What Buster, My Beagle, Teaches Me About Leadership and Neurodiversity

By Dale Smith, Cultural and Behavioural Realist | Creative Director, Bridge | insidebridge.com

I was asking a fairly straightforward question about beagles the other day. Lifecycle, health, the usual things you find yourself researching when you share your home with one for long enough that you stop thinking of them as a pet and start thinking of them as a family member — and in his case, a housemate with selective hearing. Buster has been part of the family for eleven years now, and I know him. Not in a clinical sense. In the way you know someone when you have watched them, walked with them, travelled with them, talked to them, and — if I am being completely honest — been quietly managed by them for over a decade.

Somewhere in that research, I ended up asking an AI about animal emotion. Do dogs experience guilt? Do they feel embarrassment? Do they experience remorse? The answer came back clean and confident. They don’t experience emotion like us. That is the current scientific position.

And? What exactly is that telling me? The moment I sat with it, I realised that the answer itself contained an assumption so deeply embedded that nobody had thought to question it. The benchmark in that sentence is not scientific. It is human. We are the reference point against which everything else gets measured, and anything that falls short of our particular experience of emotion gets filed away as something lesser.

Here is what I know from eleven years with Buster. I know when he is sad. I know when he is scared. I know when he just needs to be close. I also know — and any beagle owner will recognise this immediately — when he is absolutely working me for a treat, and the performance he puts on to get one is, frankly, more sophisticated than some presentations I have sat through in boardrooms. None of that knowledge came from a study. It came from time, from attention, from learning to read something that communicates entirely differently to the way I do. When Buster needs to go outside, he walks over to a particular pot plant and pushes his nose slowly into the leaves. That is his signal. I did not teach him that. He developed it. I just learned to read it. Every pet owner I have ever spoken to has a version of that story — their own private language that built itself through proximity and care, covering everything from wanting a cuddle to needing the garden, and all points in between.

The question of whether animals experience emotion is a genuinely fascinating and complex one, and I think part of what makes it so difficult is that we only have human language to work with. Words like happiness, guilt, worry, frustration — these are words that describe something we feel, and when we try to apply them to an animal, we end up in a strange loop of trying to invert our own experience onto a creature that processes the world in an entirely different way. But here is what I do know: you can recognise emotional shifts. You can see them. And if emotion is present enough to shift, then emotion exists. Buster is not just emotionally present in his own world — he is attuned to mine. He reads my moods with a sensitivity that many humans would do well to match, and responds to them. That is not instinct dressed up as something else. That is emotional intelligence operating on its own terms.

What bothered me about the original answer was not the science itself. What bothered me was the framing. The comparison to human experience was built into the question before anyone had even asked it. The moment we try to understand another creature, the first thing we reach for is ourselves as the measure. We do not ask whether birds communicate. We ask whether they communicate like us. We do not ask whether dolphins have emotional lives. We ask whether they experience emotion the way humans do. The answer is always going to be no, and the question was framed in a way that could only ever produce that answer. Whether it be birds, dolphins, a cat expressing its disdain with quiet and devastating precision, or a beagle with his nose in a pot plant — these are not failed attempts at being human. They are complete systems in their own right.

Humans do not experience emotion like other humans either. The complexity of emotional experience across our own species alone is staggering. Every person on this planet carries a completely unique internal world — shaped by their history, their neurology, their relationships, their culture, their nervous system, the particular accumulation of every moment they have ever lived through. I will never truly know what it feels like to be you. I can listen, try to understand, sit with you in something and come as close as empathy allows. Your experience of this moment is yours alone, and mine is mine, and no amount of shared language changes the fact that we are each looking at life through a lens that nobody else will ever fully see through. We walk around using human experience as though it is a single coherent thing, a fixed point, a standard. As though there is a version of human that represents the rest of us. That standard was always a fiction.

I think about this a great deal in the context of the work I do. In leadership, in culture, in the conversations organisations have about inclusion and neurodiversity, there is often an invisible measure operating in exactly the same way as the one embedded in that answer about animal emotion. Nobody announces it. Nobody stands up in a meeting and says, here is the standard, and here is what everyone else will be compared against. But it is there. You can feel it in the questions that get asked, and sometimes more tellingly, in the ones that never get asked at all. Can this person communicate, process information, and contribute in the ways we have always valued? Can they fit the shape of what we have already built? The benchmark was set long before they arrived, and it tends to stay intact even as the language around it becomes more considered.

What I have come to understand, both through my work at Bridge and through my own experience of how feedback and belonging operate on the nervous system, is that genuine inclusion does not only begin with better processes or more careful language. It begins with a willingness to question the measure itself. To ask not whether someone fits the existing shape, but whether the shape was ever the right one to begin with. The same curiosity that allows me to learn Buster’s language — to watch rather than assess, to read rather than judge — is the same quality that allows a leader to genuinely understand how a colleague experiences a conversation, a piece of feedback, or a working environment. Not through the lens of how they themselves would experience it, but on its own terms.

That shift, from measuring to understanding, is harder than it sounds, because the reference point is so often invisible. We do not see it as a constructed thing. We see it as normal. And that is precisely the problem. Normal was built by whoever happened to be in the room first. The rest of us have been quietly navigating around it ever since, some more visibly than others.

What humans have is the capacity to ask. That is what separates the conversation we can have with each other from the one I have with Buster. I will never be able to ask him what he is feeling and receive an answer I can fully understand. I just have to watch, and learn, and show up differently depending on what I see. With another person, I have the option of turning toward them and saying, how is this for you? Not as a comparison to my own experience, not to measure it against anything, but to understand it as something real and worthy of full attention. From cuddle to pot plant, Buster has been teaching me that for eleven years. And as with every leader who is genuinely trying to understand the people around them, the learning does not stop. It just gets deeper — through self-awareness, through curiosity, through navigating the endlessly complex ecosystem of human communication, emotion, and difference that every team and every organisation is made of.

When Buster looks up at me after I have scolded him, something is happening in him. I know that. Scientists may debate the label. I am not sure the label is the point. There is an experience taking place, an emotional response, meaning in that moment between us. My job is not to name it or measure it against a human scale. My job is simply to know that he is feeling it, and to be whatever version of myself he needs me to be.

That instinct — to witness rather than compare, to understand rather than measure — is closer to real inclusion than most of the frameworks we build around it. It is available to every leader, in every conversation, if they are willing to set the standard down long enough to actually see the person in front of them.

If you are curious about the leadership and neuroscience thinking behind this, the SAFE-SEEN model and its supporting resources are available at insidebridge.com — built around exactly this idea, that understanding someone on their own terms is not a soft skill. It is the whole skill.