Jack Stephens, a fifty-one-year-old veterinarian who established and now runs the VPI Insurance Group, in Anaheim, California, the nation’s oldest and largest health insurance company for pets, understands the therapeutic value of pets, but he learned about it the hard way, through personal experience. As a practicing vet, Stephens had been aware of the rising tide of articles about the psychological value of pets in veterinary journals for years, but he’d always felt a tad skeptical about the concept, a feeling that crept into his view of his practice as well. People seemed so … over the top about dogs. He’d see owners indulging their dogs, crying over them when they got sick, dripping with emotion, and he just didn’t quite get it; although he loved animals himself and always appreciated their company, he’d shake his head at half his clients, then go home and make little jokes about how overinvolved they were. “I think a lot of people in the veterinary profession don’t quite realize how bonded people are to their dogs,” he says. “There’s still the idea that they don’t have that much value.”
Jack Stephens’s own doubts about the bond disappeared about seven years ago, when he was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent five grueling months of radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Several months before his illness was discovered, Jack’s wife had acquired a miniature Doberman pinscher—another source of skepticism to Jack, a rather hard-boiled fellow who favored big working breeds and found something distasteful and rather unmasculine about little dogs. But this one—a small, sleek-coated, and uncommonly intelligent creature named Spanky—had a particular brand of charm that struck Jack as special from the start. He was a very expressive dog—when the family left him at home alone, he’d literally toilet-paper the house in protest, grabbing a roll of tissue from the upstairs bathroom, then running down the hall and stairs with it, streaming paper the whole way—and his affinity for Jack, whom he adored, had a quality of insistence that broke down Jack’s defenses somehow. Spanky decided early on that he liked Jack’s pillow, and each night he’d slowly and persistently edge Jack’s head off it, then burrow into the pillowcase and spend the night curled up inside. Jack doesn’t have a very high tolerance for that kind of behavior (“canine nonsense,” in his words), but he couldn’t help himself: in Spanky, he found it completely endearing.
When Jack developed cancer and began treatment, his relationship with the dog changed. Some nights Jack’s nausea got so bad, he’d sleep in another room. Spanky would quietly accompany him, staying close through the night, watching him. He had an instinctive sense for Jack’s needs—how much distance he required and how much contact—and although Jack had a large and supportive network of friends and family members, the dog provided what he calls a “crucial link” in his recovery. Spanky made him laugh. He motivated him to get up and take daily walks instead of languishing in bed. His presence—entertaining, attentive, utterly undemanding—helped him avoid self-pity. Jack Stephens, an Oklahoma native who prides himself on his machismo, found himself referring to this tiny dog as “my little angel man from heaven,” and his attachment to Spanky taught him volumes about the clients he once privately chided in his practice. The dog, he says, allowed him “to experience a different world with pets,” to appreciate the power of our connections with them.
Jack Stephens’s experience speaks to the profound satisfactions of living with a dog, the therapeutic properties of their mere presence. Some of this is physical: a number of well-known studies have shown that petting a dog—in some cases, even being in the same room as a dog—has a calming effect on people, reducing blood pressure and heart rate. But there’s also something psychically healing about being with dogs, and you don’t have to be a cancer survivor—or a resident at a geriatric nursing home or a juvenile delinquent or a prisoner or a psychiatric patient—to appreciate the effect.
The term “unconditional love” comes up; it’s inevitable. Ask ten people to tell you what’s so special about relationships with dogs, what’s comforting and healing about them, and at least nine of them will say it: “unconditional love.” Dogs love us—or they appear to—in a purer, more accepting way than our spouses or our best friends or even our parents.
I don’t disagree with that idea. I believe that the dog’s capacity for attachment is somehow less cluttered than ours, and that dogs can be far more steadfast and less demanding than many humans—these are the very qualities that help make them so effective in therapeutic settings like nursing homes and hospitals. And yet I’ve always found the term “unconditional love” to be a little thin when it comes to humans and dogs, static and lacking somehow. For precisely that reason, Steve Zawistowski, senior vice president and science adviser at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, says he is on a one-man campaign to eradicate the phrase. “It implies,” he says, “that dogs don’t need respect, that you can beat and kick them and they’ll crawl back.” It also implies that the relationship is essentially nonreciprocal, as though our only role with dogs is to stand there and absorb. In fact, I think the healing power of dogs has less to do with what they give us than what they bring out in us, with what their presence allows us to feel and experience.
As Jack Stephens discovered, one thing they allow us to feel is closeness without claustrophobia, a sensation that’s akin to unconditional love but is actually a little more complex—and a little easier to take. If Jack’s wife, for instance, had been as attentive to him during his illness as Spanky was—if she’d sat up nights and watched him as he slept, perched next to him as he threw up in the night, never left him alone for a minute—he probably would have gone crazy, felt hemmed in, unable to breathe.
This may be true for all of us. The idea that someone will love us to death no matter what is a great and powerful universal fantasy, but it’s also a bit of an impossible dream, one that can’t—and probably shouldn’t—be realized between grown men and women. We might talk a good game about unconditional love, about wanting it and not getting it from humans, but imagine a spouse who acted like your dog, who woke up every morning writhing with joy at the mere sight of you, who jumped up and down every time you walked into a room, who never uttered a critical word, who never took you to task for being irritable or neurotic or lazy, who gave you all of the power. In theory, that might sound fabulous; in fact, behavior like that could drive you around the bend in about five minutes. But dogs can give us what people can’t. Perhaps because they’re members of a different species, and so the line between them and us is clearly delineated, a dog can love you like that without raising questions of fairness, without triggering some confusing or destructive imbalance of power, without making you squirm. This is part of what can make our relationships with them feel so profoundly gratifying: dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to others, our needs for boundaries and autonomy and distance.
Within that niche life can be enormously comforting. Every night in the summer my friend Grace takes Oakley downstairs and lets her out into the yard. While Oakley pees and takes a moment to sniff around, Grace sits on the porch steps and looks up at the stars. When she’s ready, Oakley trots up the stairs and sits down right next to Grace, and they stay there for a few minutes, gazing out into the night together. After a minute Grace will reach out and scratch Oakley’s chest; without even turning to look at her, Oakley will hook her front paw over Grace’s arm, and they will remain like that, a dog-human variation on a couple holding hands, until Grace decides it’s time to head back upstairs. There is the niche, a perfect snapshot of it: one human and one dog in that unspoken and abiding attachment. “She’s just right there,” Grace says of Oakley, and that sense of presence, that sense that the dog is present to Grace, in a way she is not present to any other being on the planet, is what gives the connection its quality of singularity and meaning, Here I am with my dog. Me and my dog. The closeness feels like a private bridge, extending from human to animal, a causeway that nobody else can cross in
quite the same way you do.
That causeway is constructed of ritual and repetition and simple moments, of behaviors discovered and then executed exclusively between human and dog, and there is something exceptionally restorative about crossing it day after day. A woman named Michelle, owner of a tiny white Maltese named Carmen, spends about thirty minutes every morning reading the paper in her kitchen; at some point her dog developed the habit of jumping up onto her lap, then snuggling underneath her nightshirt while she sips her coffee, and now this is standard practice, a moment of quiet, shared contact that never fails to please her. Michelle says, “It’s this tender moment just between the two of us, before the kids get up and the phone starts ringing and all hell breaks loose. It’s like our little special thing.” A man named Andrew wakes up every morning to the sight of his yellow Lab’s nose: “When she thinks it’s time to get up, she walks over to the bed and just sticks her nose next to my head—inches away from me—and just sort of breathes on me until I open my eyes.” The sight of this cheers him up every single morning. “That big, happy dog head,” he says. “I swear I wake up smiling every day.” For Nancy, owner of the German shorthaired pointer named Tomato, a particular kind of pet therapy comes in New York’s Central Park, where she and her dog head every morning at eight o’clock to walk. “It is a very exquisite pleasure,” she says. “Even in the worst weather, even in sleet. There are moments I feel like this is the last thing I want to do, and then I get there and I feel it’s a gift to be out there. As much as I don’t believe in God, I’m sure when I see the light coming through the clouds, I see God out there. Which I wouldn’t do if I didn’t have this dog.”
These are all snapshots of that niche we inhabit with dogs, a place where the canine experience somehow intersects with ours, offering in the process a measure of solace. When I walk with Lucille, I’m not exactly sure I see God in clouds, but I do share Nancy’s sentiment about the experience, the sense of comfort behind it. Out in the woods Lucille and I will sometimes stop and sit in the shade of a tree, and I’ll watch her for a moment or two, watch the way her whole body is attuned to what’s happening that very instant—what smells are wafting her way, what sounds she’s picking up, what insect is flitting across her field of vision—and I’ll think: Ah, right now; that’s what it’s like to live right now. There’s something very Zen about the experience of being with a dog in such a setting, something about the dog’s orientation in the tangible here and now that rubs off on you, cues you in to sounds and smells and sights, eases temporal human concerns—what happened two hours or two months ago, what’s going to happen two hours or two months later—into the background. Focus shifts; perspective returns. You find yourself exercising two skills that are so elusive in the human world: the ability to live in the present, and the ability to share silence. Snapshot of peace.
Next, train your camera on something more specific: the dog’s coat, his fur. “Dogs are so tactile.” My friend Tom says this one day in his kitchen as he reaches down and scratches Cody, his Australian shepherd, and I think about Michelle with her Maltese, Andrew with his yellow Lab, Grace on the porch steps with her malamute. I think about the importance of touch, and about how nettlesome it can be in the human world, and I look at Tom’s dog. Cody is the kind of creature who lives to be touched: if you’re sitting near him, he’ll often come up, crane his neck toward you, and just hold his head a few inches above your lap, a look of the most earnest expectancy in his expression, as though he’s presenting himself to you like a gift. If you start to pet him, the look will shift from anticipation to gratitude and then bliss: ears back, mouth open in a smile, tiny stub from his docked tail in a nonstop wiggle. His whole body seems to say, “Pet me! Thank you! This is good!” and it can feel both startling and curative to be on the receiving end of that message. Our own culture is so dubious and suspect about touch, so rule-bound and witholding. Imagine reaching out to scratch a colleague behind the ears every time the impulse for physical contact hits you; imagine going up to friends and randomly hugging them or tousling their hair. Behavior that would alienate humans (or get you arrested) is perfectly permissible with dogs, welcomed and solicited. Our need to self-censor vanishes in their company; touch is at our whim and need not be negotiated; in a sense, we are allowed to inhabit the physical world the way they do: openly, without self-consciousness.
This appears to be true across genders: in clinical observations of clients in the waiting room of a veterinary clinic, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that both men and women petted their dogs for similar lengths of time and with little difference in frequency. Their gestures were consistent, too: similar numbers of men and women stroked, scratched, and massaged their dogs, or rested a hand on the animal’s neck, or sat with their arm around the dog, leading the researchers to conclude that dogs may have a particularly powerful role for men, especially those who tend to confuse touch with sexual overtures or possessiveness: “A pet may be the only being that a man, trained in the macho code, can touch with affection.”
Alan Beck and Aaron Katcher suggest that the component of touch—our ability to touch dogs and their ability to touch us—gives the relationship between human and dog a quality of therapeutic intimacy, one that’s both like and unlike the kind you might find with a traditional therapist. “A Rogerian analyst,” they write, referring to the nondirective approach first advanced by psychiatrist Carl Rogers, “is not unlike a Labrador retriever.” Indeed, the parallels between analytical and canine behavior are striking. Like an analyst, a Lab will not guide your conversation. He will not offer opinions or criticisms or tell you what to do; instead, he will be attentive but silent, observing you with an empathic gaze. Author Jerome K. Jerome put it slightly differently: “Dogs,” he wrote, “never talk about themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep up an appearance of being interested in the conversation.” The big difference between dogs and therapists, of course, is that the dog can jump up and lick you, nuzzle you with his snout, let you kiss and hug him anytime the impulse strikes. “The difficult art in therapy,” write Beck and Katcher, “is achieving a mutual feeling of intimacy without touching.” With a dog, this is a piece of cake.
Another big difference between the Lab and the analyst: it’s a lot easier to figure out what the retriever is thinking. My trainer, Kathy de Natale, lives outside of Boston with her husband and two German shepherd dogs. When I ask her why she’s so drawn to dogs, what makes living and working with them so gratifying, she answers in a word: “Honesty. I love the honesty of the dog.” Kathy herself is a very down-to-earth and straightforward woman, neither gooey nor sentimental when it comes to dogs, so she means this in the most literal way: with a dog, what you see is what you get. “Relationships with people are never so simple,” she says. “There’s so much to get through as a human that by the time we get to be adults, we’re all carrying around all this baggage. But with a dog, you don’t have to wade through a lot of garbage to get to what’s real.” I nod, listening to her, and think about how relieving that degree of clarity can be. Lucille wouldn’t know a repressed emotion if it hit her on the head like an errant Frisbee. She wants her dinner, she sits on the kitchen floor and stares at her bowl. She wants a rawhide chew stick, she goes over to the drawer where she knows they are kept and she sits and stares at that. The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied. If you’ve spent a lifetime navigating the landscape of human relationships, characterized as it can be by covertness and ambivalence and indirection, this can be an enormous relief.
So can the dog’s lack of self-consciousness. Aaron Katcher has a wonderful childhood memory of being in his grandparents’ living room, the staid and sober adults engaged in an elevated discussion abou
t morality and religion while the family’s Great Dane lay by the fire calmly licking his genitals. This is the kind of canine behavior that makes some people squirm, at least publicly: dogs, at least by our standards, can be so shameless. They lick and hump and sniff each other; they relieve themselves in public; they blithely act out all our repressed instincts and appetites; they are, Beck and Katcher point out, like four-legged embodiments of the human id. But if we get a bit embarrassed when a dog starts sniffing another dog’s butt or mounting a visitor’s thigh, I also think we also get a certain vicarious satisfaction out of their freedom, their capacity to so freely flout our conventions. “We are drawn to dogs,” wrote George Bird Evans in Troubles with Bird Dogs, “because they are the uninhibited creatures we might be if we weren’t certain we knew better.”
Sometimes that lack of inhibition rubs off on us: the dog’s freedom becomes our freedom. “I dance in front of my dog.” A woman named Linda, forty-five, tells me this over the phone in a breathless voice, then adds, “You have to understand: I don’t dance. I don’t think I’ve danced in public since junior high. I’m like the most self-conscious person on the planet.” Her dog, a scruffy black terrier mix named Cookie, is the one creature with whom Linda’s reserve crumbles. “That’s what I love so much about him,” she says. “I can act like a raving lunatic in front of him, and I just don’t think about it.”
About a year ago I met with a blind woman named Barbara, thirty-seven, who lives with a guide dog named Homer, a two-year-old yellow Lab, and I expected her to describe slightly different sources of comfort: the particular levels of trust and communication you develop with a dog you depend on; the sense of partnership. She touched on those subjects—the two of them are “a team”; Homer is a critical symbol of mobility to her—but as she sat on her living-room floor with the dog and talked about their relationship, she returned far more often to the themes of simple joys: the pleasure of living with such an accepting and uncomplicated creature, the sweet earnestness of the dog, the freedom she feels in his presence to be herself. “It’s so hard to talk about dogs without using clichés,” she said, “but they really are best friends.”
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