For the Love of a Dog (40 page)

When and how you pet your dog may seem trivial, but it’s actually an important topic, given the suffering that people and dogs experience when the relationship between them goes sour. Dog lovers everywhere think they are using positive reinforcement when they pat their dog’s head for coming when called; the actual result is to teach him or her, with stunning effectiveness, to stay away. Before you know it, the dog is at the local shelter, because “he just won’t ever listen to me.”

The physical consequences of touch (or the lack thereof) aren’t trivial, either. As we saw in the chapter on the brain, touch is vitally important for the physical and psychological health of social animals like people and dogs. Massage therapy on humans has been found to increase levels of serotonin and decrease excesses of dopamine, which in turn decreases incidents of aggression and acts as a calming agent. One of the many benefits of dog ownership is that the feel of their fur on our hands is good for us. Petting a dog can lower your blood pressure
and your heart rate. In one study, petting a dog increased the level of one of the body’s first lines of immunological defense, an immunoglobulin called IgA.
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Certain kinds of touch can even be used therapeutically on dogs (see the comments about Touch therapy in the References). It’s simply a biological fact that petting your dog can be good for you, too, so although spending every night lying on the couch petting your dog isn’t exactly a well-rounded health care plan, a little bit of it can be a good thing.

Like humans, dogs need a sense of security. The nationally recognized speaker and trainer Trish King explains it well in her book,
Parenting Your Dog
in which she reminds us that dogs count on us to take care of them. Involuntary Peter Pans, puppies become adult dogs who are never really allowed to grow up. We control when and what they eat (well, okay, mostly), when and where they go to the bathroom, when and where they sleep and exercise, and who belongs to their social group. They live in a world in which we expect a lot of them, but in which they are completely dependent upon us. It’s hardly surprising, then, that they would look to us to be a trustworthy source of confidence and security. You know those “animal people” who seem to have a magic touch with animals, the ones your dog goes to sit beside and doesn’t want to leave? In my experience, the one trait they all share is an ability to broadcast a sense of peaceful confidence and contentment that suggests they could be the benevolent leader whom we all find attractive. They’re the Dalai Lamas of the animal world. The type of happiness they exude is the opposite of the frantic jolliness I sometimes see owners use to try to cheer up their dogs.

You wouldn’t want to rely on someone who was paralyzed with angst all the time, so don’t put your dog in that position. I see so many people who desperately want their dogs to feel loved, and who in trying to create that feeling end up catering to them in such a way that their dogs never learn any boundaries, never learn emotional control,
and never feel that they can count on their human to make the hard decisions that every leader needs to make. It’s been said that great leaders are not defined by their skills or their knowledge, but by their ability to promote feelings of confidence and security in others. Remember, emotions are contagious—you’re not going to promote a sense of security in your dog if you don’t have some of your own to share. Some people are inherently better at projecting confidence than others, but all of us can work at becoming more like them. I know of no greater gift you could give to your dog.

Someone who’s not a dog lover might well be asking: “Why on earth is it so important for these crazy people to make their dogs happy? They’re just dogs, for heavens sake!” I get calls about once a month from writers assigned to write articles about the lengths that people go to for their pet dogs and cats. This doesn’t just happen to me. Dr. Marty Becker, the go-to vet for
Good Morning America
, tells me he gets called regularly about the same topic. The subtext is always the same: the writer has been told to get a quote from us about how foolish/ pathetic/overly emotional people are about their companion animals. The focus is usually on how much money dog lovers are willing to spend on their dogs, buying hundred-dollar dog beds and designer collars. I’m the first to agree that it does dogs no good to be thought of as furry people, but I don’t see why spending money on your dog is any worse than spending it on a new golf club or eating out in restaurants. What’s the harm in spending a hundred dollars on a dog bed that your dog loves and that looks nice in your living room?
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During one of these interviews I asked one reporter, who seemed bound and determined to drag out of me some remark demeaning dog lovers, how much her shoes cost. I asked because I had just seen a similar pair in a San Francisco department store priced at over seven hundred dollars. I’m the first to admit that the shoes were gorgeous, if you like shoes that are impossible to actually walk in, and that doctors tell us can cause permanent damage to your feet. Even if they’d been boots designed to keep your feet warm in the Antarctic—seven hundred dollars? Oh, my.

I may think it’s a bit crazy to spend seven hundred dollars on shoes, but it’s not my business if someone does. I just object to her laughing at those of us who spend our money on dogs instead of clothes or ski vacations. Perhaps the laughter’s real source reflects a cultural discomfort with our emotional connection to another species, rather than any objection to the economics of the issue.

Of course, you don’t have to spend lots of money on a dog to love him. We’ve all read the stories about, for example, the homeless man who has nothing but the shirt on his back and a little brown dog who follows him everywhere. In the one I remember best, the man wouldn’t sleep in a shelter because they wouldn’t take dogs, and the dog refused to leave his friend to scavenge in the local dump even when he was starving.

This love that we have for dogs, and that they have for us, brings untold happiness to millions of people and dogs around the world. Whether we buy them plaid raincoats and booties, or share our only can of beans, the love between people and dogs represents a special kind of happiness. From the peaceful contentment that comes while cuddling in front of a warm fire, to the giddy rush of dopamine-charged infatuation, love generates more happiness than anything else you could name. “All you need is love” isn’t actually true at all—all you really need is oxygen and water and food—but without love, who could ever truly be happy? The central role of love in the pursuit of happiness has spilled over into our relationships with members of another species, which is little short of a miracle. Those of us who love dogs love them deeply and can’t imagine being truly happy without a dog in our lives. In an eloquent testament to the happiness we share with our dogs, here’s what two of my friends said in an e-mail about the death of their Standard Poodle, Sophie.

In 1992, I fell in love with a dog named Luke. I brought him home from a herding dog trial one chilly October evening not sure whether I’d keep him, not sure I wanted another dog. A gangly adolescent, Luke had been a disappointment to his first owner, who reported that he wouldn’t come when called and had failed his first herding lessons. I’d had my eye on him ever since he was a pup, and had told the owner to let me know if she ever decided to sell him. When she did I had more dogs than I needed, but every time I saw Luke something clicked inside, as if I’d finally found the combination to an old padlock I carried around, unopened. I took one last look at his bright, expectant face, wrote out a check, and drove him home through the red and orange hills of a midwestern autumn
.

By sundown of the next day, Luke and I had fallen in love. I don’t know any other way to describe it. I say “fallen in love” with the knowledge that eyes will roll, lips will purse, and heads will shake. “That’s pathetic,” someone said to me once when I described my love for Luke. It seems that people either get it or not; like the yes-no simplicity of digital computers, the world sorts us into those people who’ve been deeply moved by an animal, and those who can take them or leave them. I learned to censor myself, to test the waters by volunteering some platitude like “Yep, he’s a great dog Luke,” instead of a deeper, more complex attempt to express how much I loved him
.

I am buoyed by the knowledge that I am not alone. People come up to me at seminars, eyes full and bright with the beginnings of tears, and tell me they had a dog like Luke. “Forever dogs,” we call them: the canine loves
of our lives, dogs who expand our hearts and fill our souls as nothing else ever has
. Old Yeller
is a book about a dog like that, a plain yellow dog who settles in the heart of a young country boy, and who is a cultural icon of the depth of devotion we can have for a dog
.

No one describes the love between a person and a dog better than the late Caroline Knapp, in
Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs.
Speaking of the “remarkable, mysterious, often highly complicated dances that go on between individual dogs and their owners,” she wrote:

For twelve and a half years Luke and I danced together, sometimes so clear and so close to each other it was like moving as one, sometimes stumbling over each other’s toes. We were each other’s soul mates, colleagues, and best friends. I described him to everyone who would listen as my “one in a million” dog; for reasons I don’t understand, he seemed to love me as much as I loved him. In some ways, Luke seemed to be having a love affair with all of humanity. He was handsome and social, the one everyone wanted to sit next to at the dinner party, and he could schmooze with the best of them at banquets and cocktail parties. He was the perfect dinner guest, who never neglected to thank the hostess and could always be counted on to flirt with the single woman in the corner. Flirt? Could someone possibly describe a dog as flirting? All I can say is that Luke adored everyone, but he loved women more than he did men, and always chose to sit beside one and charm her, head lolling like Stevie Wonder’s, his face open and full of happiness, one big paw in her lap
.

My life was linked with Luke’s in every way. Luke was the first thing I saw in the morning, when he nosed my arm under the covers after the alarm went off, and the last thing I saw at night as I stroked his head on
my way to sleep. Luke and I ran the farm together, he the trusty right-hand man, me the landed gentrywoman who knew the value of a smart, willing crew boss. It was Luke I turned to when flighty lambs needed loading or when the ram jumped the fence to breed the ewes a month earlier than planned. It was Luke who leaped over a four foot stall and saved me from a rampaging horned ewe, and it was Luke who risked his life to stop a three-hundred-pound ram from smashing me into pulp against a fencepost
.