by Jon Katz
Like many of the Dog People, part of Laurie’s dog love seemed to flow from a growing conviction that vets and dog-food companies were engaged in a greedy conspiracy that threatened dogs’ welfare. The Net had fueled this view: much of her information about canine health came from Internet mailing lists suggesting miraculous alternatives to traditional veterinary care. Laurie had grown almost paranoid about commercial foods and medicines, refused to give her dogs their recommended shots, wouldn’t feed them kibble or canned food. Vets were useful only in dire emergencies—broken bones, savage bites. Otherwise, Laurie and her friends firmly believed in herbal remedies and holistic diets. Many of her dogs would be dead, she told me, if not for the alternative approaches the Dog People shared.
This was a significant difference. The vets I’ve met are serious, sympathetic, highly skilled, and quite dedicated despite their profession’s grueling hours, emotional intensity, and relatively low pay and status. I rely on their counsel and have rarely regretted it. My dogs have always thrived on store-bought kibble, and I’m not interested in baking them organic treats. I understand that all companies are interested in the bottom line, yet I’m hard-pressed to believe that it’s in the economic interests of pet-food manufacturers to poison dogs.
Laurie—again, like many Dog People I knew—had fantasies about eventually running some dog-related business that would enable her to buy more land, thus have still more dogs. She dreamed of hundreds of remote acres with hundreds of dogs, a literal sanctuary where they could all live out their lives with room to run and no end of loving care.
I doubted she’d find that mythical place, and I think she doubted it, too, but the fantasy kept her going. Perhaps one day she could underwrite the plan by marketing her organic biscuits nationwide. For now, she baked them at home for friends. (Without preservatives, they had to be consumed quickly or frozen.)
It didn’t surprise me that Laurie identified with the complex and mercurial Orson, because he was something of a rescue, although I’ve become uncomfortable with that term, overused as it is. She saw the same thing I did in this dog: a great and loving heart that had every right to be angry and hard, but wasn’t.
Her own life, past and present, was difficult, a litany of abuse, bad luck, and hard times. Like Orson, though, she had made a choice; she had chosen to love. Like him, she could easily have been bitter and resentful; instead, however battered, she had chosen a caring life. There was something stirring in that.
But she had also made a fateful decision: she had largely abandoned humans, even the idea of human companionship. “I had a choice,” she said simply. “I chose dogs. They saved me.”
I didn’t want to make that choice.
Laurie was in her early fifties. Ten years earlier, she’d finally summoned the strength to end a nightmarish marriage that capped a brutally difficult childhood. A nurse by training, she’d worked for years in hospitals around Philadelphia, until she wearied of bureaucracies and suffering; her work with humans had proved less rewarding than her work with dogs. She’d waited for her three children to grow up and scatter around the country, then scavenged everything she’d been saving for years and moved upstate into her charmless but affordably low-maintenance split-level. She struck me as sad; yet she insisted she was finally happy.
She’d been swallowed up by dog love, and judging from her e-mail—she got hundreds of messages a day from her various lists—she was far from alone. I hated to think what her life might have been like without dogs.
She barely knew any nondog people any longer, nor would she have much to say to them. She rarely read a paper and had little time for TV, although she often had Animal Planet on as she tended to her brood. Yet she read every book about dogs that she could afford, and, as she put it, “many that I can’t.”
There was even a Dog Person economy. Laurie bartered goods and services—housepainting, dog-sitting, plumbing, and maintenance, sometimes even food—with other Dog People living nearby. “When somebody gets sick, one of us takes care of their dogs. If there’s a frozen pipe, we all come and clean up. We grow vegetables and share them. We buy our food together at co-ops. It’s the only way we can live.”
Only Dog People could truly understand other Dog People. Most people—including her own children and grandchildren—didn’t feel comfortable visiting, so they didn’t. “And I understand it, I do,” Laurie admitted. “Who wants a dozen dogs, some of them out of their minds, around little kids? My house is smelly. I have allergies—I know how bad the hair is—so I’m on medication all year. It’s not a good thing, but I accept it. It’s the price, and you know what? I’ll live with it.”
Her statement stuck with me. I was also paying a price for this dog adventure. It was costing lots of money, much more than I expected. It sometimes got lonely and strange. I missed my wife and daughter constantly. The responsibility of caring for so many animals weighed on me, and there was never time enough to do all the things that needed doing. The border collies required plenty of care in their own right—exercise, feeding, training, grooming. With Rose, I had a rare chance to train a great new dog right, to show real patience, tolerance, affection; I was determined not to screw it up. But I was also doubtful.
The reality of middle age had hit me hard at the farm. My knees ached; my bad ankle throbbed continuously; my skin cracked and bled as the weather turned. I was almost always cold or wet, bitten by bugs or choking on dust from hay; I wore Band-Aids all over to cover blisters, welts, cuts, and burns. I dreaded the arrival of true winter. Even five years earlier, country life wouldn’t have felt so hard. Now, many times it seemed beyond me.
It took almost three hours just to drive to the nearest supermarket, shop, return, and unpack everything. Sometimes it was easier to just stand at the kitchen counter with a bowl of cold cereal for dinner. When I crawled into bed, I had to remember to take off my glasses before I lay down, otherwise they’d still be on my face in the morning.
How did real farmers survive, I kept asking myself. How did Laurie? Strenuous as I was finding it to care for the sheep and donkeys, overseeing eleven screwed-up dogs was probably no simpler. Yet she saw herself as having traded misery for nirvana.
“I miss my kids . . . a lot,” Laurie confessed once. “But at the same time, I see them as part of my past, to be honest. Some people would be horrified. I mean, I am a mother. But the dogs are my kids now.”
She’d moved upstate because her old working-class row house didn’t have much of a yard and she wanted to be able to take in the “dogs from hell,” as she put it, the dogs that nobody else could handle. They truly needed her, calling on every nurturing gene in her body, and that was enough.
She haunted local vets’ offices and shelters and trawled Internet mailing lists looking for sick, abandoned, and abused dogs. When she found them, she took them in, loved them, “fostered” them, fed them special diets, and tried to find them homes—sort of. Some of her dogs were far beyond adoption, and she knew it. But she and her friends maintained an unwavering “no-kill” policy. No dog Laurie took in would ever be put down, no matter what it did. If she couldn’t retrain or re-home a dog, Laurie kept it.
She’d steeled herself to accept these gains and losses. Some dogs died of health problems, one or two escaped, and every now and then one got killed by another. Yet she couldn’t, it seemed, be busier, more engaged, or more fulfilled. She was wedded to her dogs for life, for richer but mostly for poorer, in sickness and in health.
I WAS CONSCIOUS FROM THE BEGINNING, OF COURSE, THAT SHE reminded me of my sister.
Jane is two years older than I am. We have loved each other all our lives, but we were especially close when we were young, thrown together in tough times.
Our family was falling apart and she was descending into a life marked by pain, emotional troubles, and crisis. My parents, like most, did the best they could, but not nearly enough.
As her life spiraled into a series of breakdowns, obsessions, and addictions, we mutual
ly recognized that it had simply become too painful for us to talk to or see each other.
When I moved to the farm, I hadn’t seen Jane in more than a decade and might not have recognized her if I’d run into her on the street. We hadn’t even spoken much by phone in years. She had only seen my daughter a handful of times, though each reminded me of the other in their humor and intelligence.
Witnessing her near-destruction, her struggles to care for her children, her collapsed marriage, her valiant but unsuccessful effort to become a doctor, her complete immersion in serial obsessions from punk rock to Catholicism and now dogs—plus my own estrangement from the person I’d been closest to—was the tragedy of my life.
Watching her disintegrate was something I’ve never figured out how to surmount. I’d seriously considered all the enduring clichés—forgive your parents, let the past go, move on with your life. But I never could, not completely.
My fruitless efforts to get Jane help left me troubled, isolated, estranged from almost all authority—familial, religious, educational. I suffer, of course, from many of the same ills that have afflicted her—anxiety, depression, anger. Although she had in many ways moved beyond that awful drama, I never fully have. In my mid-fifties, I doubt I ever will.
I feel that loss—the loss of my sister, the destruction of our family—every day. It surfaces in the way I relate to my own daughter, in the way I respond to other children, in every encounter with siblings who move through life loving and worrying about one another. For lucky people, family is the one thing you can always count on. For Jane and me, it was the thing you never could. With time and a great deal of effort and help, I’ve begun to write a different family story for myself. But even as I struggled to do that, I could never fully escape the one I was born into.
As Jane began to recover and put a life together, I was vaguely aware that she’d become deeply enmeshed in dog rescue. My life had taken a somewhat similar turn, also relatively late in life. I had published ten books before I thought to write about dogs; Jane was well into her forties before she got her first rescue dog. But her involvement had grown considerably more consuming.
When Jane did communicate with me from time to time, it was to e-mail me pictures of her latest dog or to relate another’s humorous adventure. She told story after story about a dog behaving adorably or idiosyncratically.
Those stories always felt oddly discordant, given our own now-distant relationship. Rarely did she ask about my family or my work. But I understood that this was what allowed her to survive, and her being alive at all was a miracle. And so it was left, for years.
Jane lived somewhat like Laurie, happiest in the company of other Dog People, somehow rebuilding or reworking her own mangled life through the lives of sick, needy creatures. She loved them powerfully, creating special diets, soothing them through grievous illnesses, enfolding them in love and attention. You didn’t have to be a shrink to notice that she was giving her dogs the kind of life she’d never been given herself. But if she sensed the connection, she didn’t want to talk about it. This was the happiest she’d felt in years. Why pick at it?
“It’s why I didn’t go and get a gun and shoot somebody,” she told me once. “We all get by the best we can. This is how I get by.”
She spoke so passionately about her dogs that it sometimes made me uncomfortable, even resentful. Had she moved past all her pain to lose herself in dog love, while I refused to forgive the world for what had happened to her?
We barely spoke, yet she had unlimited time and affection for strange dogs that weren’t even hers. She’d never suggested coming to see me, but routinely drove hundreds of miles to pick up some Newfoundland with heart disease. She’d never shown much concern about my problems, yet there wasn’t a troubled mutt she wouldn’t open her home and heart to.
This was unfair. I knew my sister loved me. I knew she was doing the best she could. I even knew dogs were saving her life. Like Laurie, she took in the lost causes of the dog world—the biters, the misanthropes, the crippled. As she had moved away from me, she had moved toward them.
I missed Jane, as I sometimes ached for Paula and Emma. Our family crises had taken her from me, and I had let her go; now, after she’d survived, dogs were keeping her away all over again. People often told me how dogs presented a wonderful way for humans to connect with other humans. I wondered. Often, I feared that dogs were a way for humans to leave other humans behind.
Like Laurie, Jane had left a husband and kids behind. Like Laurie, she missed her children and wished they were part of her life, but was prepared to live with the possibility that they never would be.
When my sister talked about her dogs, she became animated and chatty, describing their histories and misadventures. But when the conversation drifted away from dogs, she grew restless. She didn’t seem to grasp that I was less interested in her dogs than in her. “You’ve got to see Pudge,” she told me several times. “You’ve got to meet them all.”
I didn’t really want to meet them. When we began talking regularly again after years of near-silence, just after I’d moved to the farm in the fall, she told me how eager she was to drive to Hebron with her dogs. My heart sank at the thought of my intense border collies with her herd of Newfies and others. I was nearly overwhelmed struggling to care for the dogs and sheep and donkeys. If there were one more animal spewing waste on the farm, I sometimes thought, it would sink and so would I. How could my sister not sense my fatigue, even panic? But it seemed inconceivable to her to go anywhere without bringing eight or nine dogs.
I loved my own dogs dearly, and my work now centered on writing about dogs. But I don’t want them to occupy so central a role. My wife and daughter, friends and books are more important to me. I don’t want to see dogs the same way I see people; I don’t want dogs to replace or supplant them. There are some holes even dogs can’t fill.
To me, dogs offer a chance to keep working at the issues that prevent me from attaching to other human beings—impatience, judgmentalism, intolerance, anger. I hope dogs lead me toward, not away from, people. One reason I hope they help me to become a better human is so that I can apply those lessons to life with humans.
But in my initial discouragement over this aspect of my relationship with my sister, I’d forgotten that relationships can change, and that change takes effort. I’d also almost forgotten what I loved about my sister in the first place. Over the next few months, her sensitivity, humor, and raw intelligence led us into an ongoing conversation—though only on the telephone—about our lives and the place dogs had taken up in them.
When she got laid off from the software-development job she’d had for many years, I urged her to consider moving out of the Boston area, to a place with some land—like Laurie, whom I told Jane about. Jane, too, could have room for her dogs, a cheaper and therefore less stressful life, and the kind of community she’d been seeking much of her life. She could perhaps even make a living from working with dogs, as Laurie and her friends were more or less managing to do. It wouldn’t be easy. Life in rural areas could be discouragingly harsh, as I was learning. But it was possible, and this was the perfect time to consider a move.
We also began to talk about human-animal attachment, something I’d been studying for some years now. She seemed to me to be reworking earlier traumas through her dogs, I told her; to some degree, I probably was also. But I confessed that her perspective concerned me, that dog love might have thrown off the balance in her life.
If she really wanted to connect more with humans, as she claimed, then shouldn’t she consider how caring for numerous sick and troubled rescue dogs, which hemmed her in, might make that more difficult? Didn’t she realize, for example, that I felt overwhelmed at times on the farm? That showing up with a van full of Newfoundlands wasn’t a way for us to reunite? Repeatedly, Jane had offered to come help me on the farm. Yet her suggestion didn’t seem real to me, tied as she was to her dogs.
This was an astonishing convers
ation to be having with my sister. During her worst troubles, it wasn’t possible to talk with her. Now, she was listening intently, groping toward change, welcoming my interest.
It was a hallmark of our family life that no one ever helped anyone solve anything. Bringing your problems to the family just made things worse, sparking guilt, hysteria, or recrimination.
So I was amazed when Jane called me one night and quietly told me that she was buying a house on three acres in upstate New York, several hours west of Hebron. She’d found the place online through another dog person. A woman who had as many dogs as she did would sell the house—already marked by scents and stains—only to another dog person. They’d talked on the phone, and Jane had made the long drive to look at the house. Dog People from adjoining towns and farms—women much like her, with similar pasts and similar packs of dogs—came to meet her, tell her about the area, introduce their dogs.
“I realized when we sat down to dinner,” Jane told me, “that it had been so long since anyone had invited me to dinner that I couldn’t remember the last time.” She couldn’t see my eyes tearing. “These people, these dog people, they were my new community, my friends. I felt completely at home there.”
And the new house, perfect for her dogs, opened onto a lake, was surrounded by woods, and had a roomy fenced yard.
Jane further surprised me a few weeks later when she called to say that she’d decided to find new homes for two of her smaller charges that were aggressive with other dogs and difficult to care for.
She had thought a lot about our talks. Dogs were the center of her life now, she said; that was true, and she wanted to keep it that way.
“But you don’t see that dogs are the reason we are talking,” she pointed out. “Taking care of these dogs has opened me up, forced me out of myself. I have lots of work to do, still, but the dogs aren’t taking me away from people. They are bringing me to people like you, and maybe one day back to my kids as well. If I can learn how to love and care for them, then maybe I can bring that to my other relationships.”