Dog owners wage battles like this all the time; they’re a central feature of living with a dog, and food—so tied to feelings of longing for humans, so wrapped up with our concepts of nurturance and love—probably sends us into more projective tizzies than any other issue. I’ve talked to owners who toast their dogs bagels for breakfast, spread them with cream cheese and raspberry jam, set them down on the floor on special plates; I know owners who fix their dogs individual bowls of ice cream every night, a different flavor for each day of the week, sprinklings of jimmies included; I know owners (I’m one of them from time to time) who spend more time preparing the dog’s dinner than their own. Some of this is genuinely loving behavior on the humans’ part—there’s an intimacy to the act of feeding the dog, at least for us—but if we didn’t have such complicated feelings about food ourselves, chances are we wouldn’t go to so much trouble.
Dogs, of course, fuel the projective fires; they play us like fiddles. As behaviorists will tell you, dogs are often far better at training us than we are at training them, both clearer and more consistent than humans in communicating their wants. They are also very quick studies when it comes to food: they learn which behaviors are rewarded and which aren’t, what they’re likely to get away with, what will or won’t happen if they refuse to eat what we put in front of them. I know a woman whose Doberman pinscher has basically “taught” her that he won’t eat his dinner unless it’s mixed with two tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil. No other oil will do—try to fake him out with low-grade peanut oil, and he’ll sniff the bowl and walk away. Sarah, his owner, knows this is a little silly—she picks up that twenty-eight-dollar bottle of olive oil every time she feeds the dog and she thinks, Ridiculous—but the olive oil gets the dog to eat, and the owner can’t stand it when the dog goes hungry. And so the ritual is repeated, day after day.
Brian Kilcommons and Sarah Wilson write about a family who projected themselves right out of their own home during feeding time. Somehow—they never quite figured out how this happened—their dog would eat only if the entire family trooped out to the hallway outside their apartment and rang the doorbell. If they failed to enact this ritual, the dog would ignore his food and go hungry, causing the loving, nurturing humans great distress. So they’d file out the door, ring the doorbell, and stand there while the dog ate. A little nutty? Perhaps, but I’m hardly the best judge. I’ve been known to sprinkle Lucille’s food with liver powder and Parmesan cheese when she won’t eat, to mix it with chopped carrots and expensive Italian pasta, to get down on my knees and hand-feed her. What she makes of all that effort is beyond me, but it gets the dog to eat, which (in my mind, anyway) is the point.
These are the kinds of stories that make vets and behaviorists gnash their teeth. C’mon, they say. The dog is the dog. The dog doesn’t need us to jump through such elaborate gastronomic hoops. The dog doesn’t need fancy food or varied food or human food or health food, and he certainly doesn’t need food that comes in pretty little shapes and colors, the stuff that marketers dream up in order to appeal to the owner’s definition of an appetizing, healthful diet. Dog biscuits shaped like mailmen and cats? You think the dog really knows the difference? The same could be said of some of the products we buy for dogs, such as beds designed like little futons and canine apparel. One rainy day last fall I saw a perfectly groomed white standard poodle standing outside in a field, clad in a pair of blue plastic rain pants. Think that was the poodle’s idea?
It’s not too hard to guess how a poodle feels about being swathed in Gore-Tex, but fathoming the canine experience on more complicated fronts can be very difficult, indeed. Leslie, owner of the Wheaten terrier named Wilson, struggled for nearly a year with the question of whether to neuter her dog, a concern that was wrapped up in her own feelings about sexuality, her own sense of what it meant to be a sexual being. When Wilson, not yet neutered, was about a year old, Leslie saw the movie 101 Dalmatians. She watched the two protagonist dogs fall in love. She watched them marry and have a family and coo together over their puppies, and this image crystallized certain fantasies she harbored about Wilson’s life. Leslie, of course, understood that the movie was a Disney production, warm and humanized. She understood that concepts like marriage and family unity are alien to dogs. But the movie tugged at her, and part of her wanted what it represented: sexual love for her dog, the opportunity for him to express that part of his being. Neutering seemed like such a betrayal by contrast, cruel and irrevocable, and the idea of tampering with his most basic drive, his sexuality, horrified her.
This fear tends to be more common among men (according to Alan Beck and Aaron Katcher, pioneers in the study of the human-animal bond, some men have such a hard time separating the concept of virility from the physical equipment that they say they’d rather have the dog killed than neutered), but Leslie agonized over the decision: she made several appointments, canceled them at the last minute. Finally Wilson started bolting out of local parks and into traffic, drawn by the scent of females in heat; worried about his safety, Leslie rescheduled the procedure. I spoke to her the day before the surgery. She felt it was the right thing to do by then, and she was determined to go through with it, but she never fully came to terms with the idea that for Wilson, sexuality was probably more a physical, hormonal experience than a romantic one. Shortly before I left, she told me: “I’ve been thinking that maybe I should get a female dog. Then Wilson could get a vasectomy and I could get the female’s tubes tied, and then it would be an equal thing. They could stay home while I go to work, and they could have sex whenever they wanted to.”
Nice fantasy, but not necessarily a very canine one. When I suggested that the dog’s experience of sexuality is probably not as tied in to intimacy as ours is, Leslie sighed and said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just have such a hard time seeing him as a dog, and not as a person.”
Nearly half of all contemporary dog owners appear to struggle with that distinction: 48 percent of respondents to a University of Pennsylvania survey said they saw their dogs as “people” rather than as dogs, and I’d venture to say that even those of us who are very clear on the fact that dogs are dogs blur the lines between us and them on occasion.
For Milton, a forty-four-year-old psychiatrist, the projective downfall used to come in the first ten minutes of puppy kindergarten class, which was designated as playtime, an opportunity for the dogs to socialize. Milton was new to the world of dogs, having just acquired a boxer puppy named Zelda, and he’d never really seen dogs play before. They’d start hurling each other to the floor, baring their teeth, executing hip checks, and Milton would stand there in abject horror, not because he feared for Zelda’s safety (mock fighting is perfectly normal canine behavior, as natural to a puppy like Zelda as chasing a ball; Milton knew this), but because the sight rocketed him back to boyhood, to the vulnerability he had felt in seventh-grade gym class as “the smallest, runtiest, least athletic kid in history.” He says, “I’d stand there with my heart in my throat thinking, ‘The other kids are beating Zelda up! The other kids are beating Zelda up!’ All that old fear—my fear—came washing up.” For her part, Zelda turned out to be one of the more dominant dogs in the class, perfectly capable of holding her own against seven other puppies, but Milton still shudders at the memory: “Playtime,” he says, “terrified me.”
Dog as small, fur version of the owner as child: very easy view to slip into, very hard to resist. I’m better at separating Lucille’s experiences from my own than I used to be, but when she was a puppy, I had to give myself little lectures all the time, little mental slaps to tease out what I knew about her world from what I felt about my own. I’d see her at the dog park, standing hesitantly at the outskirts while a group of dogs played, and my heart would melt: the canine wallflower, tentative and self-conscious, blinking out at the other kids. Mental slap; private lecture on popularity, human versus canine: The dog is not feeling left out; dogs are not preoccupied with such human concerns as “fitting
in”; the dog simply doesn’t feel like playing. Or she’d fail to execute a command at obedience class, and I’d look at her, certain for the briefest moment that I saw embarrassment in her eyes, and then I’d have to give myself a lecture about human, as opposed to canine, definitions of failure and success: Lucille is not worried about getting an A here; the concept of performance anxiety is alien to the dog; this discomfort is entirely yours.
What’s astonishing to me is how automatically such feelings can arise, how unconsciously they attach themselves to the dog. Betsy, a fifty-two-year-old New York editor, describes taking her Tibetan terrier, Lucy, then four years old, to Central Park, where she ran into a young woman with an adorable puppy. The two chatted. Betsy asked the woman how old her dog was. Nine months. The woman asked Betsy how old Lucy was. And Betsy, who’s never once lied about her own age and is determined not to, heard herself say, without even thinking, “She’s two” Then she stood there and wondered: What was that about? Projection of her own fear of aging onto the dog? Competitiveness on the who-has-the-cuter-pup front? A statement about her own self-image? Whatever its source, something came up—some vulnerability, some buried insecurity, some need to manipulate the truth—and Lucy served as a lightning rod for the feeling.
During our first year together, I used to take Lucille once a week to a day-care center for dogs. The center is housed in a ramshackle triple-decker in Somerville, Mass., a town over from where I live, and when you walk in, all you see is dog. Two cavernous rooms with dogs everywhere: dogs on old sofas and dogs on dog beds; dogs lying on the floor, dogs waiting by the door; big dogs, little dogs, medium-size dogs; dogs, dogs, dogs. The place terrified me, not because I found the dogs scary but because I assumed—instinctively, unconsciously—that Lucille felt lost and invisible when I left her there, exactly the way I’d feel if deposited in a crowd of strangers. I’d walk in, holding my treasured dog by the leash, and I’d think: Oh, no! She’s going to disappear into this sea of dogs! Some part of me—a part that wanted to stand out even as a kid, a part that always felt lost and uncomfortable in a crowd, a part that lacked social confidence—would come welling up, and I’d practically burst into tears, the idea of her vanishing into anonymity like that so upset me. Rational? Not necessarily. Nothing in Lucille’s manner suggested she was afraid or lacking in confidence or “feeling invisible” in the midst of all those dogs, but I’d see her watch me from the window as I left, see that dark face peering out after me as I got into my car, and I’d want to die.
The great frustration, of course, is not being able to ask the dog: Lucille, do you like day care? Are you happy being left here or would you rather be at home? Day care turned out to be a classic example of the way projection can color the decisions we make for dogs, making the question of what’s good for them enormously difficult to address with clarity. Despite my anxiety about abandoning Lucille to that sea of dogs, I continued to take her to day care for about six months. The ostensible reason was to free up a chunk of time for myself, but I’ve come to wonder if I wasn’t also motivated by a projected belief: that she’d be happiest in the company of other dogs, that day care would be “fun” for her. When she was fourteen months old, I took her to a camp for owners and dogs for largely the same reason: it sounded like canine (and owner) bliss—a week of fun in the country, new friends and activities for both of us. In retrospect, both services feel a little dicier than I’d originally thought, based more on human wishes, and human definitions of camaraderie and entertainment, than on canine ones.
Certainly they both cater to human fantasies: at one Boston-area day-care center, employees call the dogs “kids” and joke that they have “pillow fights” at night; at another, dogs who are boarded overnight are said to be attending “doggie pajama parties.” The anthropomorphic slant at camp could be found in the itinerary: along with such standard fare as obedience and agility training, it listed activities like “doggie square dancing,” a tail-wagging contest, a weenie-retrieval competition. Are these the kinds of things dogs really like to do? Well, not my dog. Dogs are creatures of habit and routine; they tend to dislike change, especially as they get older. A lot of dogs also find it very stressful to be housed for long periods with groups of unfamiliar dogs, particularly if they’re high-strung or shy. The day-care center I went to served upward of thirty dogs a day, and as calm and adaptable as Lucille is, I’m not at all sure she found the experience “fun”; when I’d pick her up at the end of the day, she’d pass out in the car within minutes, and her fatigue seemed different from the kind she exhibits when she’s been out playing in more familiar settings, more psychic than physical. At camp the population hovered around ninety and the experience wore Lucille out, not because she had such a rollicking good time square dancing and retrieving weenies but because she seemed to find being around that many other dogs exhausting, wildly overstimulating.
I don’t want to overstate the projective dangers here: day care is an excellent option for some dogs, particularly well-socialized, confident ones who are introduced to it at an early age, and it certainly relieves a great deal of strain for owners who are loath to leave their dogs alone for eight, ten, or twelve hours at a stretch. Camp may serve some populations very well, too (members of the show-dog circuit, whose dogs are accustomed to being around large crowds, seemed to be most at home; the staff also included some top-notch trainers, a boon to owners who don’t have access to good training in their hometowns). But Lucille’s stress was instructive to me, a lesson in how much confusion the gap between our views and their needs can generate.
One projected feeling leads to another, then another; they nestle inside each other like so many Russian dolls. At heart, I suppose my impulse to haul Lucille off to day care and camp also sprang from another anxiety, a suspicion I’ve struggled with since Lucille was a pup: that she finds her life with me inadequate, that she wishes she had a more exciting, adventuresome owner, that she’s … bored.
This is one of my greatest relational fears, that the beings I love will lose interest in me, and I suppose it’s no surprise it crops up with the dog, blank screen that she is. I see her look at me from her dog bed, her expression vacant and unreadable, and it’s often the first place my mind goes: The dog is bored; she’s sick of me, I’m sure of it.
I can make myself insane with this. Not long ago, on a cold, raw, afternoon with a wind-driven rain, Lucille and I skipped our customary outdoor outing and instead spent a couple of hours with my friend Tom and his dog, an Australian shepherd named Cody, one of her favorite playmates. Easy afternoon, fun for dogs and humans: Tom and I got to sit in his warm, dry apartment and sip coffee; the dogs got to wrestle in the living room, which they did for ninety minutes straight. Lucille appears to adore both Tom and Cody—every time we go to his house, she practically does a little jig on the front steps—and I kept stealing looks at her throughout the afternoon, gratified to see how happy she seemed. This is not always clear with Lucille—some dogs are naturally wiggly and exuberant; they wag constantly, wear looks of contentment nearly all the time, but Lucille’s expression tends to be so serious and sober, her manner so quiet and composed, that she can appear to be in a grave mood, crestfallen or disheartened, no matter how at ease she actually feels. At Tom’s she radiated glee: she’d come up to one of us and wag her tail, steal a kiss; she’d hurl herself at Cody; her eyes appeared bright and fascinated, the expression of a kid at a circus. And then, two hours later, we went home, she lay down on her dog bed, and she looked … miserable. Expression blank, not a trace of that earlier joy. My heart sank.
This is what I mean about driving myself insane. In reality the dog was probably worn out, the blank look connoting nothing more complicated than physical fatigue. But I saw wistfulness: She misses Cody. I imagined the little mind clicking with comparisons: she’s thinking, Cody’s house is more fun than my house. I heard a tone of sad resignation: she’s thinking, Ugh, here we are again, hanging around this same old living room; what a bor
e.
These are not canine thoughts and feelings. I know this. I stood there and gave myself another round of mental slaps, a lecture on the experience of boredom, canine versus human. Dogs get bored (or more accurately, restless) when they’re left alone too long, when they’re underexercised or under-stimulated, none of which applies to Lucille (in fact, the opposite is true: I exercise her a fanatical two to three hours a day, never allow myself to skip a walk or cut one short, will lead her through the woods in monsoons; in my effort to stave off boredom, I tend to wear the poor dog out). Dogs also appear to relish their predictable, territorial comforts: lazing about on the sofa night after night may sound excruciatingly dull to me, but it’s probably heaven to her. In all likelihood dogs do not make comparative assessments about their lives either, do not lie around wishing they were elsewhere, fantasizing about better owners, dreaming of more varied settings. The very idea that Lucille harbors such thoughts is absurd; I understand this. But that’s the projective stew: human anxiety, a voiceless dog, a pinch of paranoia.
In other words, my stuff. I am deeply afraid of being bored: it’s one of my least favorite states, almost always laced in my experience with undercurrents of alienation and despair, invariably a signal that I’m depressed. I am equally afraid (if not convinced on some level) that I am a boring person, hollow and bland, and that anyone who gets too close to me is bound to figure this out. The projected anxieties follow: when I see a glazed look in Lucille’s eyes, I fear she’s experiencing boredom exactly the way I do, with all its ancillary emotion. And when I see an empty, vacant look, I see something just as scary reflected there: me, my worst self.
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