The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Such a sweeping change of heart, and values, is unlikely amongst our species, despite the fact that, though the Judeo-Christian religion condones the dominion of mankind over all the other animals, science cannot sustain such a view. What, I have to ask, in the Darwinian theory of evolution, posits human beings are at the top of the heap? If one believes in evolution then one must accept the fact that the “tree of life” is laterally designed, branches branching branches branching branches, no one unwinding design “better” than any other.

  That people tend to believe their kind have value above and beyond nonhuman animals is an assumption for which there is not a lot of convincing evidence, an assumption that may have served our species well, up to a point, up to this particular point, facing, as we are, ever-rising amounts of greenhouse gases, scientists now saying that we have done irreversible damage to the Arctic’s ecosystems and that, within just a few years, CO2 will be at 450 parts per million, at which point we’ll be past the tipping point and well on our way to a world vastly imbalanced and possibly not viable, with weather so labile crops will fail, droughts will crack the parched surface of the earth, while the tundra steeps in its own wet rot, releasing, as it does, ever more methane into our already densely saturated atmosphere.

  Even though some, maybe most, don’t think of the disaster looming just over the line, I believe we sense it in our brains and in our bones; we smell it in the congestion of our coughing cars, in the foul smog that casts its pall above some cities, and in the eerie yet lovely sight of pink blooms set on a snow-crusted branch, early spring, time and time again.

  I wonder if the willingness of more and more Homo sapiens to put their animal’s welfare on par with, or even above, that of themselves and their kin, is a sign of a slow sea change caused in part by our dawning awareness of global warming, its possible role in disasters we as a human community have lately faced, along with a sense of our foreshortened future. Are we not, in some sense, feeling our smallness, shedding, like any good mammal, the gleaming coat of our supposed superiority as we face, over and over again, evidence of our extreme mistakes? How can we believe we have god-given dominion over all the other animals on this planet in light of our spillage and spoilage, the seas slicked with oil, blackened birds washed ashore, not once, not twice, but in one way or another, over and over again. A long, long time ago Copernicus suggested that human beings were not at the center of our solar system, and by doing so he shook the souls we say we have to their ethereal roots. There is, as of yet, no single scientist who has done for our relationships to life forms on earth what Copernicus did to our relationship to the stars in the sky. That doesn’t mean, however, that there have not been some especially resonant voices, one of the earliest ones belonging to philosopher Jeremy Bentham who wrote, in 1796, in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:

  The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty for discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

  More recently philosophers such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer have argued against what they call “speciesism,” the tendency to assign value or give consideration based on a being’s species membership. In speciesism, physical differences are given moral weight. For Singer, as for Bentham, the issue is almost always one of sentience and suffering. In his book Practical Ethics Singer writes:

  Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. The white racists who supported slavery typically did not give the suffering of Africans as much weight as they gave to the suffering of Europeans. Similarly speciesists give greater weight to the interests of members of their own species when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of other species. Human speciesists do not accept that pain is as bad when it is felt by pigs or mice as when it is felt by humans.

  In Singer’s world, sentience and suffering are the key concepts, and they lead to what some might say are outrageous claims. For instance, if one had to inflict pain on either a brain-dead infant or, let’s say, a normal mature dog, in Singer’s world (as in my own) one would choose (regrettably but inevitably) the brain-dead infant, because the human brain-dead infant cannot suffer in the same capacity as can the dog. Speaking of which, dogs are often used in animal experimentation, and animal experimentation is often defended by claims that critical cures for humans are being developed, and how could one deny, let’s say, a baby, its cure for, say, leukemia, on the one hand, while saving some mutt on the other? Singer might argue by pointing out that not too long ago blacks were called “mutts” and much worse. Now that we have made the mental switch that allows people to see blacks as human beings, however, it would be outrageous were we to suggest that we perform painful experiments on “people of color” in the hope of saving some white child, even though we have no choice but to admit that not so very long ago we saw slaves as “animals” and used them for whatever we needed, with no thought to their suffering. “But,” claims the average middle-class American at the dawn of the new millennium, “but would you let hundreds, thousands, millions die if a single animal experiment could save them?” Singer’s retort, from his book Animal Liberation:

  The way to reply to this hypothetical question is to pose another: Would the experimenters be prepared to carry out their experiment on a human orphan under six months old if that were the only way to save thousands of lives?

  If the experimenters would not be prepared to use a human infant then their readiness to use nonhuman animals reveals an unjustifiable form of discrimination on the basis of species, since adult apes, monkey, dogs, cats, rats, and other animals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing, and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain as a human infant. (I have specified that the human infant be an orphan, to avoid the complications of the feelings of parents. Specifying the case in this way is, if anything, overgenerous to those defending the use of nonhuman animals in experiments, since mammals intended for experimental use are usually separated from their mothers at an early age….)

  So far as we know, human infants possess no morally relevant characteristic to a higher degree than adult nonhuman animals.

  It boggles the brains of some to consider their dog as equal to their daughter, and, indeed, from our embedded human consciousness, it isn’t so. But when we rise above our immanence, we see, we can see, a very different picture. When we consider who and what we are, not from our own eyes but from the perhaps point of view (if I may say so) of “the Universe” or, to be more specific, of evolution and its awesome but blind engine, another sort of story emerges. Up here, on high, the galaxies streaming past us, we can see that evolution is arbitrary, and its array of vast and amazing forms is simply the result of adaptation to whatever environmental conditions happen to prevail. We were created, in other words, not because we possess some special powers over and above the other species with whom we inhabit this earth, but because, just like every other species who inhabits this earth, we have been able to make our mutations work in and for the world as we have found it.

  These facts sting the human heart, and one might well argue tha
t the sting itself is evidence of our superiority, because dogs, after all, don’t fret about their relative place in a manmade hierarchy, but then again, do they? They don’t. One can spend weeks, months, years, playing philosophical ping-pong on these points, but, in a story about animals, it seems especially fair to just cut to the chase. Here we are, then, in dew-drenched Oregon, rain sparkling on the leaves of all the trees. Roger Fouts, a primate specialist, has a lab where the walls are windows looking out onto the saturated land, where chimps play on ropes he’s hung from big, bent branches of old-growth oaks and alders.

  “It is a fundamental misperception,” Fouts says to me, “to think human life has more value than any other life form. I raise chimpanzees. Here’s how to think of it. Picture you holding your mother’s hand, and then your mother holding your grandmother’s hand, your grandmother holding your great-grandmother’s hand, your great-grandmother holding your great-great-grandmother’s hand. At some point in your family line, whether you like it or not, one of your great-great-great-grandparents would be holding the hand of a chimpanzee.”

  I like to hold my dogs’ paws. Their paws are rough, scaly, the skin cracked like quaked earth, the nails smooth and curved in their sharpness. A dog’s nails can be difficult to cut because, unlike humans, they have veins in them, and if you snip too low, a bead of blood wells up and the animal winces in a way that is hard to hear. I did this to Lila once, cut too close to the base, cut the blue-violet vein that threads the nacreous nail of this beautiful beast I call mine. I call her mine not because I own her but because I love her. I call her mine as I call mine my children, my husband, my self. She is mine for as long as she is Lila, which amounts to no more than a nanosecond in the scheme of things, and when that second passes, she, like us all, will undergo the phenomenal changing of categories that we call death. But until she does, I will care for her with everything I have. I will struggle to divide up my limited resources in the best way I can. I will admire her daily, as I do to all those I love, and why? That is the question I have not answered here, the question my husband always asks.

  Just a few weeks into her blindness, we no longer argue about the cost of her medications, not because we’ve reached consensus but because we know what the other will say, and so there is no need. Thus, my husband no longer asks if it is right to so love a dog as he knows my answer already. “Yes, it is right,” or, “One has yet to offer me any scientific proof that animals mean less than we do, so it is certainly not wrong.”

  My husband’s question for me now, when he can question, when he is not pulled into some private place of pain, unable, like Lila, to feel his way past the curved contours of a world made small by suffering, his question for me now, as he sits in his study, is simply why? After all, Lila farts and howls, drools and poops, her yearly excrement (he is calculating again, picture him, late at night, midsummer, the air heavy and wet, blind Lila savoring rawhide smeared with peanut butter) weighing in at four hundred pounds of crap. And yours? I retort. How much does your shit weigh? As for mine—a lot.

  His question, however, is good. Why? I don’t know. What I do know is that when I look into Lila’s now-blind eyes I see amazing things. I see the wildness of the wolf; I see humans finding fire, the Pliocene plains, millions of molecules, the softest snout; I see an animal walk out of the water: a single cell split; I see the engine of evolution, and if I listen closely I think I can hear it too, a low continuous hum—that is the world I hear—a sound that doesn’t stop, I must believe, even if, or when, we do.

  2: Fixed

  Although he is usually a kind man, a man, we now know, who lets his children race their tiny cars around the road ring called his bald spot, my husband nevertheless insists, as he always has, that an animal’s worth is roughly equivalent to its edibility. If you can carve, slice, boil, or bake the beast, then it is generally welcome in our home, packaged and frozen or live and wild; but if the animal presents no potential for consumption of the gastrointestinal sort, then in my husband’s mind the life form is an excess weight on the world, an evolutionary glitch that serves no purpose except to clutter our already jam-packed planet. Recently I’ve begun to think his attitude has something to do with the fact that, as a child, he watched his scientist mother drain the blood from rabbits regularly sacrificed for experiments, the soft carcasses tossed away in a floppy heap. As a seven-year-old child, I had a white rabbit, an enormous overgrown rabbit with pale pink eyes and a quashed nose that continuously quivered in response to the scents around her. I named my rabbit Boul de Neige, which means “snowball” in French, and this rabbit became a companion more important to me than any human at the time. Boul de Neige rode in my bike basket when I pedaled or in the baby carriage when I was in a maternal mood, a bonnet on her head and a blanket over her hunched form. Boul de Neige learned to take a collar and a leash, and hopped alongside me on the sidewalks of the Golden Ghetto, and although it seems impossible to believe now, she also learned a few commands, like “Sit!” and “Come!” which she did, bounding to me when I called from across our lawn, her ears streaming backwards like braids, her huge floppy paws uplifted so I could see their undersides as she galloped, thick and soft as slippers. Boul de Neige got to know her name, and when tired, she lay her fragile bony head in my lap, and I would stroke her skull and feel what a rabbit felt like; the head hard underneath the fluff of white fur, the seams where the plates had fused. Long after Boul de Neige died, I saw a picture of a rabbit’s brain hanging in a hall at Harvard; it was so tiny, truly a pea on a slender stem, barely big enough for dreams, never mind love. And yet, the rabbit had loved me, loved me largely and well. Over the years, as I grew up, I came to understand that this was not the point. Whether animals can love, or grieve, or hope, is far less important than the fact that they elicit these emotions in us. What I learned from Boul de Neige was that I can love, and grieve, and hope, and so it was that I grew into my humanity, traveling the tunnels dug for me by some small, dumb beast. I am an animal lover. I say this in no small way. I don’t mean I enjoy animals, or find them entertaining, or cute. Nor do I mean that I care for animals as accessories, a peripheral part of a well-lived life. What I mean is that animals—especially mammals, and not especially insects—enchant me and inhabit me. I feel as strong a connection to the cat in the cornfield or the white malamute in the park as I do to the members of my own species, defined as we are by tools and looms, smoke and steel, highways and homes and coffins. I understand that I speak from a position of privilege. I understand that if I were a struggling farmer whose chickens were always swallowed by coyotes, or a villager in Africa, hunted regularly by hungry lions, I might feel quite differently on the subject; I perhaps would be singing, as they say, a new tune. I am thankful for the simplicity of this song. I am also aware that its simplicity is in its surface. Underneath lurk a million dilemmas. Is my attachment to animals a sign of some pathology, a flawed capacity for human intimacy? What is the difference between love and sentimentality? What would it mean if I actually care as much for the family dogs as I do for my husband, or, worse, my … children? Do I perhaps lack the very humanity I just claimed was mine? Am I a wolf dressed up as a lover, a mother? As I write this I can hear, downstairs, the dogs as they awaken. Their collars jangle; their claws click on the floor. The younger dog is blind. She has glaucoma. It’s been four years now since she lost her sight completely, and much has come from the dark swamp of her unseeing, things for my husband and also for me, things we never expected. The blind dog’s name is Lila Tov, which means good night in Hebrew. I hope, for her unseeing sake, that this is so.

  If you are a middle-aged woman living in a suburb or a city in the United States of America, than chances are good that your chosen animal of adoration will be a dog. I met my husband before I met my dogs, Lila and Musashi, and my husband’s soothing ways gave me no reason to think he was one of those speciesists, so aptly named by Peter Singer, boxed in by his own human brain. Benjamin, an engineer by trade and a che
mist by avocation, used to tell me tales about amanita muscaria, which is a fancy way of saying mushrooms. I met him in the wet, humid summer of 1990, the summer Nelson Mandela came to Boston and preached peace and everywhere the domed caps of mushrooms were popping up in the rain-fed fields. We found enormous ears of mushrooms growing along the rotting trunks of fallen trees, and we found minuscule mushrooms huddled at the base of a stockade fence, and he picked one, tweezing it free with his fingers and putting it in my palm. “In Russia,” Benjamin told me, “mushrooms are signs of good luck. The Siberians used to believe that at night mushrooms become reindeer.”

  It was easy to fall in love with Benjamin; he made the world seem elfin with his curious assortment of facts about plants and animals and star-shaped molecules he made from marshmallows and toothpicks so we could eat estrogen and air. He was, as I’ve said, a kind man.

  And yet, if that is so, than why is it so difficult for me now to recollect the forms his caring took? What makes a man gentle? Why are some beings so easy to love, while others feel so serrated? And if love is easy—as in the love one woman has for her copper-colored dogs—is it love she in fact feels or something simpler, like affection? What I question is the question: Why the need to define love in the first place? I suppose it proves that I am human. A long time ago Linnaeus created categories within categories within categories—kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species—and that is how he housed the beings with whom we share our planet. We do not know of any other animal except the human who is so in need of boxes, so desperate for the four curt corners that can be rendered beautifully, as in in the painting I saw the other day, a glowing pink box against a deep-blue background, the lid slightly lifted and the emanating light suggesting that anything might be inside: birds, stars, clocks, pearls; the box gives birth to the whole of our human world. From the box, paradoxically, comes the infinite warp we walk in.