Which makes the entire idea of spirituality empty. From the point of view of an authentic human life—or the life of any dog—the idea of spirituality is meaningless because there is no way to separate the spiritual from the nonspiritual. Spirituality is inseparably infused throughout.
In addition, the idea that there is a transcendent being or power or principle behind or within or (choose your preposition) experienced reality would find no traction in a dog’s mind. The idea of such a thing is not just unnecessary. It is incoherent. If there is such a thing, a universal being or power or principle—and if it is truly universal—then how could it be extracted from everything else in a way that would qualify it as a separate entity? As with spirituality more generally, as soon as you distinguish this being or principle or power from everything else, you have separated it from itself and you are left with nothing at all. You would have better luck separating wetness from water.
In order to see a spiritual realm or a transcendent realm or a godhead lurking within nature—as something separate from nature itself—you first have to make the irrational leap to a perspective that somehow lies outside of nature. Religion and spirituality require first that you occupy a dissociative mental space populated with fictitious abstractions.
This is exactly the kind of mental space that emerges from the viral delusion of human exceptionality, the demonstrably false belief that humans are unique and somehow separate from the rest of the natural world, the delusion that serves as the cornerstone of the civilized worldview.
