For the Love of a Dog (43 page)

Two months later, a specialist called with new lab results and said: “It’s time to start reflecting on the wonderful life you and Luke have had together.” He might as well have taken a baseball bat and slammed it across my chest. I cried to my friends: “I’m not ready for the He’s had a wonderful life’ talk.” I rallied, did more research, added more supplements, committed myself to proving the vet wrong to saving my dog by sheer force of will
.

But slowly, inexorably, Luke got worse. Food began to nauseate him and, in a heart-crushing example of classical conditioning his body rejected whatever he’d eaten the day before. My life revolved around finding new kinds of food for him. I bought sardines and pumpkins and pork shoulder roast and organic brown rice. Friends brought over duck and buffalo meat and fee-range eggs, but eventually, there wasn’t anything Luke could eat. We couldn’t keep him hydrated either, even with twice-daily sessions of subcutaneous fluids
.

About a week before he died, I began to feel that my efforts were harassing Luke rather than helping him. Accepting that I couldn’t save him, I switched to hospice rather than hospital care. I emptied my calendar and spent my last week with him, soaking up the touch of his nose, the smell of his fur, the pink of his tongue. I sat long hours with him in the sun up in the pasture, full of the bittersweet emotions that accompany love and grief. At the end, we slept together in a makeshift bed on the living room floor. That’s where the veterinarian and I helped him pass on, peacefully snuggled up against me, nothing but bones and a shockingly beautiful black-and-white coat
.

After Luke died, I was dumbstruck with grief, stumbling through the next months in a haze. I felt as if I’d been hit by a train, as though I’d been physically as well as emotionally injured. None of my senses seemed to function as they had before. The colors of the earth were different, wrong somehow, although I couldn’t quite say how. I coped well enough, seeing clients, running my business, tending to my farm. But a day didn’t pass that I wasn’t heartsick and hurt and angry, and that I didn’t agonize over whether there was something I’d missed, something I could have done to save him
.

Luke’s daughter didn’t do so well after his death, either. Lassie worshiped
Luke from the day she met him, when she arrived at the farm at eleven months of age. She was meant to stay only a few weeks, as a favor to her breeder, but within twenty four hours I asked if I could keep her, so enamored was I of her sweetness, so impressed by her natural ability on sheep. And so she stayed, becoming as much a part of the farm as her father. She fell in love with him herself, watching him, following him, licking his face while they cuddled together on the rug. They spent so much time together that I felt sorry for Pip, who had been Luke’s playmate up until then, but instantly became the odd dog out when Lassie arrived
.

Lassie and Luke adored each other, and of all the dogs, I wondered most what would happen to her when he passed away. The answer came readily enough. Lassie’s behavior changed radically the day after Luke died. She regressed to some of the anxiety-ridden behaviors she’d had when I first got her. She began sucking on toys and kneading her paws obsessively, self-medicating herself with the hormones of a suckling puppy. She began licking again relentlessly, as she had when I first got her—tongue moving mindlessly, eyes shut, licking anything in front of her—tables, rugs, your leg it didn’t matter.
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Worst, her work on sheep became nervous, almost desperate. She’d walk two paces toward the sheep and then stop and eat sheep poop, walk another two paces, and look for more poop to eat. Not a pretty habit, but a heartbreaking one, since I knew it was driven by anxiety. She’d done it before on occasion when she’d felt pressured, but never to that extent. It was pathetic to watch her, so for a while I kept her away from what had been her greatest joy in life, and what now seemed to cause her unbearable anxiety
.

It’s possible that Lassie’s change in behavior was entirely due to the change in mine. My grief over Luke’s death was palpable, and I can’t imagine anyone in the house not being influenced by it. And yet Pip and Tulip didn’t seem to be, at least not visibly. Tulip seemed unaffected by Luke’s illness, his death, or my grief. True to form, she was quiet and serious some of the time, and rollicking bright at other times. I can’t think of anything about her behavior that changed in any way
after Luke died. Pip’s behavior changed a bit, but not in the direction I would have predicted. Pip and Luke always seemed to get along well, and I can’t remember one incident in twelve and a half years where there was the slightest spark of tension between them. Imagine my surprise when she seemed happier after Luke died. She seemed more playful, perkier—a notable change in a dog known for her sweetness, but not her exuberance. My only explanation is that Luke’s life was so big that he took attention away from Pip, and after he was gone she got more of what she wanted—her toys, and attention from me (I suspect that is the correct order). But while Pip seemed energized, and Tulip seemed oblivious, Lassie was—there is no other way to describe it—a wreck.

Lassie behaved as if she was devastated by Luke’s death, and her story is not an uncommon one. A multitude of anecdotes suggest that dogs can grieve over the death of someone they loved. A friend’s Boxer startled as if she’d been hit with electricity when she entered the room in which the family’s beloved cat had died. She sniffed the body, left the room, and barely got up for the next three days. She lay like a puddle in one place, eyes meltingly sad, refusing all food, including steak, chicken, and cheese.

Lassie spent the night that her father died lying in the same room as his body, with her head down and her brows furrowed. Every time I checked on her she was awake, lying still, staring at Luke’s body. The next day she began doing all the crazy, obsessive things she had done when I first got her: she began spinning in tiny little circles, she started compulsively licking, and she sucked on her toys as if she’d regressed to puppyhood.

Similar stories of what looks like grief in animals are common. We’ve all heard about elephants staying for days with the body of a deceased herd member, and then returning months and even years later to stroke the bones. Jane Goodall riveted the world with the story of the chimpanzee named Flint, who seemingly died of grief just three weeks after his mother, Flo. Stories of animals who appear to be overwhelmed with grief aren’t even restricted to mammals—an avian biologist
named Marcy Houle gives a heart-rending account in
The Smile of a Dolphin
of a peregrine falcon’s behavior after his mate failed to return to the nest. After three days of giving the usual contact call, used by mates to stay in touch, the bird finally let loose with “a cry like a screeching moan,” and then sat motionless for an entire day before he rallied to take over feeding their chicks.

It seems reasonable that animals as complex and social as dogs could feel pain because of the death of an individual they love. Yet the concept of death isn’t a simple one. It’s one thing to be aware of the absence of someone you care about, another thing altogether to understand the finality of death. To understand that someone has died is to understand, at a minimum, that their absence isn’t temporary, and that they won’t be coming back. We often speak of dogs as living in the present, but to grieve as I did over Luke, Lassie had to understand the consequences of his death on
the future
. I knew that after Luke died I’d never again get to stroke his soft fur or watch him run across the pasture. But what of Lassie? If dogs always live in the present, how could she understand that the future would no longer include Luke?

It’s no insult to dogs to question what they understand of death. After someone dies, their lifeless body can’t feel, can’t think, and will never again be able to laugh, cry, or yell in anger. That’s a complicated set of ideas to understand. Children don’t understand the concept of death until they’re at least five or six. Before that, they say things like “I know Daddy is dead, but when is he coming home?”

Dogs can’t ask us questions like that, but we can glean something from their behavior after someone special has died. Lassie’s story suggests that she did understand the finality of Luke’s passing—you’d have to work hard to convince me that she didn’t. However, for every story of a dog depressed after the death of a playmate, there are hundreds if not thousands of observations of animals who seem unaffected. Remember the account, at the beginning of this book, of how Tulip seemed so sad about the death of the old ewe named Harriet? I was thinking of that episode when Amy, another of the farm’s special ewes, died. I thought Tulip might react as she had when Harriet died, so I took her to Amy’s body and got ready with my camera to take some interesting photographs. I got some pictures, all right—of Tulip sniffing the body for a few seconds, then moving on to sniff a pile of manure,
and then, with what appeared to be joyful enthusiasm, rolling and grinding on her back in the dirt. Nothing about her behavior suggested any awareness that something special had happened, much less that she was grieving.

The difference in Tulip’s response to the deaths of Harriet and Amy is emblematic of the variety of reactions that animals seem to have to the death of others. Andy Beck, an equine ethologist in New Zealand, tells a moving story of a band of horses reacting to the deaths of three foals within a few days of one another: after the last death, the herd formed a circle and stood motionless together for three days. However, stories of grieving animals may capture our interest and our imagination (not to mention our own emotions) but most accounts are less dramatic and easily fade in memory. There are numerous reports of horses sniffing the dead body of another as casually as if sniffing an old boot. Of course, we can’t say from their behavior what they are feeling inside; the seemingly casual sniffing could cover a cauldron of emotions. Perhaps Tulip didn’t much care for Amy, but was genuinely fond of Harriet. However, we have to be careful about dismissing behavior that
doesn’t
look like grieving while paying special attention to behavior that
does
. If we’re going to use behavior as an indicator of emotions like sorrow and grief, then we have to take into account all the behavior we observe, not just the behavior that supports what we want to believe.

Thanks to many advances in neurobiology, we are no longer limited to observations of behavior to help us understand what’s going on in the minds of our dogs. We’re learning a lot about how the brain and the body react to (and create) strong emotions like grief, and it is becoming increasingly clear that to understand how other animals experience them, we need to understand their thought processes as well as their emotions. Earlier, we defined emotions as physical changes inside and outside the body, as well as the
thoughts
that went along with them. Grief is a good example of that: thoughts like “I’ll never see my dog again” are part of why it’s so hard to contemplate the death of a beloved dog. Thus, if we want to understand how our emotions compare to those of our dogs, we need to understand something about how their thoughts compare to ours.

Here’s where the rubber hits the road, because debates about
whether animals like dogs can think can get as contentious as the nastiest of political debates. There are those who claim that animals aren’t able to think; their argument is based upon the differences in the size and function of human cortexes, or on our unique linguistic ability, or on a combination of the two. It is absolutely true that those big, wrinkly cortexes of ours enable us to integrate large numbers of mental abstractions, hold them in working memory, and move them around in order to plan and strategize. If you’re lying in bed trying to decide whether you should get another dog, you’re integrating a vast amount of information about who dogs are, what they need, and what your life is like now compared to what you’d like it to be in the future. That’s what we call “thinking,” or the ability to form and manipulate “abstract mental representations” of things that are not directly in front of us. You aren’t necessarily thinking in abstractions when you’re looking at a puppy and wanting to pet it, but you are if you’re lying in bed alone, visualizing a puppy (which is an “abstract mental representation”) and wondering whether you want one. Our ability to use abstractions is so ingrained we rarely think about it, but there isn’t an animal born that can approach our ability to store and manipulate large amounts of abstract information.
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Historically some have argued that nonhuman animals aren’t capable of working with abstractions at all, but as we’ll soon see, the animals are proving them wrong.

In this chapter, we’ll look at what we know about thinking and emotions, and how that knowledge relates to our dogs. The story at the beginning of the chapter was about grief because, sad though it may be, it’s an excellent entry point to a discussion of emotions and the mind. Because grieving over the loss of a loved one necessitates an understanding of abstract concepts, such as “the future,” it’s a perfect introduction to the interplay between emotion and thought.

What humans call grief has its roots in the profound social attachments that many animals form with one another, and the biology of those relationships
appears to be as innate as anger, fear, and happiness. We know a lot about what’s called separation distress in animals, and we know that many of their reactions, when they lose contact with their mother, mate, or young, can be strikingly similar to those of humans. For example, in animals who have strong social attachments, the young give “distress vocalizations” when separated from their mothers. There’s been lots of research on this phenomenon; we know where in the brain such calls are generated, which chemicals elicit them, and which ones soothe them.

All these studies make it clear that the calls are much more than mindless noises produced mechanically; they are generated deep within the brain, in areas related to strong emotions. Interestingly, this type of distress involves chemical and neurological pathways different from those activated by the fear of danger or injury. Think of the way you felt when you were young and you lost track of your mother at the shopping mall, or how you felt when you looked out into the yard and discovered your dog had disappeared. It won’t surprise you, then, that this neural pathway is called the panic circuit, a fitting term for any of us who have had a beloved dog go missing for even a few minutes.