Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  And as a team, we were fantastic; we forged a bond that would allow us to dominate the planet. With canines at our side, we became masters of the universe; these new companions were our night watchmen, our GPS guides, our first-wave assault team. In the battle for existence, they gave us the crucial competitive edge that allowed us to persist while our rivals, the Neanderthals, faded to extinction.

  After that, well, hell! There was no stopping us. From then on, we couldn’t make enough animal alliances. We persuaded horses and elephants to carry us into battle, and hawks and ferrets to kill rabbits and drop them at our feet. Wildcats became tame and protected our grains from rodents. We learned to saddle reindeer and herd geese and yoke yaks. Animals didn’t just feed and protect us; they inspired us. We studied them, drew them, revered them. Religions worshipped animals as gods; moralists looked to them for life lessons; seekers chose them as their spirit guides. We named our tribes and babies after them. Egyptian pharaohs went to the grave with them.

  Then we forgot them.

  The romance that had burned for ages was snuffed in a heartbeat, historically speaking. We had animals on the brain for more than 300,000 years—and then, out of the blue, Edison and Ford came along and stole our hearts. As soon as we had electric lights and affordable cars, we moved indoors and locked the animals out. We don’t need guard dogs or plow horses or fresh kill anymore; we hunt freezer aisles instead of forests, fire up the Prius when we need a ride, rely on screens when we crave companionship. Man’s best friend became a major pain, an intruder who craps on our sidewalks, barks all night, and has to be confined to cages in the back bedroom and little prisons in our parks. Coco and Cuddles are now another form of trash; according to the ASPCA, more than four thousand abandoned cats and dogs are destroyed every day, just to make space for the six million that are dumped at shelters every year.

  “Okay, but that’s the price of modern life,” you might reply, and no one can say you’re wrong (a little cold, maybe, but still…). I’ve butchered my own chickens, milked my own goats, and ridden in Amish buggies, and believe me, when it comes to meals and daily commutes, you need only one go-round with those experiences to appreciate how nice it is to have machines take all the gore, udders, and manure off your hands. Our lives became easier, and in many ways even safer and healthier, when technology allowed us to reduce our one-on-ones with the animal kingdom. It took us until the twentieth century, but finally, we one-upped Mother Nature.

  Now comes the reckoning.

  7

  “Earl’s in for murder. Several, in fact.”

  E. O. Wilson first got a whiff of trouble ahead in 1984.

  Wilson is a famous Harvard scientist, but he grew up as a country kid in Alabama who was so wild that he went blind in his right eye when he hurt it while fishing but decided it was too good a day to spend in the hospital and kept casting instead of telling his parents. That accident became his superhero origins story: by losing half his vision, Wilson had to change the way he looked at the world. He struggled to see animals in the woods, but his good eye could zoom in so tightly on insects that he could see the waving of their nearly invisible body hairs. He became a world authority on ants, and it gave him a godlike perspective on nature: he could gaze down from above and watch the way an entire society made decisions that would change it forever. It even changed Wilson; he discovered he had become an expert on unintended consequences. Over and over, he would see an ant colony react to environmental pressure by, say, migrating to search for tastier food or escape a threat, and a few generations later, that same colony had evolved into an entirely new species. You never really know what kind of cliff lies ahead, Wilson realized; those ants did nothing but change their address, and that changed their DNA.

  By the 1980s, Wilson was getting worried about his own species. He’s a naturalist, and the world around him wasn’t natural anymore. It was nuts! Given a choice between freedom and prison, we were happily marching into cells and clanging the door behind us. We were shutting ourselves in boxes—cubicles and cars, thick-windowed homes and soundproofed gyms—and cutting ourselves off from the sights, sounds, and smells of the most important relationship we’ve ever known. Everything we are, Wilson knew, we are because of animals. Our brains, our bodies, our conscious and subconscious minds—they all evolved in response to the creatures around us. It was eat or be eaten, which meant we couldn’t forget about them for a second. The human nervous system developed as an early-warning animal detection device, scanning 24/7 for any hint of an approaching heartbeat. Animals were simultaneously our dearest friends and our deadliest enemies, and after 300,000 years, you don’t just end a bond like that without paying a price. When we close ourselves off from the natural world, Wilson was convinced, we’re messing with forces we don’t understand. We’re changing our address with no idea where we’re going.

  Wilson called those forces the biophilia hypothesis, which literally means “love of living things” but translates more closely to “Your brain may not remember, but your body will never forget that animals have guarded us since the Stone Age.” Why do you think cuddling a cat is so stinkin’ irresistible? That’s your inner caveman speaking, telling you that as long as that kitty is purring, nothing is trying to kill you. Our prehistoric animal partners were extensions of our own eyes and ears, using their sharp night vision and long-range hearing to alert us to danger. Now, when a tabby curls up in your lap or even when you see a cartoon of Snoopy sleeping on his doghouse roof, you’re nudged by a calming ancestral instinct that says Relax, you’re safe for now. Dogs are even more comforting than your guy, at least at night; in 2018, animal behaviorists at Canisius College researched the sleeping habits of people who shared their beds with a pet and found that out of nearly 1,000 women, the majority had “better, more restful sleep” when they cuddled with a dog rather than with their husbands. And not just because the pups are better about sharing the good pillow and turning off their phones: “Their dogs were less disruptive than their human partners,” the study found, “and were associated with stronger feelings of comfort and security.”

  The FBI figured out how powerful this animal-human connection can be a few years ago, thanks to an ailing agent named Rachel Pierce. Rachel is an FBI psychologist with acute rheumatoid arthritis, and she suffers from flare-ups so crippling and excruciating that some days she can’t even get to her feet. She wondered if a service dog could help, so she went to a local shelter and found Dolce, a muttley mix of Husky and German shepherd. Rachel and Dolce began training together, and Dolce turned out to be a star: He learned how to turn on the lights for Rachel, fetch her a bottle of water from the fridge, even load her heavy laundry into the washer so she only had to press the buttons. Dolce was such a treasure that Rachel was tempted to break the very first rule she’d been taught about service dogs: Absolutely No Sharing. If friends and strangers start playing with your partner and feeding him treats, they can confuse his focus and unravel his training.

  Still, Rachel couldn’t help thinking about how great Dolce would be with the witnesses she worked with. She often met with children who were recovering from abuse and teachers who’d survived school shootings. Their recollections were crucial, but it’s hard to think clearly when you’re still scared to death. What if they had a strong, gentle protector by their side? Rachel began experimenting on her own, volunteering with Dolce at nursing homes and camps for grieving children. The Dolce Effect was amazing; as a psychologist, Rachel was thrilled to discover that her dog could create an atmosphere of trust and security much faster than she could on her own. The FBI authorized her to take Dolce along to work cases, like kidnappings and murders, and they became such an outstanding team that in 2012 Rachel received the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence.

  One thing you notice when FBI agents show up, by the way: these guys ain’t playing. I’ve reported on Mafia car bombings and, once, the weird case of a Mexican drug kingpin who
flew to Philadelphia to have his fingerprints surgically rotated by a local doctor. As soon as the blue raid jackets appear, a chill comes over the crime scene. You can chat with local cops at the yellow tape, but when the feds arrive, you shut up and step back. Every second counts when suspects are on the loose, so FBI investigators are trained to be stone-faced and machine-efficient. Not for an instant will they tolerate some dog underfoot, unless that dog is producing some serious results. And Dolce, they found, built better cases. He took bad guys off the street. Investigators watched as terrified eyewitnesses sank their hands into dog fur and suddenly had better recall and provided actionable tips. With Dolce by their side, children gave stronger testimony in court.

  Dolce turned out to be such a star that the FBI added a Crisis Response Canine program to its Rapid Deployment Teams. When a pair of terrorists opened fire at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, murdering fourteen people and wounding dozens more before escaping in an SUV, the FBI raced to address what could have been a national emergency. Two of the first responders were a pair of Labs, Wally and Giovanni. The agents were glad to see them, and not strictly for professional reasons. “People at the command post were working long hours and were under a lot of pressure,” FBI Associate Deputy Director David Bowdich remarked to the press afterward. “As the dogs roamed the area, I saw agents and task force members take time out to pet them.” Another FBI official was so thrilled with their performance that she had to abandon law enforcement lingo and reach for sorcery to describe their effect: “The dogs have worked a certain type of magic with people under a great deal of stress.”

  * * *

  —

  The magic works for the bad guys too. That’s the beauty of E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis: The human-animal bond is instinctive in all of us, even if we don’t seek it. Or deserve it. Guards at Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane discovered this by accident in 1975 when the inmates in one ward began acting fishy. Lima is for the hard cases, the high-risk deviants who are too violent for the general prison population. “If you’re in Lima,” as one case manager put it, “you’re in for something pretty heavy.” But for days on end, one ward was mysteriously calm. Criminally insane convicts occupying an entire ward don’t spontaneously decide to simmer down and cooperate, and when they do, the guards get ready for trouble.

  Instead, they found a sparrow.

  The bird had flown into the ward and injured itself. An inmate snuck it into his room and began nursing it back to health, and it soon became the ward’s mascot. Administrators knew they had to confiscate the bird—what if the inmates tortured it, or began fighting over who got to feed it next?—but extracting a pet from a doting gang of arch-criminals was going to be tricky. It wasn’t worth sparking a riot, so the guards opted to hold off a little and see what happened. While they waited, the ward remained weirdly tranquil. The hospital decided to push the accidental experiment a little further. It began taking in unwanted animals, accepting just about anything that was dropped off at its doors. Within a few years, Lima was bursting with nearly two hundred winged and furry friends, including goats, chickens, guinea pigs, ducks, tropical fish, two deer, and a goose that had lost a wing to a dog attack.

  “Look over there,’’ a case manager said, pointing a New York Times reporter toward a prisoner petting a goat named Friendly. ‘‘Earl’s in for murder. Several, in fact. Then he escaped from a prison and kidnapped a guard in the process.’’ But after the critters showed up, Earl became a new man. Fights and suicide attempts in the hospital had plunged so dramatically that medications were cut by half. Take a second to consider that; it’s such a humble solution that you can scoot right past the fact that it’s almost Nobel-worthy. Somewhere in the hinterlands of Ohio, a warden up to his eyeballs in assaults and escape attempts decides to take a gamble and introduce some unwanted barnyard animals to the most dangerous men on earth. That gamble could have blown up in his face, but instead of hurting the animals—or one another—the most dangerous men on earth became half as dangerous. Guards and civilians are now safer because Earl isn’t holding shanks to their throats, and Earl doesn’t need to be pharmaceutically restrained into a drug-induced stupor anymore. Lives are saved and healing is accelerated, all because of that medical miracle worker, Friendly the Goat.

  The warden’s courage is even more remarkable because at the time, modern psychology considered animal therapy to be a joke. In the 1970s, a psychologist named Boris Levinson of Yeshiva University was trying to convince his colleagues that his recent breakthroughs were mostly due to his dog, Jingles. Levinson had been working with a “very disturbed child,” as he put it, when Jingles sauntered into the room. Levinson was struggling to get this child to speak, so he didn’t want a distraction. But with Jingles around, the conversation started to flow. Levinson tried Jingles with his other problem patients and got the same reaction: the dog consistently put children and adults at ease and prompted them to open up.

  Just like Freud! Levinson remembered a footnote from the history of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud didn’t consider emotional catharsis a party either. He found it so stressful to listen to his patients’ buried traumas that he would sometimes have his dog, Jofi, sit at his feet to take the edge off. After a while, it dawned on Freud that his patients were also enjoying Jofi’s company; whenever the Chow Chow was around, even the most tight-lipped were more willing to explore painful subjects.

  So with both Jingles and Freud’s ghost on his side, Boris Levinson believed he was onto something. He gathered his session notes and wrote them up in a paper for the American Psychology Association. But when he presented the paper at a conference, he was mocked. “What percentage of your therapy fees do you pay to the dog?” someone yelled from the audience. Heckling isn’t usually a big part of gatherings like these. Psychology is all about nurturing and bold ideas, so when professionals who tolerate diseased minds all day laugh you out the door, you know you’ve broken new ground. “The tone in the room,” remarked a therapist who was there, “did not do credit to the psychological profession.”

  Luckily, prison wardens are more worried about shankings in the shower than squabbles among eggheads. As far as they were concerned, if goats and chickens were keeping Lima’s prisoners from going over the fence, then bring on the livestock. Penitentiaries soon began following Lima’s lead and adopting their own biophilia initiatives. Inmates were recruited to socialize shelter dogs for adoption and train assistance animals for the disabled. Out West, cowboys were teaching prisoners how to gentle wild mustangs for use as riding mounts. After many of these prisoners were freed, they did something extraordinary: they didn’t come back. Normally, up to 75 percent of all prisoners who are released will be arrested again within five years. But among prisoners who’ve worked with animals, the recidivism rate tends to be as low as 10 percent.

  Okay, let’s tap the brakes for a second. Who says the success of these programs depends on the pups and ponies? Maybe the prisoners just needed an amusing new hobby to pull themselves together, or more open-air time, or a challenging chore to boost their self-esteem. Maybe the animals were just accessories along for the ride. Maybe—and that’s why, in the 1980s, two scientists teamed up to find out what was really going on. Alan Beck, a Purdue University psychologist, and Aaron Katcher, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, put scores of volunteers through all kinds of ingenious experiments. To test the “open-air” theory, for instance, they divided a bunch of ADHD students with poor impulse control into two groups: one went canoeing and rock climbing, while the other cared for companion animals. Midway through the study, the two groups swapped.

  The result: “Contact with companion animals resulted in greater improvement of ADHD symptoms, better learning, and superior school performance when compared with the outdoor experience,” the scientists found. But that was just the beginning. “The companion animal experience also provided greater speech gains, bett
er nonverbal behavior, improved attentiveness, and an increased ability to control impulse behavior.” Moreover, these differences were still evident six months after the program ended. The italics are mine, because holy moly, that’s some long-lasting wonder drug.

  Yes, “drug.” Because here’s the wildest part: Beck and Katcher were also monitoring their subjects’ physiological responses, and they found that the dogs weren’t just entertaining the kids; they were creating a pharmacological reaction. Pet a dog for as few as five minutes and your heart rate and breathing will slow; your blood pressure will drop; your muscles will relax and your breathing will moderate. That’s amazingly fast. For a narcotic to relieve stress in five minutes, you’d need a face mask and a tank of nitrous oxide.

  Or a jolt of the “love hormone”—oxytocin. That’s exactly what was happening, as later studies demonstrated: By petting those dogs, the children were receiving a surge of oxytocin, a hormone that triggers acute feelings of trust, compassion, and affection. Oxytocin is the brain chemical that makes us feel safe and loved. It relieves pain, helps you sleep, and even boosts your immune system, so you’re less likely to get sick. Oxytocin is the reason you feel stronger after a warm hug, and why new mothers are able to nurse; that hormonal boost not only helps a mother bond to her newborn but provides a sense of security that it’s safe to feed. During those sunny moments when you feel the world is a wonderful place and you’re lucky to be here, more than likely you’re experiencing a burst of oxytocin.

  The love hormone is so powerful that it’s even effective against one of the toughest challenges in modern mental health: treatment of combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Soldiers conditioned to “man up” are reluctant to get help, and even when they do, it’s not easy to isolate and treat symptoms that can be all over the place, ranging from anger to depression, paranoia to loneliness, acute fear to dangerous bravado. For one out of every three PTSD sufferers, conventional treatments don’t help. Luckily, one drug is effective, has no dangerous side effects, and looks rad wearing a bandanna: Jingles. Dogs were actually Plan B; researchers originally thought they could use a nasal spray to shoot oxytocin right up a patient’s nostrils. Why have a dog on the couch when you can have an inhaler in your pocket? But whenever we try to outsmart Mother Nature, Mother Nature breaks out the nunchuks. The nasal spray was fine when the dosages were dialed in just right (a group of eighty traumatized male and female police officers in Holland responded beautifully), but even a pinpoint miscalculation turned out to be, literally, a nightmare, causing horrific dreams, insomnia, agitation, and flashbacks.