Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  Why would anybody stay with me if they had a choice? This is an agonizing fear, but it lives deep within me, and it’s stubborn as a virus, immune to logic. When that feeling hits—she’s bored; oh no, the dog is bored—all reason goes out the window. My fear becomes her reality.

  I am my dog, my dog is me. Boundaries can blur like this in a heartbeat. Susan Cohen, director of counseling at New York’s Animal Medical Center, calls projection “diagnostically fascinating” for precisely that reason. “When someone offers what sounds like a human interpretation of a dog’s behavior,” she says, “it gives you something to explore. It might not tell you a lot about the dog, but it helps tell you what the person is thinking, what they’re hoping, fearing, or feeling.” I tend (at least in my more difficult moments) to err on the fear side of that equation—I look into Lucille’s eyes and see the reflection of my darkest fears—but I think it’s just as easy to err in the opposite direction, to see much loftier sentiments beaming back from the canine gaze, whether or not they actually exist.

  About a year ago I came across a worried message on an Internet dog chat line, posted by a forty-one-year-old mother from Florida named Marsha. Several days earlier Marsha had been feeding both her dog, a four-year-old Airedale terrier, and her baby, a five-month-old girl, scraps of pizza crust from the table, when all of a sudden the dog growled at the child, then snapped several times at the air. Marsha wanted to know: What was that about? Should she worry about it? Do something? Missives flew in response. Aggression alert! Dog is seeing baby as competition for the food source! Yes, you should worry (Airedales can be big, scary dogs), and yes, you should do something: obedience work, long down-stays, an end to joint feedings. Marsha was ambivalent about the response. In a subsequent e-mail dialogue with me, she said the incident seemed like a “one-time thing,” and she refused to believe the dog would do anything to hurt the baby.

  “He loves her,” she wrote. “I really think he knows she’s his little sister.” Valid belief or anthropomorphic hope? For the baby’s sake, one hopes the former, but Marsha’s sentiments speaks to the wish—widely shared, if often dangerously misplaced—to see the dog as a four-legged version of our best selves, a fur-covered human who brings to relationships the same degrees of love, loyalty, and commitment we do.

  That wish is manifested in many ways; you see undercurrents of it all the time. I’m reminded of a button, seen on dog-owner lapels of late: Dogs are people in fur coats. I’m reminded of a woman who came up to me at a dog park, beaming because she’d told her six-month-old Doberman puppy to guard her bag while she ran across the street to get some water, and the dog had obeyed, had actually stood there—unleashed—and (as she saw it) guarded her bag. I’m reminded of the owner of a German shepherd dog whom I used to see in the woods when Lucille was a puppy: his dog would lunge at Lucille every time he saw her and pin her against a tree, his hackles raised and his teeth bared, and the man would stand there and chuckle. “He’s just being friendly,” he’d insist. “He’s just trying to get her to play.”

  The idea that dogs embody our own most admired and coveted qualities is very seductive. Dogs become extensions of us so quickly—we want them to reflect well on us—and they are easy to idealize. And so the temptation to see them through the lens of our own hopes—to play with the facts, to spin stories that support our relational ideals—can be enormously difficult to resist. The snapping Airedale is the devoted family member who shares our values; the six-month-old Doberman is the loyal and communicative partner; the aggressive shepherd is every bit as friendly and outgoing as we are. The fantasy here, the projected wish, is old and abiding: underneath that fur coat, the dog is a person who loves us.

  I understand the impulse to romanticize the dog; I struggle with it myself. At least once a day Lucille comes up to me if I’m sitting quietly in a chair, and pokes her nose toward my hand. This is the kind of moment that can make me feel in tune with her, that seems to speak to a level of connection between us that I cherish: she is asking me to give her my hand, and when I comply, she will sit down next to me and spend several minutes licking it. She looks like a little fawn at a salt lick when she does this—her ears go back, her manner is gentle and concentrated, and she sometimes places a paw on my wrist to steady my hand, a gesture that feels delicate and tender and full of affection to me. But is it? I’d like to think that this is about love, that Lucille is deliberately seeking me out for a kind of canine kissfest, but it’s equally possible that she’s indulging one of her other affinities: for the taste of hand lotion. So which interpretation is right? I choose to believe that the hand-licking is about both moisturizer and me (they’re my hands, after all), but I’m also aware that an element of choice is at work here, that this is my read, based at least to some extent on my own investment in the idea of loving communion with my dog.

  In the end that may be all we’re left with: choice. In Dogs Never Lie About Love, a book that posits an exceptionally romantic view of canine emotion, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson describes what happens when he is out walking and one of his three dogs strays too far from the others. “I will notice that the other two stop and wait for their companion to return,” he writes. “They look at me as if to let me know that this is the right thing to do, and that I should wait, too. They do not want to continue until the pack is complete.” Some observers would interpret this behavior as strictly instinctual: keeping the pack intact is, for dogs as for wolves, a matter of survival. Masson chooses to see only benevolence: “This act,” he writes, “is surely indicative of compassion.”

  Maybe, maybe not. The fact is, Masson will never really know if his dogs experience compassion the same way humans do, and I’ll never really know if Lucille is motivated to seek out my hand by lotion or by love: they’re dogs; they simply can’t tell us. And at heart, I’m not so sure I’d want them to.

  When Lucille was about a year old, I started hearing rumblings about a practice called “interspecies telepathic communication,” which is a fancy name for psychic communication with animals. I read a New York magazine article about a seminar on the practice, which attracted a standing-room-only crowd at a pet-care expo in New York; I saw a flyer tacked up at a pet shop, advertising a workshop on the subject; my dog trainer reported that more and more of her acquaintances were consulting “animal communicators” (the preferred term among practitioners) about their dogs and horses. The trade has attained the status of a minor movement in the last few years, and its practitioners answer human questions about animal emotion in unequivocal terms: Yes, they believe, animals most definitely experience emotions like ours, such as love and compassion. And yes, it is possible to reach across the boundaries of species and communicate with them quite directly.

  Three hundred years ago this sort of thinking could have gotten you burned at the stake. The idea that animals even had feelings was seen as pure heresy at that time, and the Church (which controlled the bulk of research and scholarship) had a vested interest in keeping it that way. If animals were conscious, sentient beings—beings with souls—the Church would have been presented with a host of ethical problems: How to kill animals for food in good conscience if they have feelings and emotions? How to force them into servitude, deny them free will? How to make room for all those animal souls in heaven? It was far more palatable to see animals as unfeeling biological machines. Extending the ideas of René Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher credited as the first to propose that animals lacked consciousness, Nicolas de Malebranche summed up the prevailing wisdom, writing that animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, act without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

  That philosophy may seem ludicrous, even cruel, today, but it persisted for generations, expressed in more modern form by the behaviorist school of the 1950s, which supported an equally mechanistic view: that animals were controlled not by “emotions” but by instinct, and by such empirically observable phenomena as neurons, muscles, and
hormones; at least in the world of science, inquiries into an animal’s inner life were roundly discouraged.

  Today’s scientists aren’t exactly embracing animal emotion as a field of study (for the fairly pragmatic reason that animals can’t tell us directly how they feel), but the general public certainly is. Far more personally invested in animals than we used to be, far more interested in relating to them as kindred spirits than in exploiting them, the contemporary pet owner would find a thinker like Descartes as heretical as he would have found us. We are deeply committed to the notion that animals feel, and we are starved for information about how they do it. In the past five years dog owners have made best-selling authors out of such emotionally oriented thinkers as Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Hidden Life of Dogs, published in 1993), Stanley Coren (The Intelligence of Dogs, in 1994), and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love, in 1995 and 1997). And some of us, nudging the cultural pendulum one notch farther, are consulting psychics.

  Intrigued, I called three communicators, less curious about what they might actually “hear” from Lucille than about the underlying conviction, the belief that they could hear anything at all. All three operated similarly. Prices ranged from $45 to $65 per session, and because the work, in the words of one, “is all conducted telepathically,” I didn’t need to bring Lucille in for actual visits. I merely called up, provided brief descriptions of Lucille and lists of questions, and they communicated with the dog, as it were, over the phone.

  What struck me about these exchanges was their chatty matter-of-factness. I’d ask a general question (“Is Lucille happy?”), there’d be a pause of several seconds (time in which the communicator communed), and then an answer would come back, clear as handwriting on a wall. “Oh, yes,” one said. “Her joy at being with you is, like, boundless. She doesn’t even understand why you would question it.” The same phenomenon applied to more specific questions. “Who are Lucille’s favorite dog friends?” (Answer: “I’m seeing an apricot-colored spaniel.”) “Is her diet okay?” (Answer: “She would like more vegetables.”) The tone was unquestioning and absolute, as was the belief behind it: Ask and you shall hear; it’s that simple.

  This didn’t feel like a scam to me. None of the psychics seemed crazy or deluded; there was an earnestness to their manner, a sense that each one truly believed she’d established some sort of contact with my dog. None of them made me feel particularly enlightened either, but for the most part, I found their interpretations pleasantly diverting, as I might find a reading of tea leaves. Boundless joy? That’s perfectly pleasant to hear. Spaniels and spinach? Well, who really knows? I listened as they talked. I nodded. I scratched questions on a pad (I wonder. Do Portuguese water dogs speak Portuguese?). I didn’t stock up on produce.

  But not all the interpretations left me quite so amused. Example: Lucille has two phobias, which I asked all three communicators to explain. The first fear concerns highway driving, which she has loathed, for reasons that are not clear to me, since she was about six months old: she sits in the back seat and cowers, literally ducking every time we’re passed by a truck. The second concerns houseflies, a fear that dates back to a week we spent in a rented farmhouse in Vermont when she was about a year old. The house was old and drafty, full of moths that would flit around the lamps at night, and my then-boyfriend, Michael, would periodically chase the moths around with a rolled-up magazine, smacking them against the wall in irritation. Lucille appeared to find this horrifying—you’d hear a smack, then turn around and see her slinking off to her dog bed. The housefly phobia materialized when we got back to the city: she’d see a fly buzzing around inside; a look of alarm would cross her face; she’d get up and creep away.

  Two of the communicators had vague but not unreasonable explanations for these fears—the speed of highway driving may have upset Lucille; the houseflies may have reminded her of a bee that stung her that same summer; that sort of thing. The third, a woman named Marcia from Sherborn, Massachusetts, spun a more elaborate tale. “Oh, it’s an awful story,” she told me. In a former life, she said, Lucille had been owned by a mean “dark-haired, brown-skinned couple” who badly mistreated her. Lucille apparently showed Marcia a “picture” from this former life, a mental image of driving down the highway with the couple who, in a final fit of abuse, threw her out of the car and left her for dead. Marcia sent me a transcript of her “conversation” with Lucille: “While I lay dying,” it read, “the flies were all over me, in my eyes and eating my flesh. They became so big. They were so destructive. They ate my body. I went through so much pain.” Hence the dual phobia: highways and houseflies.

  I read that transcript, thanked God I didn’t buy a word of it, and shook my head. Canine fears or human ones?

  What troubles me about anthropomorphism, about projection that’s sloppy and unexamined, is the idea that the elusive truths of a dog’s experience are a mere phone call away, that we can know so easily and surely. One of the psychics encouraged me, toward the end of a consultation, to learn to speak with Lucille myself, to practice conjuring up mental images for her to receive and to make myself open to whatever pictures or sensations might be lurking in her consciousness. “Lucille says she would like to be able to communicate with you,” she said. “She would be very willing to assist you. She’s actually very enthusiastic about it.”

  I hung up the phone and looked down at this animal, sleeping peacefully at my feet. “Do you want to talk to me?” I asked her. “Would that make you happy?” She raised her head from the floor and gave me one of her classic blank looks: dark eyes fixed on me, her expression curious, calm, and completely inscrutable.

  I leaned over to scratch her belly, and I looked into those unreadable eyes, and I smiled. The fact of the matter is, I like not knowing how Lucille experiences the world, I like the mystery of living with a dog. There is something deeply rewarding about the moments when she and I manage to transcend the language barrier, to reach across the boundaries of species and communicate with one another, understand what the other wants and feels. But there is something equally rewarding about honoring the moments when we can’t.

  OUR DRAMAS, OUR DOGS

  TWO YEARS AGO, Jean, a slight dark-haired woman in her late thirties, was walking down a small side street with her German shepherd dog, then an eleven-month-old pup named Sam, when she saw a man approaching her from down the block. Jean’s hand tightened on the leash, and she felt her heart speed up just a bit. Ex-boyfriend. She took a deep breath. Jean hadn’t seen this man for almost a year—after a brief fling, he’d broken up with her one night over dinner, made a lot of promises about “staying friends” and “keeping in touch,” then promptly disappeared from her orbit—and the prospect of having to stand there on the corner and make small talk with him filled her with dread.

  As the man got closer, Sam’s hackles rose and he began to growl. This didn’t surprise Jean—Sam had been a protective dog since puppyhood, and she was fairly inured to the way he strained at his leash on the street, menacing passersby, so she didn’t take the behavior too seriously. She merely whispered to him—“Sam, stop it; it’s all right”—and jerked the leash a few times, with little result. But then the man got closer. He waved and called out her name. He opened up his arms to give her a hug. The next few moments are still a blur in Jean’s mind. She felt Sam lurch forward, saw a whirl of black and tan fur, heard several simultaneous sounds: barking—deep and guttural and fierce; fabric tearing; swearing. Sam had leaped up on the man, torn a chunk out of his leather jacket, and lacerated his forearm, an injury that required seven stitches.

  This is a story about entanglement, about the way an owner’s feelings—fears, needs, wishes, both conscious and unconscious—can affect not only our view of dogs but the dog himself and our relationship with him. Jean had acquired Sam nine months earlier following a break-in at her apartment, an incident, she now realizes, that tapped in to a lifetime of fear. “To say that I am an anxious
person would be the understatement of the year,” she says. The break-in reopened a number of very old wounds—Jean had grown up with an invasive father whose behavior bordered on sexual abuse; at the age of eighteen she had been assaulted in an airport parking garage—and she spent the next several months battling insomnia, walking around with her heart racing. A girlfriend suggested she get a dog, and Sam—a feisty, intelligent, rather willful pup—seemed like a perfect choice. “I didn’t go out and get, you know, a lapdog,” she says. “I wanted a big, scary dog. A big male. I felt incredibly unsafe in the world.”

  In retrospect, Jean says she’s sure she helped make Sam a big, scary dog. True, like a lot of German shepherd dogs, he had a strong protective streak to begin with—as a young dog, he barked wildly whenever anyone came to the door; he barked at strangers on, the street, sat by the window at home, and growled whenever anyone passed by the apartment. But Jean, who found his protectiveness both endearing and reassuring, also encouraged it in subtle, often only semiconscious ways. Sometimes she simply ignored Sam when he barked or growled; sometimes she heard herself talking to him in pleased tones, responding to his menacing outbursts by saying things like, “Are you being a guard dog? Are you protecting me?” In other words, she rewarded the behavior, sent him steady little signals that his aggression was warranted. On a slightly less tangible level, Jean suspects that the dog read her correctly, saw how jumpy she was, felt her tension on the other end of the leash, learned from her to see the world as a fearsome place. And he acted accordingly: as Sam saw it—as Jean helped define it—his job was to perceive danger and fend it off. This was all fine when Sam was young, but a scrappy twenty-five-pound puppy is very different from a seventy-five-pound snarling adult dog. By the time Jean ran into her ex-boyfriend on the street, Sam had become a full-grown menace of a dog who lunged at strangers, growled at anyone who came into the house—friends, the plumber, Jean’s seventy-three-year-old mother—and, as it happened, bit people.