My paternal grandfather, a wealthy man who fancied himself a gentleman of leisure, would have agreed. He lived in upstate New York, farm country, and he always had a passel of dogs around: hounds, mostly, who’d accompany him on hunts. He liked dogs—admired them, valued their skills—but he certainly didn’t dote on them, or depend on them emotionally, and he would have been appalled by the kind of life I lead with Lucille: dog in the bed? An outrage. His dogs rarely made it through the front door.
My father would have had a more charitable view of my relationship with Lucille, but I’m not sure he would have emulated it with a dog of his own. Dogs are dogs, he might have said: nice family pets, highly amusing creatures, and clearly objects of attachment, but not primary relationships. His perspective lay somewhere between my grandfather’s and mine: sure, the dogs can come inside, but please, keep them off the furniture.
And then there’s me, last stop on the continuum. Photos of the dog on every available surface of my home. Piles of dog magazines and catalogues from pet supply houses stacked on tables. And, of course, the dog herself, snuggled wherever she damn well pleases: on the sofa, on the bed, on the leather mission chair.
Together the three of us tell a story about people and dogs, about the contract that’s bound us over the years and how it’s changed. In my grandfather’s day (and for generations before him), people acquired dogs because they wanted them to execute specific tasks—herding sheep and cattle, guarding property, leading hunts. Their arrangements with dogs were rather businesslike in nature, utilitarian, and if my grandfather’s dogs occupied any emotional role in his life, that would have been a fringe benefit, the bonus of acquisition but not the primary motivation. By the time my parents bought their first dog, in the early 1960s, suburban America was in full flower, and the majority of dog owners no longer needed dogs to herd or hunt; the working dog gradually mutated into the suburban dog, acquired as an adjunct to family life and subject to relational rather than utilitarian terms of service. My parents got dogs as companions, as playmates for the kids, and they chose elkhounds not because they required partners to lead them on elk hunts through the streets of Cambridge but because they liked the look of the breed, its intelligence and temperament. And me? If Lucille and I had an official contract, the concept of work wouldn’t even make it into the fine print. As I write this, she’s under my desk, lying on a soft fleece bed, and I consider this to be a key part of her household duties: keep me company while I tap away at the computer; be my ally, the steady presence in my life; give me something to take care of, to touch, and to love.
Intimacy has always been a feature of the relationship between people and dogs—without some capacity to bond with and nurture dependent pups, humans never would have let the dog’s early ancestors into their homes, let alone their hearts. But at least in this country, emotional closeness has never been such an essential part of the bond, and it’s never been so overtly expressed. In one of the first dog play groups I attended, Lucille’s companions were named Sadie, Max, Franny, Murray, and Marty; we owners used to joke that, together, the dogs sounded like members of a weekend tour group in the Catskill Mountains, but I think we also understood, without talking about it, that the choice of human names reflected this heightened emotionality. Easily half of today’s dog owners name their dogs after people; the majority of today’s dogs are allowed to sleep in their owners’ bedrooms, almost half of them in bed with a family member; intimacy for people like me is less a by-product of acquiring a dog than a goal, its raison d’être.
A woman named Kathy—single, a schoolteacher, late thirties—lives with a Wheaten terrier named Guinness. When I ask her why she has a dog, she says simply, “Dogs are our children.” I nod. I wouldn’t draw that exact parallel, but I know what she means: Lucille is a primary focus of caretaking for me, the creature I nurture. A man named Donald, who lives with three dachshunds, tells me, “I get a lot of my physical contact and affection from my dogs. If you don’t have a wife and kids and you’re not the kind of person who runs around hugging your friends all the time, the dogs are it.” I nod again: I probably kiss Lucille forty times a day, reach down and just touch her more times than I can count, which is not something I can say about the humans in my life. Paula, who is painfully shy and troubled and thin, looks down at her hands when she talks to me about her standard poodle, Bridgette. “The dog is family to me,” she says. “I’m much closer to her than I am to my family.” Paula came from a household that emphasized appearances: her role was to be a well-behaved, good little girl, someone who would reflect well on her socially conscious parents, and she grew up feeling undernurtured, confused, isolated. Bridgette gives her the opposite feelings, a sense of being loved, sure of herself, connected. “She’s the reason I belong in the world,” Paula says. “Otherwise I’d be lost. I wouldn’t know who I was. She’s how I define myself.” This rings many bells for me, reminds me of how vague and shapeless my life felt when I first came across Lucille, so I nod yet again. Dog as family member. Dog as primary source of emotional support and affection. Dog as object of self-definition. We may have appreciated the dog’s ability to play those varied roles for centuries, but until recently many of us have not needed him to do so with quite so much intensity.
This is not to say that all modern dog owners bring high degrees of psychological complexity to their relationships with dogs. But many of us are living in closer emotional proximity to our dogs than we might have in simpler or more stable times, and sometimes, when I contemplate my attachment to Lucille—her centrality to my life—I think about that difference, about how fundamentally different our world is from the one my parents and their dogs enjoyed. Toby and Tom, the elkhounds, lived before the era of the dual-career couple, and they had a whole family at their disposal, five humans to attend to their needs at various points during the day. My mother worked at home, so she kept the dogs company in the morning; the kids would come home after school and play with them. (I remember spending an entire afternoon when I was about twelve “teaching” Tom to hunt down Fig Newtons, which I hid in various spots around the living room; he was a quick study, consumed an entire box, then threw up all over one of my mother’s oriental rugs.) The dogs might have lived simple, bounded lives, but they were never lonely. By contrast, I am it for Lucille. I work at home, so I don’t have to contend with the guilt of leaving her from nine to five, but I am also the only human in her life, the only person who walks her or feeds her or gives her something to watch, and I’m often struck by the sense of responsibility this gives me: how much at my mercy she is.
My parents’ dogs also lived in a safer world than Lucille and I do. When Toby escaped from the yard, which he did with some frequency, my mother worried about him, but the streets were less congested than they are today, and the drill became fairly predictable: an hour or two would pass, the phone would ring, an annoyed voice on the line from Dunkin’ Donuts would sigh and say, “Mrs. Knapp, would you please come and pick up your dog? He’s scaring the customers.” Me? If Lucille got out of the house, I’d worry about everything from city traffic to local lunatics: someone might run her over, haul her off to animal control, steal her and sell her for medical research. Unless I choose to take her out, Lucille is an indoor dog, and this means she is around me more, witness to more intimate aspects of my daily life: she’s staring at me intently every time I reach into the refrigerator; she’s poking her head into the bathroom while I shower; if I’m having an angry conversation on the phone, she’s skulking nervously out of the room; were I to bring a new man into my life, she’d be there on the bed with us (and God only knows how she’d react) while we made love.
Dog owners like me are in closer emotional proximity to dogs these days because we understand them better, too, thanks in large part to the explosion of information about the nature of the dog, his heritage and his mind. My grandfather certainly didn’t spend his leisure time cruising dog chat rooms on the Internet, or investigating canine Web pages,
or attending on-line veterinary forums. Nor did he stand around in bookstores poring over books about pack structure and canine intelligence and the emotional lives of dogs: books like that didn’t exist in the mass market. By contrast, the first month I had Lucille, I soaked up dog books. I read Barbara Woodhouse (No Bad Dogs) and the Monks of New Skete (How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend) and Brian Kilcommons (Good Owners, Great Dogs), and I remember the seriousness and emotionality with which all three treated the bond. The message, consistent in each: You are the pack leader; you are dealing with a sentient being; acquiring a dog is a relational undertaking, not a proprietary one. Kilcommons’s books says as much in the subtitle: “The Kilcommons way to a perfect relationship.” The bond—its proper cultivation—is at the heart of the Monks’ methods as well: “We approach training,” they write, “as a way of relating to your dog,” a concept that Woodhouse casts in an even more emotional light. “In a dog’s mind,” she writes, “a master or a mistress to love, honor, and obey is an absolute necessity. The love is dormant in the dog until brought into full bloom by an understanding owner.”
There’s the new contract in a nutshell: love. I will love you; you will love me.
It gives me a little chill to think about what Lucille’s life might have been like had she grown up with a man like my grandfather. No soft bed or fleecy blanket, no jaunts to the dog park to see her friends, nary a Frosty Paw. I don’t believe that dogs really need all those canine frills, but I get a great deal of pleasure out of indulging her, and I believe that, at heart, Lucille enjoys our shared intimacy as much as I do. Every once in a while I’ll hear a thump, thump from under my desk, look down, and realize she’s wagging her tail in her sleep; she’s probably got squirrels on her mind, but I like to think that maybe—just maybe—she’s dreaming about me.
And yet I’m also aware that this new, more intimate contract, with all its complicated emotional riders, has its trade-offs. Once, when Lucille was about a year and a half old, I took her lure-coursing, an activity that takes place in a big, open field and basically allows dogs to go haywire with their predatory instincts: a white plastic bag is mechanically swept along a track at high speed, and the dog, seeing what must look like a rabbit in flight, gets to chase it down. Lucille went bananas. We got to the field, and she saw that plastic bag zipping back and forth along the course, and her whole body tensed in excitement. She let out a sound I’d never heard from her before—a shrill, high keening—and she strained at her leash until she nearly choked, and when I finally let her go, she tore across that field with an energy that seemed almost feral, a wildness I found glorious to behold. I watched her run, saw the concentration and drive in her bearing, and I thought about the discrepancy between what she was bred for (herding, chasing) and what’s expected of her (lounging quietly under my desk, sleeping with me at night). Make no mistake: I know Lucille has a great life—lots of contemporary dogs have great lives—but I’m also aware that she lives in a modern, urban, human home, an environment that’s designed to stanch many of her natural instincts and abilities. Be quiet. Off. Stay. Leave it. The underlying messages behind those commands are often none too subtle: conform to my world; respond to my needs.
Leslie Nelson, a Connecticut-based trainer, uses the phrase “the Lassie syndrome” to talk about the gap between who dogs are and who we expect them to be, a term I’ve heard echoed repeatedly. Lassie was both a product and an emblem of suburban America, and as such, she both represented and helped seal the dog’s transformation from working partner to family companion. By the mid-1950s, televisions were installed in the majority of American homes, and Lassie was bounding across all of them, teaching an entire generation of dog owners what to expect from their four-legged family members: loyalty, selflessness, and above all, perfect obedience.
In a sense Lassie underwrote our new, more relational contract with dogs, and trainers and behaviorists are nearly unanimous in their opinion that she did more to shape (if not warp) contemporary American fantasies about dogs than any other cultural icon. “A lot of people think dogs were put on earth to live in suburbia while we’re off working, and then to lie by the fire at night at our feet,” says Nelson. “It’s Lassie. It’s good old Fido. We come into owning a dog with a set of expectations that are incredibly unrealistic. The truth is that very few dogs were created to be household pets: they have needs that living in a pet home just doesn’t fulfill.”
Owners themselves are often painfully aware of this disparity. “Sometimes I feel like we spend an awful lot of time trying to keep the dog from being a dog,” says Sara, who lives outside of Boston with her husband and a two-year-old border collie mix named Elmore. Elmore is a rather delicately built and high-energy dog—forty pounds, with a wispy black coat and the intense, eternally fascinated gaze of a border collie—and he is by all accounts a perfectly happy animal. Sara’s living room floor is littered with his toys—rubber balls, rope tug toys, rawhide bones—and the dog spends a great deal of time outdoors on a run, where he races back and forth barking madly at squirrels, passing cars, and (especially) UPS trucks. But Sara looks around and sees an environment of trade-off and compromise. There, in the corner of the room, is Elmore’s crate, where he tends to hang out for the five to seven hours he’s left alone each day: guilt city to Sara, despite her belief that Elmore feels safe and perfectly content when he’s in it. There, on the coffee table, is a pamphlet from a company that designs and installs electronic fences—Sara is debating whether he’d be happier if he could run free in the yard, without being tied to his run, or whether the periodic electric jolt would constitute cruelty. “Sometimes I think he has a great life,” Sara says. “I mean, we take this dog to McDonald’s and get him his own order of Chicken McNuggets. But other times I look at him and think, ‘God, I wish I had a hundred-acre farm and a flock of sheep.’ Wouldn’t he be happier if he had that kind of life?”
Vicky struggles with a more subtle issue. “I don’t really worry about Thurston not having work to do—he gets a ton of exercise—but I sometimes worry if it’s healthy to be this close, for either of us.” She worries about mutual dependence, an excess of it. Thurston won’t let her out of his sight for a minute; she steps out of the shower and finds him lying on the bathroom rug waiting for her, and she wonders if this is a bad sign. She worries about his exquisite sensitivity; she can’t so much as raise her voice without upsetting the dog. If she needs to cry, she’ll often shut herself in another room so she won’t have to see Thurston’s eyes, that pained, empathic expression gazing back. She even worries about how much she worries about him. “I hate that ‘Oh, he’s just a dog’ mentality,” Vicky says, “but sometimes I wish I had a little more of it in me. Sometimes I wish I was a little less intense about him. Do you know what I mean?”
Indeed I do. Intensity with a dog is a complex thing. In our other key relationships—with family members, lovers, close friends, therapists—we can sit down and talk about our feelings: what we need and want, what’s frustrating or disappointing us, where the relationships stands and where it’s going. This, of course, is impossible with the dog, and the gulf between us can be utterly baffling, by turns a source of joy and one of enormous frustration. Sara wishes she could sit down and ask the dog: Do you really like your crate? Do you know we’re coming back when we leave you alone? Would you rather be in here or out there on your run? Vicky wishes she could “get inside Thurston’s mind for ten minutes and find out if he’s really happy, if he worries about me too much, what’s going on in there.”
These are the kinds of issues that crop up when you live in close relationship with an animal. You may get the best of what dogs have to offer—their capacity for companionship and loyalty, their ability to make us feel connected and needed. But the business of feeling intimate with a dog, considering him or her to be a part of a vital relationship, can be confusing and strange, too. You battle, sometimes daily, with communication, or the lack of it. You struggle with guilt, and with the unkn
own. And sometimes, through the hazy, human fog of your own attachment, it can be very easy to forget that the dog is the dog.
This happened to me all the time those first few months. Lucille and I would be driving along in the car, and stopped at a traffic light, I’d hear myself saying something to her, something very benign like, “Hey, you: how’s it going back there?” And then I’d turn around and look at her, and I’d see this little puppy face, jet black, those little triangle ears flopped over at the tips, and I’d actually feel a little jolt of surprise, as if I’d suddenly realized: Oh, my God, there’s a animal in my car!
I’d search her face: “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” The puppy would stare back at me, curious and alert and undoubtedly baffled, no idea at all. And I’d just shake my head. What a strange sensation, to look down and remember that you’re talking and interacting with an animal, a member of a different species: it drives home their otherness. The dog is not a creature who experiences communication and connection the same way I do. She is not a being with access to language or human constructs, and she is not a perfectly attuned, cleverly disguised version of a person in the backseat with a clear, knowable, or even remotely human agenda. The dog is, in fact, the dog.
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