Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  I came to regret caving in so quickly—all the dog owners I knew at the time swore by crates, and all their dogs still seem to love them, creeping into them for naps of their own accord—but the experience was telling, a testament to that dark battle between intellect and feeling. I’d put her in the crate, and some part of me would feel convinced, against all reason, that the act felt cruel and punitive to her; some part of me would worry that she’d love me a little less when she got out.

  But what can we really know about love? Would Lucille really have loved me any less if I’d made her stay in that crate at night for three months instead of three days, or if I’d forbidden her to sleep on the bed altogether? Would she really love me any more if I were more of a hard-ass, more controlling and forceful?

  When Lucille was about fourteen months old, a Boston-area behaviorist named Jay Livingston looked me straight in the eye and told me: “Your love and respect for Lucille far outstrip her love and respect for you.”

  Apparently this statement was based on about three minutes of observation. I’d taken Lucille with me on an interview with Livingston, and toward the end of a general conversation about people and dogs, he told me he could pretty much scope out a human-dog relationship that quickly: within minutes. He also said his initial assessment is almost always right: in formal consultations with clients, he spends the rest of the time merely confirming his perceptions. Intrigued, I asked him: “So how would you assess my relationship with Lucille? In the first three minutes of watching us interact, what did you see?”

  Livingston hails from the uppity-dog school of training, and he spoke at great length during our talk about how spineless modern dog owners can be, about their refusal to muster up the emotional strength, control, and pushiness they need to effectively deal with dogs. Given his bent, I didn’t expect him to say he saw Lucille and me as a paragon of perfect training, but I also sat there as he talked feeling rather proud of my dog, and of the work I’d done with her.

  I scratched notes on a pad, and I thought about the dozens of times I’d seen owners in the park screaming “No!” at their dogs in vain, or watching helplessly while their muddy-pawed pets leaped onto strangers or menaced other dogs. I considered some of the more idiotic things I’d seen and heard about in the world of dogs (a woman with a highly aggressive pit bull who called a trainer seeking advice not about curbing the dog’s behavior but about opening a bed-and-breakfast in her house; a woman who arrived at the dog park one day boasting that her four-month-old puppy had followed her, unleashed, all the way through Harvard Square!). And after a while I even began to feel a teensy bit smug. In the world of dominance and control, I’d hardly be described as dictatorial, but I’d worked hard with Lucille at obedience training in the year since I’d gotten her, and despite our periodic battles over the recall, her behavior seemed to reflect that. While I talked with Livingston, Lucille spent most of the time lying near my chair on the floor, sleeping, and I’d look down periodically and think: What a sweet pea she is; my good dog.

  So I expected Livingston to assess our relationship in rather benign terms: “You seem to be doing well together,” or “It’s hard to say, given that I haven’t really seen you working together.” But Livingston sat back in his chair. “Well,” he said, “it’s obvious that you’ve done some basic, AKC-style training with her. It’s obvious that she’s attached to you.” And then he paused and said it: “And it’s obvious that your love and respect for her far outstrip her love and respect for you.”

  What astonished me about this summation was its power, the vulnerability it unleashed in me. I listened calmly to Livingston’s explanation. Lucille, he said, is a dog who comes from serious working stock, and in his view she “wasn’t doing any work at all.” When we came into his office, he watched her sniff around the perimeter of the room, jumping up on her hind legs at one point to investigate some toys on a high shelf. “She’s fourteen months old,” he said. “You may think, ‘Oh, she’s just being a puppy,’ but I see an adolescent dog who should know better. That’s obnoxious behavior to me.” I nodded soberly as he talked about canine ideals. Dogs function best, he said, “when they’re well loved and highly controlled,” and he saw something missing in part two of that equation: Lucille was paying more attention to her surroundings than she was to me; instead of wandering about on her own, she should have been far more focused on me, ready to drop into a down-stay at a moment’s notice. I asked a few vague questions (“What kind of ‘work’ should she be doing?” I wondered. His answer: “Pleasing you.”). And then I gathered up my notebook and my dog, went home, and burst into tears.

  I eyed Lucille warily for the rest of the day. She doesn’t love me as much as I love her? Doesn’t respect me? This dog, whom I so adore, thinks I’m a wuss? My oldest, most familiar fear welled up: You’re unworthy of love—even your dog knows this. It took me several days (and several conversations with my own trainer) to depersonalize his assessment, to accept that his ideal of control is simply different from mine, to acknowledge that ultimately all dog owners have to find the right balance for themselves. But the experience was striking all the same, a reminder of the extent to which the matter of control can get tangled up with ego and insecurity, with our most central worries about love.

  Livingston’s analysis might have had more to do with human aggression than canine love but, inadvertently perhaps, it may have inspired me. Around the time of that interview, I decided I couldn’t tolerate standing there at Fresh Pond screaming into the bushes for my dog—the episodes scared me too much, made me too angry, generated too much discomfort on the love-and-respect front—and so I embarked on a long remedial program, the human-dog equivalent of “working on our relationship.” Every day for a month I’d gather up a thirty-foot leash and a pocketful of freeze-dried liver, and I’d take Lucille to a soccer field just off the Fresh Pond walking trail. I’d place her in a sit-stay, walk twenty feet away, turn and face her. Then I’d summon up my most upbeat energetic voice: “Lucille, come!”

  She’d look away.

  I’d say it once more, with feeling—“Lucille, come!”—and if she failed to respond again, I’d give the leash a good snap and reel her in to me like a fish. She’d come plodding toward me at the other end looking vaguely irritated, perhaps distracted, but I chose to ignore this. When she finally got to me, I’d practically fall all over her with enthusiasm: Good dog! What a good come! Excellent! Then I’d hand her a cube of liver and begin again.

  We repeated this exercise ten times, twenty times, thirty times a day. Sometimes I felt like a marine sergeant, and sometimes I felt like an Olympic coach, and sometimes I felt supremely bored, but I kept at it. And it worked. By the end of the month, Lucille would drop dead carcasses in the woods to come to me. She’d ignore tempting smells and other dogs; she’d tear out of the brush and plant herself at my feet; my heart would swell with pride and relief.

  So did I become Master of the Universe in her eyes? Did she develop new respect for me? Or was it really all about liver?

  Who can say for sure? Lucille has developed a fairly consistent recall rate—she’ll come when I call about 90 percent of the time—and I, in turn, have developed a more comfortable relationship with control. Not an ideal relationship, mind you. Some part of my ego may always be drawn to the Master of the Universe role, and I can still experience a little stab of jealousy when I see someone whose dog is perfectly trained and unwavering in focus, but I’ve come to terms with the idea that I have neither the will nor the need to be that highly controlling. This means compromising: I let the dog off-leash in the woods, keep her on-leash in the city; I worry periodically about whether she “respects” me sufficiently, but I no longer worry excessively. (And the lingering sting from Jay Livingston notwithstanding, I don’t really believe that Lucille is lying awake nights plotting ways to overthrow the regime.) In other words, I’ve developed a level of control I can live with, one in which both my ego and her safety are protected. But I a
m still struck—often, and powerfully—by how much I don’t know about what goes on between us, about how she really perceives me or what really motivates her responses. I have been able to shape her behavior to some extent, to learn how to predict it, to be more comfortable with it. But controlled or not, bounding toward me or bounding away, she is still the dog: mysterious and, at heart, unknowable.

  INSCRUTABLE DOG

  THE DOG APPEARS to be practicing telepathy. We are at a friend’s house for the evening, and she keeps creeping into the kitchen where we’re drinking coffee, planting herself about four feet from my chair, and staring at me, her gaze unwavering and intent.

  I look at her. “What is it, Lucille?”

  She stares and stares, ears pricked, body taut with concentration.

  I pose the obvious question: “Do you need to go out?”

  She doesn’t move, which suggests that this is not the issue (if it were, she’d jump up from her sitting position at this point and do a little prance, code for yes-yes, that’s it), but I leash her up and take her out anyway. She pees but expresses no great urgency about it, and ten minutes later she’s back at it: comes into the kitchen, sits, stares.

  This continues off and on for about ninety minutes. I reach over to pet her periodically, tell her to lie down. She complies periodically but invariably gets back up and stares some more, clearly struggling to request something of me. My inquiries lead nowhere. “Do you want a toy?” She doesn’t blink. “Do you want to go home?” Doesn’t budge. She looks like she’s telling me she needs to be somewhere—an appointment, an important date—and I am struck, as I so often am, by the communicative gulf between us, how massive and unbridgeable it can feel.

  J. R. Ackerley describes this in My Dog Tulip, his tender 1965 memoir of his beloved Alsatian bitch: “What strained and anxious lives dogs must lead,” he writes, “so emotionally involved in the world of men, whose affections they strive endlessly to secure, whose authority they are expected unquestioningly to obey, and whose mind they can never do more than imperfectly reach and comprehend.” At the moment Lucille is reaching my mind imperfectly indeed—I have no idea what she wants or needs or feels—and I think about Ackerley’s words as I look at her, about how stressful it must be for the dog not to be able to speak English.

  It’s stressful for humans, too. Living with a dog—trying to understand a dog, to read his or her behavior and emotional state—is such a complex blend of reality and imagination, such a daily mix of hard truths and wild stabs in the dark. Lucille and I have moments of genuine sympathy, small daily exchanges that make me feel we bridge that gap and know one another, to the extent that this is possible between members of different species: a look here; a touch there; words uttered by me, understood and reacted to by her. But for each instance of clarity, there is a moment that baffles me utterly, like the episode in my friend’s kitchen. Does she want something? What is it? Is she unhappy? What is she feeling? The gaze betrays nothing; her internal state is alien to me. And so I do what a lot of dog owners do: I stumble through this unknown territory, sometimes blindly and sometimes not, sometimes accepting the gulf between us and sometimes resisting acceptance, and often—often and inevitably—falling back on my own entirely human interpretations.

  In other words, I project. I project and I anthropomorphize and I make stuff up. I view her inner life through the filter of my own emotions and experiences, and the tendency to do this can make me crazy, for I can read anything into Lucille’s eyes. Anything. I can imagine that she’s mad at me, whether or not she is. I can imagine that she’s lonely or depressed, that she’s worried or chagrined or wistful, that I’m getting on her nerves. Not long ago I rattled off a list of emotions I’ve attributed to Lucille to a friend, someone who doesn’t have a dog and has no emotional investment in dogs. She heard the list (melancholy, regret, anticipatory dread, spite), and then she smiled. “You know,” she said, rather gently, “her feelings are probably really simple. Like, Bed: comfortable. Or, Need to pee: uncomfortable.”

  My friend is probably right—at the very least I suspect that Lucille’s experience of emotion is different from mine, that her inner life is immediate and sensate and less associative than mine, cleaner somehow, certainly less abstract. But accepting that doesn’t dampen my curiosity (I’m dying to know what goes on in there), and it certainly doesn’t put the brakes on my imagination. The fact is, the dog is a blank screen. Lucille appears to feel very powerfully at times, and she can seem nearly human in expressing her moods, her eyes communicating excitement or glee or desire as clearly as my own do. But the true nature of her emotions—how she feels—is a mystery to me. Lucille doesn’t have the words to describe them, and so I’m left with nothing but shadowy guesses, vague speculation about the canine mind, ideas that are shaped (sometimes consciously, often not) by my own sense of what it means to have feelings. This is the nature of the beast: dog as Rorschach. Lucille looks at me with those big, dark eyes, that empty canvas of a face, and I can read into her expressions any number of feelings—sadness, disappointment, empathy, love. And because she can’t talk back, because she can’t challenge my interpretations of her emotional state, I am left to grapple with what I see on my own.

  Consider, for example, the canine gaze, Version II:

  I am at home with a group of friends, eating Chinese food in the kitchen, and once again Lucille has stationed herself next to my chair. This time the gaze is plaintive and earnest, and this time I know precisely what it means. She is imploring me, beseeching. If there were a thought balloon over her head, it would read: “Give me a bite of that crispy beef. Give me some Szechuan chicken. You’re eating; won’t you feed me, too?”

  I feel a little stir of anxiety inside, tinged with guilt. I hate depriving the dog of something she so clearly wants, hate that beseeching gaze, but I refuse to feed her from the table: that’s one line I refuse to cross. Most nights, when we’re at home alone, I placate her with a special recipe: I take two hollow bones, stuff them with dog food, and give them to her when I sit down to eat, a solution that serves both of us (she gets to lick the food out of the bones, a pleasurable chore that takes her as long to complete as it does for me to finish my own supper; I get to eat without being stared at). But tonight is a variation from the routine: new foods, new smells, new people, and (I suspect) a sense of new possibilities for the dog. So she stares. She begs and beseeches, and finally I surrender, get up from my chair, and fetch her a rawhide stick from a drawer. She looks thrilled and relieved at this—at last! success!—and she darts out of the room as though carrying something illicit, the stick between her teeth. But ten minutes later she’s back at my chair. Sits there, stares and stares. And I am back in conflict. I am back on the slippery slope of projection, the place where behavior and persistence (hers) meet emotion and interpretation (mine).

  There is a quality of such helpless innocence to the dog: their lives are so shaped and constricted by the decisions we make for them, and I don’t know a single owner who doesn’t struggle under the weight of that responsibility, at least to some degree. The awareness of this strikes me as I sit there at the table, my begging dog beside me. However we feel about our status as pack leaders, we are in charge of these creatures and every feature of their existence is at our whim: we determine where they sleep; how often they go out and for how long; how much time they spend alone; whether they play with, mate with, or even see other dogs; whether they’ll get scraps of food from the table or go without. These are broad areas of life—sexuality, social interaction, food—and they are areas about which both humans and dogs appear to have very strong feelings. This is why anthropomorphism (attributing human emotions to dogs) and projection (attributing your own emotions) can feel like such inevitable impulses, why they’re so difficult to resist: when you dictate the terms of another being’s life—a voiceless animal, whom you want to tend to properly—it can be supremely hard to keep your own emotions under wraps, to keep them from coloring your
view of the dog’s experience.

  At the moment Lucille wants something to eat: this is a simple fact, and it may be, in her mind, a simple experience, devoid of emotional associations. Food. Interesting new smells. I want. A poem by Karen Shepard, written in the voice of her dog, Birch, captures this possibility in four perfect lines:

  Are you gonna eat that?

  Are you gonna eat that?

  Are you gonna eat that?

  I’ll eat that.

  But eating—feeding and being fed—is not nearly so straightforward to me. In my mind, food is loaded with meaning, and the giving and withholding of food are profoundly emotional acts. If I give, I am being loving and generous and nurturing; if I don’t, I am being cold and mean and the dog will think I don’t love her.

  These are not logical thoughts but the feelings behind them are deeply rooted, shaped by years of my own experience with deprivation and nurturance, hunger and satiation. Like a lot of women, I’ve channeled oceans of longing into a preoccupation with food over the years, danced elaborate dances with craving and reward, used food to fill some nameless internal emptiness, and all of this can come surging up when I see those imploring eyes; my own associations are nearly impossible to ignore. On this particular night I do my best to avoid eye contact. I stare at my plate, talk to my friends; I give the dog nothing else. Finally Lucille surrenders the vigil, retreats to the living room and curls up on the sofa. I watch her creep out of the room, and I remind myself that, to her, deprivation is probably no big deal: she may be profoundly interested in my plate of crispy beef, but chances are she’s not associating it with inchoate hungers or existential yearning. And then I return to my dinner, trying to ignore the lingering, not terribly rational worry: Is she out there in the other room feeling dejected and deprived? Have I hurt her feelings? I’ve won the battle, but just barely.