Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  Shortly after I made this connection, I bit the bullet and started taking the experts’ advice, making my arrivals and departures far less emotional, handing Lucille a bone smeared inside with a little peanut butter when I left the house so she’d associate my leaving with something positive, that kind of thing. She’s long since stopped tearing stuff up, she doesn’t howl or whine while I’m away, and when I return, nothing in her manner suggests she’s been the least bit anxious or stressed. As far as I can tell, she does what most dogs do when left alone: curls up on the sofa and sleeps. So I can leave her alone these days, and I do leave her alone, but I’m still loath to, and I’m still struck by the range of feeling that that look in her eyes can generate in me.

  If there were a 12-step program for codependent dog owners, I’d no doubt be a prime candidate, but I’d hardly be the only member. Right there in the church basement with me would be Jonathan, forty-one, owner of a four-year-old basenji named Toby, and a man whose separation anxiety matched mine, step for angst-ridden step. Jonathan barely let the dog out of his sight for an entire year, and it wasn’t unusual for friends to find him at work in his office, the dog curled in his lap. Next to Jonathan would be Elizabeth, thirty-nine, who worries so excessively about the health and safety of her dog, a beagle named Marge, that she falls apart if the dog so much as hiccups. And beside her would be Joan, thirty-four, who’s gone on vacation without Emma, her springer spaniel, only once in three years, and who felt so guilty about that departure that in the days before her trip, she showered the dog with treats—rawhide, marrow bones, an abundance of table scraps. By the time Joan left, Emma looked miserable and lethargic and wouldn’t eat her dinner. Joan assumed she was depressed about her impending departure; in fact, she’d developed some kind of painful gastrointestinal block and had to be rushed from the kennel to the vet while Joan was away.

  Take one human struggle, add dog, and stir: recipe for entanglement. Jonathan, executive director of a group of addiction treatment centers in Greater Boston, has a long history of overinvolvement in human relationships, of blurred boundaries and excessive caretaking, and his codependence came out in spades with Toby. “The problem for me was not being able to control what happened when I wasn’t there,” he says. “And for someone who wants to be in control of just about every part of their life, leaving this animal alone, who’s so dependent, was horrible.” The horror was compounded by the circumstances under which Jonathan acquired Toby: he inherited the dog from his lover, Kevin, who died of AIDS, and few emotions can fuel one’s need for control—and one’s fear of losing it—like profound grief. Jonathan’s fear, his need to manage the people and things around him, went into overdrive with Toby, who, much like Lucille, read Jonathan’s anxiety and responded in kind. Toby is a small and delicate dog, with a sleek tan coat and tight curl of a tail, but he could tear through a room in about ten seconds. Same vicious cycle, similar outcome. Jonathan took Toby everywhere—to work, to meetings—and the aspects of his life that couldn’t accommodate the dog more or less ground to a halt; by the end of a year, people at work were taking Jonathan aside and saying, “You know, I’m really not sure it’s appropriate for you to be bringing Toby to this meeting with our major funders.” Jonathan would bring him anyway. Time has eased the struggle (so has a crate), and Jonathan can laugh about it today, but his story is a textbook study of codependence between owner and dog, in all its deflected pain.

  Human struggles don’t always affect canine behavior so directly, but the emotions they generate can drive owners halfway ‘round the bend. Elizabeth, for example, can’t count the number of nights she’s spent staring at the ceiling worrying about her dog’s death, weeping over it. She knows this is crazy. Her dog is only four years old; she’s a perfectly sturdy little beagle, thirty-five pounds of perfect health, but Elizabeth can’t help it. Her mother died of cancer when Elizabeth was fourteen, her grandmother died three years later, and her older sister two years after that. Elizabeth’s grief has abated over the years, but her sense that the world is dangerous—that the people you love can be snatched up at any time—has not, and the fear she carries around with her gets channeled into Marge, translated into a powerful need to protect and watch over her. Elizabeth herself hasn’t been to a doctor for so much as a routine checkup in years, and she’s the sort of person who’ll barely take an aspirin when she has a fever or a bad headache, but if she sees anything amiss with the dog—a limp, an untouched meal, a look of lethargy—she’s all over her: What’s wrong with Marge? Is she sick? Is she dying? “I don’t feel any of that for myself,” she says. “I don’t worry about my own safety or health, I don’t ever worry that I’m in danger—it all goes onto Marge, and it’s amazing how much emotional energy I can expend worrying about her.”

  Joan’s emotional energy goes into fending off guilt, the bane of many a dog owner’s existence. Everything makes Joan feel guilty—leaving the house for work in the morning, cutting a walk short, expressing even slight irritation—and she has found the power of this emotion both oppressive and illuminating. Joan describes standing at her back door one cold winter morning imploring Emma, who was out in the yard, to come inside. She was in a rush, overtired, premenstrual—bad combination all around—and the dog wouldn’t come, and Joan lost her temper. Clad in slippers and a robe, she went into the yard, grabbed Emma by the collar, and dragged her inside, jerking her by the collar and hissing. Then she got ready for work, left the house in a huff, and spent the entire day writhing with guilt at her desk: she’d made Emma feel bad, made her feel unloved and inadequate somehow. Not the most dramatic story—and not the most rational set of interpretations—but it taught Joan something about her own hypersensitivity to the dog’s feelings. She says, “I keep assuming that the dog feels exactly the way I used to feel with my mother, who was this extremely perfectionistic woman who always made me feel less-than. ‘I’m a disappointment, nothing I do is good enough, and one of these days I’m going to blow it. She’s going to stop loving me.’ I grew up with that feeling. So I guess I feel like the stakes are always incredibly high. If I let Emma down in any way—you know, if I yell at her or make her sad—it’s like she might feel all of that, too, like she’s this major disappointment.” Joan’s heavy hand with the pre-vacation treats was a wake-up call, showing her just how out of proportion her guilt and anxiety had become, and how dangerous those emotions could be.

  Gathered there in a 12-step meeting for dog owners—let’s call it Ala-Pet—none of us would be particularly proud of the way our own emotions tend to get tangled up with our dogs, and all of us would agree that it’s dangerous business, that things can get pretty complicated when you start acting out psychic dramas with an animal. You can create excessive dependence, compromise a dog’s physical health, make yourself half crazy with worry. You can also do far worse things, and many owners do—animal abuse is perhaps the most vivid expression of the way human emotions (violence, hostility) can harm dogs. But in the lexicon of 12-step programs, all of us would admit to a certain sense of powerlessness, a periodic and unwitting loss of reason in the face of the dog. As Elizabeth puts it, “They just touch you on that level, I don’t know how else to explain it. You can be an incredibly rational person in most areas of your life, and then with the dog you’re a total lunatic.” Amen.

  Mordecai Siegel, author of fifteen books about dogs and current president of the Dog Writers’ Association of America, once said, “Acquiring a dog may be the only opportunity a human has to choose a relative.” That’s a lovely idea, but human relatives—even self-selected ones, such as spouses—don’t tend to be as accepting of our foibles as dogs are, and they’re not nearly as pliable. Humans can’t be trained, and they rarely give their partners so much emotional free rein, rarely permit them to act out with such unscrutinized abandon. So I’d alter Siegel’s sentiment slightly and say that acquiring a dog may be the only opportunity a human has to create a relative, to make up the rules as you go along, to define the t
erms, all to your own specifications.

  There is good news and bad news in this state of affairs. The good news is that dogs are very adept at molding themselves to our wishes. They are such accommodating animals, equipped with such keen radar, and they really will play by our rules if we make them sufficiently clear: you want minimal affection from the dog, he’ll learn to keep his distance; you want the dog to occupy a secondary role in the household, he’ll take it; you want to give him an hour of exercise every day, or twenty minutes, or two hours, he’ll learn to expect that amount, no less and no more. This can make for a very gratifying partnership indeed: dogs represent the one relationship in life you really can “design” to some extent, and because dogs respond well to both structure and hierarchy, the result can be satisfying to both parties. The bad news is that humans can be woefully fuzzy on the concept of dominion, of the responsibility it entails: we don’t always understand canine behavior very well, we’re not always very clear about what we want from dogs or what we’re asking from them, and our comparative lack of sensitivity can lead both parties—dog and owner—into trouble.

  A small but telling example: not long ago, on my way out of the house with the dog, I discovered that the lock on the front door was jammed. Couldn’t get the key in, couldn’t get the key out, it was stuck at the halfway point. I was in a bad mood and also in a hurry, so this annoyed me no end. I slammed down my bag, dragged the dog back inside, stormed into the kitchen muttering, rubbed some olive oil on the key, then went back to the front door. Bingo: key slid in, problem was solved.

  Lucille was not aware of this, however. Lucille was six or seven steps behind me in this process, still fixated on the fact that I was angry. So when I finally locked the door and turned around, there she was, an expression of the gravest concern in her eyes. She looked up at me imploringly, then leaped up and placed her front paws on my arms. Her ears were flat back and her tail was wagging madly; she curled her upper lip back, baring her teeth in a submissive smile, and craned her neck up to lick my face. She seemed to be saying, Please don’t be mad, I didn’t do anything bad, I swear. My heart melted at this, but I was also struck by that quality of canine attunement: how keyed in to us dogs can be, how responsible for us they seem to feel, and how inadvertently our moods and behaviors can affect them. I looked at her and thought: God, it would be easy to screw this animal up. A dog’s sensitivity is an exquisite thing, but it can be dangerous in human hands, for we’re not always aware of what we’re communicating to them, of what needs and feelings might be simmering below the surface.

  Consider a woman I’ll call Martha, who became charged with the care of her six-year-old mixed-breed dog after her husband died. Martha’s husband was a nasty man—alcoholic, abusive—and on a fairly regular basis he’d get drunk, pick a fight with Martha, then corner her on one side of the living room and slap her. During a visit to her vet—a routine call, for the dog’s rabies vaccination—Martha confided that she was having “some trouble” with the dog, that he didn’t seem to like her. When the vet questioned her about this, Martha let on that following her husband’s death, the dog had begun to charge over to her as she passed through the living room, corner her against the wall, and snap at her, baring his teeth and growling.

  The vet who reported this story speculated that the dog’s aggression may have been a fairly straightforward example of learned behavior—taking his cues from his former master, the dog determined that, for unknown reasons, Martha needed to be cornered and snapped at; since the husband’s death, that job now fell to him. But he also speculated that Martha may have played a role in the confrontations, too, that these daily skirmishes reflected learned behavior on her part as well, that she was unwittingly reenacting with the dog the drama she’d played out in her marriage, sending him signals that the aggression was somehow necessary and appropriate—a kind of human-dog version of battered-wife syndrome. Blaming the victim? Perhaps, but I’m enough of a believer in the power of the unconscious to think there may be some truth to that explanation, to the idea that the dog picked up on some signal of Martha’s and acted accordingly.

  Certainly I believe that dogs absorb our worldviews, that they’re very adept at figuring out who we want them to be and sliding right into the role. Bonds between people and dogs are like miniature marriages, sometimes enormously successful and healthy, sometimes dysfunctional and weird, but always based on some complex blending of need and temperament, communication and miscommunication.

  My friend Joanne complains that her mother has a “psychotic” relationship with her dog. The mother, according to Joanne, is an angry, embittered, rather paranoid woman, a widow in her late sixties, and the dog, a four-year-old terrier mix, is apparently an angry, embittered, rather paranoid animal. The dog is dominant and highly territorial; he snarls at other dogs on the street, barks furiously whenever anyone comes to the door, and has bitten a number of visitors, including Joanne’s husband, twice. Joanne keeps telling her mother to do something—the dog is out of control, she needs to take him to obedience classes, there is a problem here—but the mother refuses. When the dog bit Joanne’s husband, the mother defended the dog: Alan must have provoked him, she said; it couldn’t have been the dog’s fault.

  Not long ago, while Joanne was walking with her mother and the dog, a young woman with a miniature poodle passed by, and the two dogs started snarling at each other, a little dance of distress and aggression. Joanne’s mother picked up her terrier and held him to her breast, then started screaming at the other woman about her “vicious dog.” When the woman was out of earshot, she put the terrier down and started railing to Joanne, a venomous monologue about people, about the world, about how you can’t go anywhere these days without running into trouble. And it dawned on Joanne: the dog is her mother’s perfect partner, as scrappy and territorial and angry as she is. She’s encouraged that behavior in him—reinforcing his fearfulness of other dogs, for example, by picking him up in horror; failing to take charge when he acts aggressively—and she also needs it. The dog is the repository for all her mother’s feelings of ill will, all her dark, angry pessimism; he acts those feelings out for her, gives voice to her own fear and hostility.

  A caveat: I don’t believe that most people enter into complicated emotional entanglements with their dogs, and I don’t believe that every dog owner in America is unconsciously foisting his or her deepest fears or neuroses onto the dog, leading the animal into some dark subterranean drama. A lot of the strong feelings that come up around dogs—guilt about leaving them alone, worry about their health, anxiety about their well-being—are simply products of attachment, pieces of the emotional landscape we inhabit when we love another being deeply. But I also think the potential for psychic drama is high with dogs. They are, after all, among our most private relationships. We spend most of our time with dogs behind closed doors, in our own homes, where we’re most likely to be ourselves. The larger world rarely observes us in close interaction, so the dynamics between us aren’t subject to the same degree of social scrutiny that characterizes relationships between humans. (If something weird is going on between you and your dog, you’re not going to get a call from his first-grade teacher, asking why he’s stressed out or depressed.) Nor are relationships between people and dogs often subject to the same degree of personal scrutiny as human relationships. Because dogs don’t contradict or negotiate with us, because they tend to act on cues so subtle we’re often unaware we’re sending them out, we can be blissfully unaware of what’s going on with dogs in the first place, what we’re asking from them, how we’re using them or interpreting them or shaping our alliance with them. Dances between people and dogs are choreographed in confidence, moved by music so subtly scored, we may not even be conscious of its sound. We feel, we move, the dog moves along with us.

  If we’re lucky—and wise enough to learn from our mistakes—these dances can actually have a kind of elegance, taking us places we need to go. Sometimes they can help us cop
e with feelings that are hard to deal with in the human world, providing a relatively safe way to act out some of our more complicated impulses. “If I didn’t have Marge,” says Elizabeth, “I don’t know what I’d do with all that fear. Maybe I’d be more of a hypochondriac about myself, or about my friends, I don’t know. But there’s some way that she contains the fear, like it’s all housed right there in that little beagle body, where I can sort of deal with it.” Jonathan agrees: because Toby so satisfies his need to care for and manage another being, he now feels less compelled to act on those impulses with humans. “I think that in a lot of my early relationships,” he says, “I was treating people kind of like pets—trying to control them, not being able to give them space. Toby is like a big release for those feelings.” He’s not a bad release, either: Toby is a dependent creature, who by definition requires a certain degree of caretaking and control. “I sometimes think a lot of my human relationships would have been better if I’d had a dog twenty years ago,” Jonathan says. “For a truly codependent person, a dog is like a dream come true.”

  Entanglements with dogs can also serve more complex purposes. In retrospect, Jean says there was “a weird kind of beauty” about the dance she entered into with Sam: she couldn’t have dreamed up more compelling choreography if she’d tried. Not only did the dog inadvertently help her withdraw from the world, establishing a canine wall between herself and others; he also allowed her to recreate something familiar—a world in which her life was dominated by a large threatening male. But this time Jean added a twist, rewrote the script: this time the male was threatening other people, not her.