Read For the Love of a Dog Online
Authors: Ph.D., Patricia McConnell
Historically, there’s been a notable lack of logic in much of what has been said about animals and emotions. Perhaps that is because we are so often uncomfortable with our own—indeed, much of the time, our emotions seem to embarrass us. Look at what Jonas Salk said when confronted with evidence that early variations of his polio vaccine actually caused polio in some victims:
“I know it’s purely emotional
, but I cannot escape a terrible feeling of identification with these people who got polio” (my italics). The subtext seems to be that because Salk’s feelings were “purely emotional,” they must be of less value than if they’d been “purely rational.” Yet, what would you think of a man who didn’t care that his efforts ended up killing some children, rather than saving them? Our emotional responses are often as important as our rational ones, but in one of the great ironies of all time, it is often hard for us to give them equal credit.
During Hurricane Katrina, I heard CNN news anchor Aaron Brown defend a female reporter whose voice had trembled with emotion as she floated past desperate, dying people stranded on rooftops. Here was a reporter in the middle of one of our country’s most dramatic and terrible catastrophes, helplessly passing by scenes of profound suffering. Yet even so, Brown knew she would be criticized for
the emotion in her voice. Reporters are supposed to be objective and dispassionate, and there she was, speaking on the edge of tears, letting her feelings creep through on national television. Personally, I thought they were both marvelous. If she hadn’t expressed some feeling, I would’ve thought she was mentally unsound, and I appreciated Brown’s awareness that the reporter might be criticized by some for being “so emotional.”
It’s true that at times it’s important to keep your emotions to yourself. Fighters and poker players are famous for being able to control the expressions on their faces, for obvious reasons. Perhaps that’s why dogs descended from fighting lines are also often difficult to read—fighters of any species aren’t negotiating or communicating, they’re trying to disguise their own emotions while looking for an opening to attack. Perhaps that’s one reason we equate emotions with weakness. However, emotions themselves aren’t indications of weakness, any more than rational thought is superior and separate from them.
Perhaps the argument we’ve been having about animals and emotions isn’t really about animals. Perhaps it’s about us, about our discomfort with how our emotions link us to other animals. In something like a nouveau riche attempt to confirm our place in the world, we’ve linked our sense of worth to the distinctions between ourselves and other animals. By trying to separate rational thought from our emotions, we’ve put the “thinking” part of our brains on a pedestal and have treated our emotions like poor second cousins. What an irony, then, that so many have denied animals the ability to experience emotions, when simultaneously we’ve described emotions as primitive and animalistic.
Sometimes it seems that our irrationality about emotions, animals, and our relationship to them knows no bounds. In a strange twist of logic, we call kindness “humane,” when we can be the cruelest of species. We accuse violent people of acting “like animals.” In an almost desperate attempt to keep ourselves separate, we’ve done all we can to remind ourselves that animals aren’t human, while trying to forget that we humans are still animals.
We may be special, and we may represent the most remarkable of all creatures, but, whether we like it or not, we are still animals. That the mental experiences of dogs aren’t as complex as ours is no reason to dismiss
those experiences altogether. It’s true that when there are great differences between things it is tempting to think of them as differences in
kind
rather than differences
of degree
. I wonder whether dogs believe that we are completely unable to smell, given how impoverished our ability is compared to theirs. We
can
use our noses, but it might not seem like it to dogs. Accordingly, just because dogs don’t think the way we do, it doesn’t follow that they can’t think at all.
I say this with some trepidation, because there is danger in overestimating the minds of dogs as well as underestimating them. Almost every day, trainers and behaviorists like me see the damage caused by people who imagine dogs as four-footed humans. These well-intentioned dog lovers behave as though their dogs have moral codes like adult humans (“How could he betray me like that?”); they feel angry when their dog won’t stroll quietly beside them on a walk. But left to their own devices, dogs don’t walk side by side, shoulder to shoulder; we have to teach them how to do this like it’s a circus trick. Additionally, dogs don’t lie around during the day thinking up ways to punish you because you left the house and went to work. They don’t understand why they shouldn’t eat poop, when you pick it up and act like it’s special (“No! Stay away from that! It’s mine!”), and they don’t get angry about slights that only our own convoluted brains can imagine.
Our dogs need us to understand that they are dogs, and that they don’t come speaking English. They’re not born reading our minds or understanding what we want just because we want it. Without question, their thought processes are profoundly different from ours. We can’t, on the one hand, say that our dogs are special because, unlike us, they always live in the present, and then turn around and expect them to think like us at other times. We have to find a balance here, one that acknowledges that dogs are different from us and at the same time celebrate what we share with them.
What we share, without question, is a rich emotional life. Emotions like fear and happiness and love simmer within us, sometimes bubbling to the surface, always linking us together. The glass of our shared experience may be half empty, but that means it’s half full. How lucky we are that it’s a big glass, and that, most of the time, the liquid within it is sweet and good.
1
I’m aware that this sounds excessive to some people, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I am grateful to have the resources at this point in my life to take care of my dogs as well as I can. These expenditures don’t stop me from contributing to charities or saving for retirement, and, as important, they prevent me from spending money on things like fancy shoes.
2
These kinds of repetitive actions, called stereotypies, have been found to increase the amount of serotonin in the brain, and so animals who perform them are believed to be “self-medicating.”
3
Thinking about your ability to think is itself a great example of your ability to form and use abstract concepts. Once you start analyzing it, you might find that thinking about thinking is both fascinating and as circular as the architecture in an M. C. Escher print.
4
It’s primarily the prefrontal cortex that communicates with the amygdala. Together they create an integration of thoughts and emotions that results in the way we feel about any given thing.
5
What an irony that so many have denied animals the ability to experience emotions, when simultaneously we’ve described emotions as primitive and animalistic.
6
Damasio has found it useful to define “emotions” as physical changes like facial expressions and activated amygdalas, and “feelings” as the “private” thoughts and mental experiences that accompany them.
7
In my experience, some dogs do well with these devices, but others do not, so please be careful and thoughtful before you invest in one. I’ve seen several dogs who were traumatized by them, so I don’t usually recommend them.
8
In many ways, this is a good thing. If our dogs were as smart as we are, I doubt that things would go so smoothly.
9
It never ceases to amaze me how few studies we have on the animals we live with, compared with those on other primates, birds, marine mammals, and rodents living in laboratories.
10
The article doesn’t say what new words were used in this experiment. I’ve used “spoon” merely as an example.
11
To his credit, the author, David G. Myers, does an excellent job discussing the relationship between thinking and language, and does not argue, as do some, that thinking cannot occur without language.
12
I should note here that there are many definitions of thinking, and arguments about what it is and what it isn’t could easily fill other books. The definition I’ve chosen is accepted by many, but not by all.
13
I wonder how many of the people who say they “know dogs can’t be jealous” actually believe that their dog is jealous, but feel it isn’t “correct” to say so.
14
Researchers are currently distinguishing “self-awareness” from a less complex concept, “self-recognition.” The distinctions between them are beyond the scope of this book, but if you’re interested in the topic, be sure to look up both phrases in your research.
As I write this, it’s been a year since Luke died, almost to the day. It’s snowing now, the white flakes sifting onto Luke’s memorial stone in the high pasture. Lassie is lying on the sheepskin at my feet. She is better now, as am I. A few months after Luke’s death, Lassie began to beg me to let her work sheep again, so I opened the gate to the pen and asked her to drive the sheep to the far corner. I helped her at first, standing behind her to back her up as she faced off the flock’s toughest sheep, the sheep only Luke would’ve taken on before. She gathered her courage step by step, leaning forward into the job, committed to holding her ground, taking over from her father. She works like a dream now, steady and brave each night as she holds the sheep off the feeders so I don’t get trampled. She sparkles with joy every evening when she picks up her toys, flings them through the air, teases me to grab hold and play tug-of-war with her
.
I still miss Luke; I miss him a lot. A part of me died with him, as always happens when someone we love dies. But a part of Luke will always live on in me, and my heart doesn’t hurt the way it did before. There are days when I still tear up over Luke, occasional days in which I give in to a good cry. But those days are less frequent, and it feels in my heart as if Luke and I are moving on
.
I live on the farm with three dogs now, Lassie and Pip and Tulip, and I love each of them deeply. My love for each dog is different—Tulip is my clown, my stand-up comedian, whom I can count on to cheer me up on the darkest day with her puppylike gamboling and radiant eyes. She’s dozing in
the sun now, sprawled on the couch after staying up last night to warn the coyotes away. Pip, my sweet and gentle Pippy Tay, is old now, almost deaf and often wobbly. She follows me everywhere, refusing to be left alone even for a minute. She’s lying beside me now, just a few feet away. I feel a desire that is so strong to ease her remaining days that it makes my heart expand just writing about it
.
And Lassie? Oh, Lassie. I named her after the famous Lassie, the imaginary dog everyone wants but rarely gets, who seems to live and breathe just to make you happy. Lassie is creamery butter, sweet and willing and more devoted than any human deserves. Like her father, Lassie adores me, pure and simple. If Jim and I move in different directions on the farm, Lassie won’t follow him. She stays with me. If a veterinary technician takes her by the leash and pulls her away for medical tests, she’s too polite to protest, but her head will turn to me, her eyes pleading. As I look at her face, I think of what Alex the talking parrot said to his friend Irene when she had to leave him at a veterinary clinic: “Come here. I love you. I’m sorry. Wanna go back.” When I leave Lassie, I say good-bye quickly and cheerfully, and then walk to the car, put my head down on the steering wheel, and breathe a few gulping breaths before I can drive away
.
I am not alone in this love for my dogs; I am not neurotic, and I am not crazy. Millions of healthy people love their dogs so profoundly they are willing to risk their lives to save them. I don’t want to romanticize our relationships with dogs—having worked with canine aggression for seventeen years, I know the dark side of human-dog interactions as well as anyone. It’s not all pretty; intense, emotional relationships rarely are. We can’t pretend that fear and anger, felt and expressed by members of both species, don’t cause terrible and sometimes long-lasting harm to both people and dogs. Yet it’s the emotions of love and happiness that bind us: a shared happiness that catches us up in giddy, joyful waves, floats us through life together, grinning and amazed at the miracle of what we share
.
Last night Lassie and I played her favorite game together. Again and again, I tossed her favorite toy across the rug. Each time she leaped after it, then came back to me with her face glowing her eyes soft and luminous. Her neat little body seemed unable to contain her joy and her love of play. At some point in the middle of our game, I realized I was beaming a huge smile plastered across my face. For that moment, I was truly and completely happy
.
In some ways, it’s really that simple, isn’t it? At their best, that is what dogs do: they make us happy. At our best, we make them happy, too. That can only be true because we share so very much with them, and the foundation of what we share is our emotions. Dogs
are
emotions—living breathing embodiments of fear and anger and joy, emotions we can read on their faces as clearly as any language
.
This emotional connection between us isn’t trivial. We humans may be brilliant and we may be special, but we are still connected to the rest of life. No one reminds us of that better than our dogs. Perhaps the human condition will always include attempts to remind ourselves that we are separate from the rest of the natural world. We are different from other animals; it’s undeniably true. But while acknowledging that, we must acknowledge another truth, the truth that we are also the same. That is what dogs and their emotions give us—a connection. A connection to life on earth, to all that binds us and cradles us, lest we begin to feel too alone. Dogs are our bridge
—
our connection to who we really are, and most tellingly, who we want to be. When we call them home to us, it’s as if we are calling for home itself. And that’ll do, dogs. That’ll do
.