Our dog Gunther is supposed to be half and half, but we’re convinced he’s actually a Labrador simply dressed in Rottweiller clothing. When greeting new people he flings himself at them, his entire body wagging from side to side, powerful tail thrashing in counterpoint. His need for attention is constant, and he’s biddable and eager to please. In short, none of the dour independence and aloofness of the maligned German breed.

Being so extroverted in our household, I suspect he gets bored since we rarely have people over. So apart from his set of toys, every so often I pop down to the local butcher and bring him a goat’s head.

The first time I did this, I was tired of handing him dog chews that I expected to keep him occupied for hours, and then having him come up to me, tail wagging after less than ten minutes, the chew completely gone. I expected the goat’s head to keep him going for a whole day or even two. But in fact, less than two hours after he finally got chewing (he barked at it for a while), all that was left was one molar and an inch-long shard of skull.

My wife and I looked at him differently after that. It was hard to reconcile the body-wagging, slobbery love monkey with a creature that could chew and ingest skull, jaws, teeth and even horns in less than an afternoon. It reminded us that not so far underneath his domesticated dependency, was animal, even wild animal. We had several conversations in which we wondered—if the apocalypse came—how many days of hunger would pass before he tried to eat one of us.

What’s interesting is that switching on the wild side takes some time. He’s reluctant to approach the head at first, ducking and darting around it, making feints towards it. But once the switch is thrown, he sits, ears back, crunching, tugging and chewing away, a goat smell wafting in so strongly from the balcony that we’re forced to close the doors. (Yes it’s gruesome, but don’t forget, if you’ve ever eaten a mutton biriyani, one or more goats lost their heads for you.) For a couple of hours, he forgets us, and we can actually get up and walk across a room without him jumping up to follow.

When it comes to dog discipline, I was taught the old ‘rolled-up newspaper and occasional good smack’ school of rearing.

Though I was largely following the principles of positive reinforcement, in the beginning, when I lost patience or he did something particularly bad, I would smack him. But just as most of us are now raising children without ever hitting them, current thinking says it’s never okay to hit your dog. The most inspiring (and guilt-inducing) quote in this regard was: “I have strong teeth and claws, but I choose not to use them.”

The key word is ‘choose’. It’s true, that in spite of my 45kg weight advantage, if he chose to clamp down on my arm with those skull-crushing jaws, I would not be able to get him off me. And his neck muscles are all Rottweiller, so he could easily rip flesh straight off bone in one tug. And so, I removed the smack from my bag of dog-training tools, and I feel that we see eye-to-eye much better now.

Like that other animal head in Lord of the Flies, the occasional goat head is a good way to remind everyone concerned that there are two species in this household, and sometimes, they can never meet.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Bengaluru, India.