Earth's Gone to the Dogs!

In the radioactive ruins of a post-Atomic War world, Commissioner Ruskin uncovers a relic that challenges everything humanity believes about its place in the hierarchy of evolution. Dogs once lived alongside humans as companions and workers. Now, after the bombs fell and society rebuilt itself around new assumptions of human dominance, this artifact threatens to expose a history the powers that be have carefully buried. The discovery forces Ruskin to question which species truly inherited the Earth, and whether the leash has always been on the wrong neck. McClellan's 1950s SF short story operates in that paranoid space between Sputnik anxiety and nuclear dread, asking uncomfortable questions about progress and who gets to define it. The canine angle is both literal and metaphorical: man's best friend becomes man's uncomfortable mirror. It's a strange, compact piece of Cold War speculation that feels ahead of its time in its willingness to interrogate human exceptionalism.