For the Love of a Dog (42 page)

Second, the sociability of dogs is similar in many ways to that of humans. Dogs evolved from one of the world’s most social species and naturally seek companionship. That’s why sheep-guarding dogs stay with the flock, that’s why some dogs form friendships with horses that last a lifetime, and that’s why your dog is waiting at the window when you drive home from work. Dogs will live alone if they have to, but as long as there are enough resources to go around, dogs will always choose the company of others. This is as true of adult dogs as of puppies. In many other species, the young can form strong attachments to others, but once they’ve matured, their interest in forming new bonds decreases. Not so dogs—you can become best friends with an older dog in just days or weeks, so strong is their desire for companionship.

Although dogs cling to any kind of social relationship, they don’t
treat humans as any port in a storm. They seem to be as attracted to us as we are to them. Even dogs who’ve been socialized for only minutes as puppies are able to form strong attachments to people. (Usually, however, only to a small group of highly familiar people; they remain uncomfortable around strangers all their lives.) By contrast, wolves must be taken away from their mothers at three weeks and raised by humans to be comfortable around us as adults. And dogs want more than just to hang out with us; they seem to want to understand us, and to want us to understand them. They watch our faces all the time for information, just as humans do when they’re unsure of what another person is trying to communicate. You can see people do the very same thing, in a game that dog trainers play to sharpen their skills. One person uses a clicker to train another to perform some action, in a kind of “warmer/colder” game. No words or visual cues are allowed; there’s just the sound of the click to tell the trainee that she’s on the right track. Yet even though trainees are told they’ll get no other information, they turn to look at the face of the trainer when they become confused. Dogs do exactly that when they’re confused about what we want: herding dogs will break their focused stare to turn and look at their handler’s face with the visual equivalent of “What?!” Dogs might even be better at decoding certain types of human signals than our closest relatives, chimpanzees. In some studies, chimpanzees, even ones familiar with people, weren’t able to locate hidden food if the experimenter pointed to it. Subsequent studies on dogs suggested that they were more adept than our closest relatives at the task.
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A dog’s desire to communicate with people fits within the bounds of a dog’s evolutionary baggage, in which pack members hunted together, raised their young together, and fought to the death to keep the group together. You can’t coordinate your efforts as a group without some kind of communication, so it’s no wonder that dogs are as obsessed with social communication as we are. But dogs’ desire and ability to communicate, and their formation of attachments, transcend species boundaries. Research found that in novel environments,
kenneled dogs were calmer in the presence of a human caretaker than with a dog they’d been kenneled with for over two months. It’s remarkable that an animal would choose an individual of an entirely different species for comfort and companionship. Imagine being lost and alone in the jungle and stumbling upon a person and a bird—and bonding with the bird and ignoring the person. In one study, dogs living in shelters formed attachments to people after only minimal contact. It took only three ten-minute sessions of petting for dogs to become attached, and for the dogs to stand at the door, waiting, if the person left the room.

Some explanations of dogs’ attachment to humans are not particularly romantic. Psychologist John Archer argues that dogs are simply social parasites, who have learned to manipulate our emotions so as to obtain free food, safety, and, in some cases, appointments with certified canine massage therapists and animal communicators. Lord knows dogs are an evolutionary success story: just compare the numbers of dogs in any given country with the number of wolves.
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However, the biological success of dogs doesn’t negate the profound feelings of love and devotion that go along with it; we don’t dismiss the love of parent for child simply because it’s to the parent’s advantage to pass on his or her genes. I think it’s shortsighted—sad, really—to dismiss the love that dogs have for us in such mechanistic terms.

Still, there is an important truth to be found in an objective view of our relationship with dogs. Painful though it might be, we need to re-examine the belief that dogs give us unconditional love. There’s no question but that most of our dogs love us, and there’s little doubt that, sometimes, their love is often almost epic in its intensity. However, as we saw in the chapter on anger, the chance that our dogs are never irritated with us is slim at best. How convenient, then, that they can never say so.

You may wish with all your heart that you could talk to your dog, but as we’re often reminded, we’d better watch out for what we wish for, because we just might get it. The power of speech is a wonderful thing, but it comes with a price. It’s not true that “sticks and stones
may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” We all know that bruises and cuts often heal faster than the damage done by a cruel comment. Personally, I’m glad my dogs can’t nail me with the kind of hurtful remark that can come out of the mouths of even the kindest of friends. I’m quite sure that sometimes I’d rather not know what my dogs had to say. I’m reminded of the “words” of Washoe, a chimpanzee raised by Beatrice and Robert Gardner, who ordered trainers she didn’t like out of the room with the American Sign Language for “You green pile of poop.”
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In addition to providing a kind of beneficial, before-the-fact censorship, our lack of a shared language has another, more amorphous advantage. As I said in an essay in the book
Dog Is My Co-pilot
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We might yearn to tell our dogs why they can’t go on a walk while their injured foot heals, or to explain that we’re only leaving town for a couple of days, but I doubt that we’d have the pure, uncluttered connections we now enjoy if the relationship were burdened by language. In
The New Work of Dogs
, Jon Katz tells a story about a man who loved his dog because the dog was the only individual he
didn’t
have to talk to. Katz suspects that men often love dogs because dogs never ask them
to talk about their feelings. Women love dogs so much, he suggests, because they see them as being so supportive. A study reported in
The New York Times
found that half of the female veterinary students surveyed said they got more emotional support from their dogs than they did from their husbands. Surely our perception that dogs are supportive is bolstered by the fact that they can’t tell us to shut up when we’re talking too much. The fact is, some dogs probably do give us unconditional love, but not all dogs do, and most dogs don’t every minute of every day. It just feels that way, given their expressiveness, their childlike cheerfulness, and bless it, their inability to communicate in words. Overall, it seems that what we can’t say to dogs is a small price to pay for what we gain from our wordless style of communication.

As if emotionality, expressiveness, a high degree of sociability, and the inability to tell us to shut up weren’t enough, there’s another important factor that influences our devotion to dogs. We humans have evolved to be protective and nurturing to big-eyed, dependent young mammals, and dogs elicit this state of mind from us with a force stronger than any hurricane. Like young children who stimulate our feelings of nurturance, dogs are nonverbal and have limited abilities. They can’t go to the store and buy food; they can’t open the door and let themselves out. If we left for work one day and never came home, they’d die, trapped and alone and unable to take care of themselves. In these ways they are the exact equivalent of young humans—nonverbal and dependent, wrapped in a fluffy, fuzzy package that says
“I’m cute and cuddly and I need you.”

Our feelings of parental love and nurturance are not to be sneezed at; they’ve kept primates like us going for millions of years. The parents of many animals walk away without a care once the eggs are laid or the sperm is transferred, but we shower our young with attention and care over a prolonged period. Lions may raise their young with affectionate licks and cuddles, but they’ll walk away and let their babies starve to death to save their own lives. Not so humans, dogs, or wolves: we’re obsessed with raising, nurturing, and protecting our young, and we’ll sacrifice our own lives to save theirs. Just the sight of young, helpless mammals can change our internal hormonal balance and increase the amount of oxytocin in our bloodstream. Although our complicated brains enable us to be rational and creative, underneath that complexity
are ancient structures that generate primal reactions to big-eyed, fluffy mammals. As the writer and behaviorist Karen London so aptly said in
The Bark
magazine, “Dogs, the source of so much pure joy and warm comfort, are a reminder that perhaps the passion in our lives is too great to be contained within the bounds of humanity.” There’s great truth to that, and it’s based not on some neurotic need to replace our feelings toward people with feelings toward dogs, but on a deep-seated biological drive to nurture small, dependent things.

So there you have it, a perfect package of love, an animal whose looks and behavior leave many of us weak in the knees. Dogs elicit the love and the desire to nurture that we’re designed to feel toward young dependent mammals, and their expressiveness just ups the ante. The mere sight of them bathes us with the hormones associated with love and devotion. At the same time, sometimes accurately, sometimes not, we feel from them the kind of love we want from
our parents
, that no-holds-barred, “unconditional” love that psychologists tell us we’ve all been seeking since infancy. It’s a double whammy of epic proportions— we love them like children, and at the same time feel loved by them with the kind of pure, primal love that we needed when we were babies ourselves. Wow. Dogs get us coming and going. In truth, we’re the ones who are helpless.

The intense love we feel for our dogs provides us joy and happiness beyond measure, but it has a flip side: the pain we experience when we lose that love. In the next chapter, we’ll look at the biology of grief and initiate an inquiry into how much our dogs understand about life, death, and the workings of their own minds.

Luke died on a Friday night, so thin and weak that when he squatted to pee he swayed like the plants in a tall grass prairie. There was no question of him lifting his leg anymore. He hadn’t eaten in almost a week and he needed help to get up on his feet. His kidneys had failed him, as had I. While the rest of his body had been glowing with health, his kidneys had simply shut down, and nothing I or anyone else did was able to save him
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Only a few months before he had seemed fine, although a bit quiet, a tad listless about his food. I took him to his vet, John Dally, who discovered he had Ehrlichia, a tick-borne bacterial illness not unlike Lyme disease. We put him on a course of antibiotics that took care of the Ehrlichia, but noticed what I hoped was a temporary glitch in the functioning of his kidneys
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I was optimistic. Three years before, Luke had won a battle with cancer, and I felt empowered by that and by the veterinary resources at his disposal. If you want to move heaven and earth to save a dog Madison, Wisconsin, is the place to do it. When his kidneys appeared compromised, Luke and I went to specialists at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, as well as to veterinarians specializing in Chinese and homeopathic medicine. He received Western medicine, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, therapeutic massage, homeopathic supplements, and home-cooked dinners.
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I always felt that Luke and I had a deal: you take care of me, and I’ll take care of you. That’s the way it had always been. He’d saved me, and I’d saved him, and this was going to be just one more challenge for us to conquer together
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