animal instincts?
To me, the Fool and his dog are one and the same. The dog is there to show how alike their behaviour is....A dog chases butterflies and cars, welcomes strangers with a waggy tail and sometimes follows them into vans never to be seen again.
While I agree that the Fool is very puppy-like, I'm not so sure they're one-in-the-same. Both can be distracted, or fooled, but while a dog may or may not be very smart, it does have instincts. Fight-or-flight type instincts that come into play. Consider this puppy that can't get down the stairs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAQzNBaAPAs
It takes an adult dog showing the puppy that it's safe, several times, before the puppy gets up the courage to go down a stair. So, I don't think a puppy who actually saw the cliff would go over it. I think that if the puppy saw the edge, and was able to stop, it absolutely would stop before going over. But the Fool, being human, can ignore his instincts. Thanks, ironically, to his intellect, he might even be able to convince himself he fly. The dog can't imagine that. It's instincts tell it that it will fall.
So, yes, a dog can take a misstep like the distracted Fool. But I'm not so sure they're one-in-the same even so. The dog is both not as smart as a man, nor as capable of folly. And that might, in this case, make the difference.
I can see that as saying you need to think of others outside yourself who trust you enough to follow you off a cliff, too
That's a really interesting way to look at it. Still..and I know I'm being a little too literal minded here--my gut feeling is that any dog would scramble away from the edge of that cliff. It's not a matter of loyalty, but simply the dog's primitive instincts. We humans, we'll jump off cliffs with someone we're attached to for all kinds of weird reasons. As I said, we can circumvent our instincts, often to our benefit, but sometime to our folly. But a dog has a harder time doing that.
So while I like this message for the Fool, I have a hard time attributing it to the dog. Perhaps the message is that we shouldn't always dismiss our animal brains in favor of our "higher" intellect. Those raw, primitive instincts can often be more right than we imagine—or want to imagine.