Unlike humans, members of the animal kingdom don’t have the concept of modesty — if you’ve ever had a cat or a dog, you know this, because it has licked its own butt in front of you.

I look at a lot of dog subreddits. In fact, my Reddit home feed is about 40% dogs (mostly bully breeds), 40% sex and spanking, and 20% everything else. One thing I’ve noticed lately is that people are censoring — blurring out or pixellating — male dog genitalia.

I’m not saying that I want to see a dog’s junk. Far from it. In fact, the one thing that really bothers me about male dogs is how hard it is to give them a good belly rub because it’s right there in the middle of their belly area. But why are people imposing their own values of modesty and prudishness on their dogs? Dogs don’t give a damn. Dogs don’t care if you can see their genitalia; they live mostly at the bottom half of the hierarchy of needs. Meet their physiological, safety, and love/belonging needs and they don’t care about anything else. Certainly they don’t care if you catch a glimpse of their junk. I mean, hell, they roll over on their backs and expose it to you specifically to get pets; they clearly don’t have the same kind of modesty humans do.

If you want to censor your dog’s genitalia before posting a picture online, you go right ahead and do so. But I assure you that (a) no one is looking at your dog’s junk (b) your dog isn’t embarrassed that its genitals are showing. It’s just happy to be there with you.

Photo by Jaime Green, originally seen on nymag.com