For the Love of a Dog (41 page)

Luke worked with me on dog-dog aggression cases with an air of calm professionalism that I still find astounding. He put up with the insanity of taping sixty television shows in two months with grace and patience. He charmed audiences at seminars, speeches, and book signings everywhere, and brought his black-and-white tuxedo of fur home to charge with abandon into mud and sheep poop to hold the ram off the feeder in the pouring rain. Luke loved being with me, herding sheep, playing ball, and running—running anywhere, after anything. He ran with the grace of a finely crafted sailboat coursing over deep water—no fiction, no drumbeat of hooves on the soil—but with a smooth effortless glide that lifted my heart every time I watched it
.

Luke was all of the above, but he wasn’t perfect. When he was young he’d lose his temper on sheep, chasing and even biting them, ears flat and eyes narrowed. He’d flash me looks better left untranslated when he didn’t like my directions. I’m not perfect, either, but as is true of soul mates everywhere, our flaws weren’t enough to undermine the love we had for each other
.

When Luke was middle-aged, I fell in love again, this time as if in slow motion, with my human soul mate, Jim. After Luke’s death, Jim admitted there had been a certain amount of jealousy between them early on, although they eventually became good friends. I called them my guys, reveling in the feelings of warmth and fullness that come with being loved. Jim, lucky me, is still here, but Luke died a year ago. His body is buried at the top of the farm road, where the hill pasture begins, where he would stand expectantly as I walked up the road behind him, waiting for me to catch up with him so he could play ball, or work sheep and run and run and run some more
.

Although the love we have for our dogs is often trivialized, there’s nothing trivial about it. A few weeks after my father died, one of my
mother’s dogs was killed by a car. A visitor had come to help sort out my father’s affairs, and unbeknownst to anyone, Jenny the exuberant Irish Setter had dashed out the door, running free and wild and no doubt, full of innocent and cheerful abandon. She was killed half a mile down the road, in front of the church where my father’s service was held. My mother, stalwart and noble after my father’s death, sobbed so hard and for so long about her dog’s death that it seemed as if her grief would physically rip her apart. I thought at the time, as did many, that Jenny’s death allowed my mom to truly grieve the death of her husband. I don’t think so now. My mother loved my father, but their relationship was burdened with disappointments and perceived betrayals. But Jenny? Jenny sparkled with nothing but joy and devotion. She asked for little and gave everything she had in return. These were no hard words late at night, no angry glances or saturated silences. No baggage. She loved Mom; Mom loved her: simple as that.

We’re not always comfortable with the depth of emotion we can have for our dogs, but profound love isn’t uncommon. I recently read an article about a teenager who risked his life to save his dog from a burning building. A tough-minded rancher once told me he’d rather die than abandon his cattle dog in a snowstorm. The evidence is overwhelming that during the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, hundreds if not thousands of people chose to risk death rather than leave their animals behind. The state of Florida learned this lesson well during 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, when thousands of people refused to evacuate because the shelters wouldn’t take pets. These decisions compromised the safety of so many people that the state now provides shelters for pets as well as for people.

The lengths that normal people will go to in order to protect their dogs testifies to the love and devotion many of us have for them. I remember a Wisconsin woman who was interviewed after a tornado destroyed her home and all of her belongings. “We’re okay,” she kept saying, clutching her dog to her chest, “we’re okay, that’s what matters.”
“We’re
okay” meant her husband, her children, and her dog; she wasn’t sorting them out by species. After the tragedy of Katrina, I heard discussions all over the country about what each of us would do if we were told to evacuate without our pets. What would you do if you had to choose between the safety of evacuation and risking your life to stay
with your dog? Everyone at my office said we couldn’t imagine living with the knowledge that we’d left our dogs behind, although we’d do it if we were forced to evacuate to save our children. Merely the thought of making such a choice was so upsetting we could barely talk about it. Our response wasn’t unique to people whose lives and careers are devoted to dogs. My farm’s pragmatic chain-sawing, brush-clearing handyman said that someone would have to shoot him before he’d leave his Rat Terrier behind to die.

What in heaven’s name is going on here? Risking your life for a member of another species? Loving your dog as much as you love a human? That’s flat-out amazing if you think about it. And yet, even if some people think it’s crazy, those of us who love dogs love them like family, or perhaps more accurately, like the family we always wanted.

Surely love, “an intense feeling of tender affection and compassion,” is the foundation of our relationship with dogs. I remember when I got my first Border Collie, Drift. Like an infatuated teenager, I was obsessed with his every move. I thought about him constantly, watched with a sense of wonder as he licked his paws, purred with comfort and completion when we cuddled together on the couch. There are millions of people who feel the same way, whose dogs bring them a unique happiness not found in other relationships.

I’m not talking about people who love animals
more
than they love people. I’m talking about people who love people, who have enriching, healthy relationships with friends and family and co-workers, and yet who love dogs so much they describe them as one of their greatest joys in life. People who skip having drinks with co-workers after work because their dogs have been alone too long; people who take their dogs on vacation, who use limited funds to buy them toys and food, who borrow money to pay the vet bill. I meet people everywhere who just want to talk about their dogs, about the silly little trick their Cairn Terrier learned all by himself, or the endearing way their Greyhound cuddles with them on the couch.

Our love for dogs is intense, pervasive, and sometimes heroic. If you think about it, it’s as remarkable as the physics of electrons and the wonder of outer space. It deserves our attention, and a good place to start is with the biology of love itself.

In a 2005 op-ed piece in
The New York Times
, the biologist Bernd Heinrich said: “Functionally, I suspect love is often [a] temporary chemical imbalance of the brain induced by sensory stimuli that causes us to maintain focus on something that carries an adaptive agenda.” Doesn’t make you all warm and mushy, now does it? However, Heinrich’s point was not to diminish love’s beauty, but to argue that love has a biological basis, and that there’s no reason to believe that we can claim it as uniquely human.

We know quite a bit about the chemistry of love. It’s dopamine that causes that first rush of infatuation, when you’re energized and elated and can’t stop thinking about that special individual. Soon after, when things calm down, the hormone oxytocin is released into the bloodstream and begins to create those longer-term feelings of caring, love, and nurturance. The biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy calls oxytocin “the endocrinological equivalent of candlelight, soft music, and a glass of wine.” Oxytocin has its origins in parental behavior, beginning with its essential role in the birth process, during which it facilitates uterine contractions and the letdown of milk. Besides these more mechanical duties, oxytocin turns out to be a key player in the attachment of a mother to her young.
¹
Oxytocin is so important that if you block its uptake in a ewe right after she’s given birth, she’ll reject her own lamb and aggressively push it away.

Oxytocin also plays a significant role in other kinds of love— familial, romantic, and even sexual. Oxytocin levels rise when friends hug, when mothers cuddle their babies, and when lovers have sex. It’s a “one size fits all” hormone, mediating love and attachment in all social relationships that involve feelings of care and connection. Women have higher levels of it than do men, which is not surprising, given oxytocin’s role in childbirth and lactation. Social animals have higher levels of it than solitary ones, a fact exemplified in two species of small mouselike animals called voles. The females of one species, which is highly social, have high levels of oxytocin, while, in the other, down-right
unsocial species, the females have exceptionally low levels. In people, higher levels of oxytocin correlate with higher levels of attachment and connection. Researchers have even found that spraying oxytocin into the nasal passages of human subjects doubled their tendency to trust others in a “game” that involved giving over custody of their money. In the not-too-distant future it will be wise to steer clear of blind dates with nasal spray bottles.

The central role of oxytocin helps explain why some people, and some dogs for that matter, seem to be more loving and nurturing than others. Individuals vary in how much of the hormone they produce and how effectively they can utilize it when it’s circulating. Individual experience can have a profound effect on people’s ability to feel warm and loving toward others, too; one study found that children adopted from neglectful orphanages had lower levels of oxytocin after cuddling with their mothers than normal children did. However, remember that the impact of experience is constrained by the brain and the body it acts upon. Just as a painter can only work with the canvas and colors she has in front of her, so the effect of experience is influenced by the brain that absorbs it. I often wonder about oxytocin levels when I meet a dog whose aloof behavior breaks her owner’s heart—does the dog have low levels of oxytocin, owing either to genetics or to early development? At present, I know of no one who is using oxytocin therapeutically (except for medical conditions relating to birth and lactation), but perhaps someday we’ll be able to spray stand-offish dogs with oxytocin and turn them into social butterflies.

Missy the Weimaraner had as bad a case of separation anxiety as any dog I’ve ever seen. She’d cut her back into shreds going through a plate-glass window trying to find her human, Cheryl. If left alone, even for a few minutes, she’d destroy pillows, couches, and kitchen cabinets with equal abandon. As soon as Cheryl began her preparations to leave the house to go to work, Missy began to pace, her paws began to sweat, and she began to drool
.

After living through months of this, Cheryl came to me for help, and we devised a counterconditioning plan to ease Missy’s fears. I told her the good
news: this type of plan has a high success rate. The bad news was that it’s a pain in the butt to pull off. During treatment, Cheryl couldn’t leave Missy alone for even a few minutes. We had to break the link between being alone and feeling panicked, so Cheryl had to hire and train a raft of helpers to dog-sit Missy whenever she was gone. When she was home, she worked on counterconditioning but because Missy’s case was so serious, progress was slow. Even with adjunctive anti-anxiety drugs from her veterinarian, Missy would go into a full-scale panic at the slightest disruption in her schedule. Cheryl’s life began to revolve around organizing helpers, lining up as many as three sitters when she had to be gone all day, changing her plans if a sitter had to cancel at the last minute. Her social life dropped down to nothing because she had “used up” all her volunteers for her job and her classes at the university
.

However, Cheryl did have a social life, and to her it was worth all the hassle and disruption. Cheryl’s best friend and closest family member was Missy, and to Cheryl, Missy was worth whatever it took to cure her. Cheryl loved Missy, and Missy loved Cheryl: that was all that really mattered. As a beleaguered mother still loves her troubled teenager, Cheryl felt a love for her dog that carried her through all their troubles. Cheryl loved Missy as much as you can love anyone, and the fact that Missy was a dog and Cheryl was a human didn’t seem relevent
.

Oxytocin and dopamine may help us understand the biology behind our strong feelings of attachment, but it doesn’t explain why members of one species—ours—should be so ready to lose their hearts to a member of another species. Not only that, but why dogs? Of all the animals on earth, why is it dogs who have settled into our hearts like rain on the desert? Just sitting in a room with a dog can decrease your blood pressure and heart rate. Petting your dog makes oxytocin flood your body and increases the frequency of brainwaves associated with feelings of peace and contentment. Dogs can even elicit positive responses from emotionally damaged people when the best efforts of family and doctors have failed. Every group that takes dogs to nursing homes has its own story about an unresponsive patient who opened up for the first time in years after petting a dog. But why? Why are dogs such masters at working their way into our hearts as no other animal can?

The traditional answer to the question of why we so love dogs is that they give us “unconditional love” or “nonjudgmental positive regard.” To a large extent, this rings true. The cheerful, loving nature of most dogs brings us a purity of emotion hard to find anywhere else, no matter how much we want it. But I think we need to address this question in more depth. Perhaps our love for dogs, and their love for us, is too complex to be explained by any one factor. It seems most likely that, at its best, the special bond we have with dogs is the result of a number of things, combining together into a “perfect storm” of love and devotion.

First, as we’ve already seen, the faces of dogs are remarkably expressive, and many of their expressions are similar to ours. More than any other animal except our own children (and possibly chimpanzees), dogs wear their hearts on their sleeves.
²
The faces of dogs are like living, breathing, fur-covered emotions, with none of the masking and censoring made possible by the rational cortex of mature adult humans. The expressiveness of dogs gives them a direct line to the primitive and powerful emotional centers of our brains, and connects us in ways that nothing else ever could. When we look at dogs, we’re looking into a mirror. That they express happiness so well, and that happiness is contagious, is just icing on the cake.