Talking to Animals

by Jon Katz

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “You are too young to have a puppy, and I have enough work to do.” Despite her response, I never doubted for a second that she would eventually say yes. This was just the requisite dialogue we had to get through.

  She said no at least two or three more times. She sounded angry, aggrieved. Who would be responsible for the dog? Clean up after it? There was no money for vet bills. She didn’t want any dog in the living room or near the furniture, or tracking up the floors or raiding the garbage cans. Who would be responsible for that?

  I knew that my mother loved dogs; she was always stopping to pet them and coo at them. I knew how much she had loved King, and how sad she seemed when he was gone, even though she never spoke of it.

  Back then, and for many thousands of years before, dogs lived at the periphery of life, not at the center. It is hard to even imagine a time when dogs and cats were not so intensely a part of our emotional lives. When they were kept around mainly to keep burglars away or catch mice.

  America was in the midst of a great transition in the human–animal bond after World War II. Our relationship with animals was changing. The working animal was giving way to machines and cars; the wild animal was being subsumed by human development; the postwar period marked the beginning of the rise of the pet. The pet became a member of the family, and a multibillion-dollar phenomenon that has profoundly affected the way we live.

  When I was a kid, dogs did not have human names and were not considered children. Animals were not family members. It would have been outrageous to suggest they were.

  Dogs ate table scraps and often got hit by cars or vanished. If they got sick, they most often died, were put down, or, if one lived in the country, were taken out back and shot. There were no treats, no toys, no animal insurance plans. People got bit all the time, and female dogs had litter after litter of puppies, usually distributed free to neighbors and relatives.

  My mother’s dance with me went on for an hour or so, as I made one pledge after another. I’ll take the dog out. I’ll train him. I’ll clean up, I promise. I’m sure she knew better; I know she wanted me to be happy. I saw her work her way through sputtering complaint to a softer stance.

  I told my mother how much I wanted the dog, how much it would mean to me. I imagine she thought a puppy would be good for me, since she was always urging me to “step outside” of myself and join the world beyond my room, where I was invariably holed up with my books and my tropical fish.

  So without exactly being agreed to, it was agreed to. She must have talked with my father about it. Nobody said no, which in that world meant yes. I could barely get through the week or sleep, I was so distracted with thoughts of my puppy. I named him Lucky because of my luck, not his. His entry into my life marked a turning point that would change the way I thought of myself.

  That Sunday night, my mother loaned me her big old bell alarm clock, whose ticking kept me awake before the alarm had a chance to go off. “Good luck,” she said. “Be careful crossing the streets in the dark.”

  Most people who love their dogs are not inclined to dwell too much on why, or how their intensity of feeling came to be. In Darwinian terms, dogs make no sense. We no longer need them for protection or help in hunting. But we love them more than ever.

  People often psychoanalyze dogs, trying to determine what they are feeling and thinking. But I always found it more interesting to apply that kind of analysis to the people who own them. I write as much or more about the people who love and live with dogs as I do about the dogs themselves. That has always been what fascinates me the most: Why do we choose the dogs we choose? Why do we love the cats that we love?

  This is where attachment theory comes in. Attachment theory is important when it comes to talking to animals and listening to them. It is the first step in learning to understand and communicate with them. Attachment theory helps us understand our need and love for them, the nature of our relationship with them. It is about self-awareness, the key to living with animals in a meaningful way. It explains everything that is important about Lucky and me.

  Attachment theory is the seminal study of the dynamics of long-term relationships and emotions in human beings. It is the joint work of psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1960s, and has generally supplanted Freudian theory as the primary theory about the development of human emotions.

  Bowlby revolutionized psychiatric thinking about emotions and early development, especially among preverbal children whose feelings are affected by fear, loss, or separation from their mothers. He believed that the template for most of our emotions—our security, anxiety, need for love—is shaped in the very first months and years of life, by the way in which our parents respond to our fears and loneliness.

  Animal behaviorists, psychologists, and trainers have applied attachment theory to our relationships with animals. In that way, it can help explain why we attach to a particular dog or cat, why we need to rescue some dogs or hunt with others, why we love small dogs or big ones, why we only want one or have a dozen.

  Attachment theory encourages us to understand the emotions and traits that we bring to the relationship. I once had a border collie named Homer, an awkward and fearful dog, or so I thought. He always seemed to lag behind, cowering at strange noises, other dogs, and loud people. I found myself yelling at him all the time, and soon I came to see I was making his problems worse. I was just not connecting with him in the way I connected with almost all of my dogs. One day—after shouting at him all during a walk to catch up, keep moving, stay with us—I stopped to ask myself why I was so angry with him.

  All of a sudden, on this cool and sunny morning, it hit me that the voice I was using was not my own—it was my father’s voice.

  My father was a good man, but a critical man. He believed lectures would solve the complex problems of children. He sometimes considered me to be a sissy, a disappointing child, bad at sports, with few friends, a bed wetter, awkward, and inept at any kind of physical work.

  When I was eleven, he threw a baseball at me during our forced “catch” sessions, and hit me in the head and knocked me down. When I came up crying, he told me I was weak and had no real strength of character. I walked off the field, and our relationship never really healed or recovered from that day. We didn’t speak comfortably again for three decades.

  Here was the key to what had been happening that morning with me and Homer. I was seeing Homer the same way that I was seen, as weak and fearful. A sissy. I never spoke to my daughter or any other person in that way, but here, with this poor little dog, it was coming out, the same voice, the same manner, the same anger and frustration. I realized that maybe, like me and my father, the two of us, Homer and I, just weren’t meant to have a healthy relationship.

  I was living in northern New Jersey at the time, and luckily, there was a young boy down the street, named Jeremy, who loved Homer. He thought he was the most wonderful dog in the world. So I gave Homer to Jeremy. With Jeremy, Homer got all of the love and affection and attention that I was not able to give him. Homer lived happily with Jeremy for twelve more years.

  Some of my friends and readers were shocked that I had given one of my dogs away. It is one of those taboos that exist in parts of the animal world. But I think it was the most loving thing I had ever done with an animal, and I had John Bowlby to thank for it. If I had not been familiar with attachment theory, I would never have been able to identify the root of why I had trouble connecting with Homer. I would have condemned this sweet creature to a life of tension and frustration.

  People ask me all the time how I choose a dog. Simple enough, I say. I get the dog I want, for my sake and theirs.

  Our emotional interactions with dogs are mostly a replay of our own early emotional development, and we generally treat dogs and other pets in one of two ways: the way we were treated as small children, or the way we wish we had been treated.

  Through the prism of attachment theory, I have since come to
understand why I am drawn to certain types of dogs—border collies and Labrador retrievers, in particular. The frenetic, ADD quality of border collies, their drive to work, their curiosity, and their great loyalty are traits I value, things that I need. The Labs offer me the unconditional love I have always sought in life, and not always found. They can slip into my life and stay there.

  Attachment theory asks us to look within ourselves, and through our own emotional histories, to understand our relationship with animals.

  I know that every animal I have loved has challenged me to look within myself, to understand my own intuitions, instincts, strengths, and weaknesses before I can begin to understand theirs.

  In 2012, I was speaking at a fund-raising dinner for an animal shelter in Palo Alto, California, and the discussion turned to attachment theory. A wealthy tech entrepreneur stood up and told me that he currently had four rescue dogs—all of them German shepherds with troubled pasts and behaviors ranging from aggression to anxiety.

  What, he asked, did attachment theory offer to explain his love of these dogs and his need to rescue them? His wife was always asking him why he had these dogs. What could he tell her?

  I said I was not a psychologist but I had encountered this many times before. I would guess that his mother was cold and aloof, and that he had been an anxious, perhaps lonely child. His father, I would speculate, was remote and absent. When he encountered these beautiful but vulnerable and needy and endangered animals, he was replaying a scene, a living video, of his own sense of being abandoned and unknown.

  He gasped, looked at me for the longest time, and then looked down at his wife. “How could you possibly know that?” he asked me. I hear it all the time, I said. And I do. I have had that same conversation with dog and cat owners hundreds of times, and I can almost unfailingly see a glimpse of the early emotional development that shaped the template of their life with animals, just as my life in Providence shaped my need for Lucky and my feeling for him.

  Unless we understand ourselves, we can never really understand the animals we live with. They are so often a reflection of us. Every animal we seek, own, and live with is a reflection of a part of us, and can speak to us, if we only learn to listen.

  It was not simply because puppies are cute or because I am a magnanimous animal lover that I wanted Lucky so badly. It was really the other way around. I am an animal lover in part because of the human being I am, the joys and sorrows I have experienced, the things I need in life. Loving an animal is a selfish act, something we need, no matter how we like to sugarcoat our motives.

  A trainer once told me that to have a better dog, I needed to be a better human. It was the best advice I have ever received about animals, and it is one of the foundational ideas of my approach to communicating with them. Accepting that idea is essential. It is the first step toward truly understanding animals.

  Twenty years ago, a friend, an analyst, told me of a wonderful book by the famed British analyst Dorothy Burlingham, and while reading it, I suddenly began trembling, my eyes filling with tears.

  Burlingham wrote in her classic book Twins about the child who feels alone and forsaken in the world. He creates a new family in imagination, builds a wonderful new life in his mind. Most often, this life centers on animals. “The child takes an imaginary animal as his intimate and beloved companion; subsequently, he is never separated from his animal friend, and in this way he overcomes loneliness.”

  This animal, Burlingham wrote, offers the child what he is searching for: “faithful love and unswerving devotion. . . . These animal fantasies are thus an attempt to substitute for the discarded and unloving family an uncritical but understanding and always loving creature.”

  It was Lucky who came to mind. He had never really left.

  I was already up when the alarm started ringing at 4 a.m. It was bitterly cold. No one was awake in the house. I got dressed, tiptoed downstairs, made myself a glass of warm milk, and buttered a piece of white bread.

  The thermometer outside the kitchen window read 3 degrees, and I could hear the bone-chilling wind rattle the windows of the house.

  I was too excited to eat much. I couldn’t stop thinking of Lucky, of having a pal, a companion. The idea of him just opened me up in a way that nothing else had.

  It was a long, cold walk. I ran much of the way. I wanted to make sure I was first. I remember my frozen nose, fingers, and toes. When I got to the boys’ entrance the bells from the big church down the street chimed five times. I knew lots of kids might want the puppy, but I didn’t think many needed him more than I did. I had never known the sensation of wanting something so much. It seemed my heart would burst.

  I took my spot on the stone steps and spent the next couple of hours dancing and running in circles to keep warm. I counted to twenty and back a thousand times, imagined that I was one of the Hardy Boys out on a dangerous mission, plotted my life with Lucky.

  Lucky would sleep in my bed, of course. We would take walks down the street, into the parks, through the big cemetery on North Main Street; we would play in the back yard, hole up in my room together while I read. In the summer, he would come with me to the beach, to Cape Cod. We would swim together, walk on the dunes.

  Lucky would love me, of course. He would offer me faithful love and unswerving devotion. There would be no need for talking. Without words, we would understand one another completely. I had to get this dog.

  Around 6:30 a.m., a half hour before the school bell rang, a big sixth grader named Jimmy walked up behind me, took a look around, grabbed me by the throat, and threw me off the top step and onto the asphalt. I got up and yelled “hey,” and he punched me in the nose and knocked me down again, blood spurting out of my nose.

  This, I understood, was life on the playground. The people in charge never saw this stuff; usually they were too busy yakking with one another to care or pay attention. Anybody who ratted on anybody else would not lead a life worth living. Even more than not wanting to get beat up on, I didn’t ever want to be a rat. It was the strange code of the embattled boy.

  We were on our own, the two of us, and to make things worse, I started to cry. I saw my life with Lucky washing away in blood and tears. I felt hopeless and desolate. Jimmy no longer bothered to even look at me; he just snorted and said, “That dog is mine.”

  To make things even worse, about a dozen other kids had appeared behind me to get in line for Lucky. I was no longer even in line. I had a growing audience to my humiliation; it would soon be the story of the day in school and at recess.

  But the fates intervened. There are angels here on earth and sometimes they do appear.

  “Wait a minute,” said a thickly accented voice through a window alongside the boy’s entrance door.

  I was still on the ground when the door opened and Mr. Wisnewski, the janitor, popped his gray head out of the door. We rarely saw Mr. Wisnewski and never spoke with him. He was a mysterious figure who would bleed the radiators when it got too cold in the classrooms or replace the lightbulbs when they went out. He was the one who cleaned up when somebody got sick or the toilets overflowed. He also came into the big auditorium to sweep up after assemblies.

  There were all kinds of rumors about Mr. Wisnewski, most of them suggesting that he was a World War II refugee of some kind. He was believed to live in a tenement in North Providence. It was said he had no family, but nobody really knew since a conversation with him was unimaginable. It wasn’t that he couldn’t speak English; it was that he never did speak it, and we all assumed he didn’t want to. Children often avoid what is strange to them.

  He looked angry standing in the doorway.

  “You there,” he said, wagging his finger at Jimmy. “I saw what you did to that boy. You took his place in line, you hit him in the face.”

  Mr. Wisnewski, in a fur-lined cap, wearing his green uniform, came down the steps and helped me get up. He took an old rag out of his pocket and gave it to me to wipe my tears and the blood off my face and
shirt.

  “You are first in line,” he said. “You get the puppy.” Jimmy skulked away, glowering at both of us. I had not heard the last from him.

  Mr. Wisnewski took me in through the door and led me down to the basement. We went through the door marked JANITOR. On the desk was a cardboard box with a small white puppy about the size of a big shoe. He was thin, trembling either from being nervous or cold.

  “Lucky,” I said. I had given him a name the first time I thought about him. We were going to be lucky together.

  Lucky, as I remember him, was small and bright white. He had big and soulful brown eyes, like a baby seal. He was, at that point, the size of a small teddy bear. He was easy to pick up, soft and warm to hold. He looks in my memory like a cute Lab puppy, although I am certain he was a mutt. I remember him from the moment I saw him as being everything Dorothy Burlingham suggested—my trustworthy friend, my unconditional love, my buddy and safe place.

  Lucky stayed in that basement room all day. I ran to see him a dozen times. I brought him water and a piece of my sandwich, which he ate greedily. Mr. Wisnewski had thought to bring some kibble, which he doled out of a tin. It didn’t occur to me for many years that the puppy may have been Mr. Wisnewski’s. That might explain why he was so involved in the adoption.

  Nobody mentioned the blood on my shirt that day, but the girls went wild over Lucky—more girls spoke to me that day than had spoken to me all year. There was a line all day to visit him and pet him. Even the usually severe Miss McCarthy came in to take a look.

  I stopped on the way out to thank Mr. Wisnewski again for saving my place in line, for helping me get Lucky. He just nodded and patted me on the head. “Good luck with the dog,” he said. “Watch out for those boys.”

  Then he picked up Lucky, patted him a few times. “Take care of him,” he said. “You are both lucky boys.”

  I had the idea that Mr. Wisnewski knew what it was like to get pushed out of place in line and punched. It’s a curious thing, but I don’t believe I ever saw Mr. Wisnewski again after that day. I have no memory of him beyond that encounter.