It’s a Dog’s Life

The heroic dog is a much-cherished image in our culture, but while we admire trained search-and-rescue dogs, we really crave stories about gifted amateurs — regular pets who run into burning buildings or jump into icy rivers to save the young or the injured. Recently, psychologists at the University of Western Ontario devised an experiment to test whether dogs actually do understand human emergencies. The first simulation involved an owner feigning a heart attack; the second replicated the classic master-trapped-under-a-fallen-bookcase scenario. The researchers found an increase in anxious doggy hovering but no actual rescue attempts. “There is a tendency to bond with our animals and to believe, or want to believe, that they are highly intelligent, that they understand when we’re talking to them or when we’re gesturing to them,” explained researcher Bill Roberts. “I think that’s probably the root of people believing animals are more intelligent than they actually are.”

We expect our dogs to rescue us. But Lassie barking when Timmy falls down the well is no longer enough. According to the litter of dog memoirs that have crowded bookstores and bestseller lists, dogs are now giving our plugged-in kids authentic childhoods, getting feckless twentysomethings to grow up, keeping marriages together, consoling the newly divorced and the terminally ill, even shepherding boomers out of middle-aged, middle-class ruts. Dogs can comfort a soldier stationed in Iraq (From Baghdad, With Love), offer a canine entree to other countries (Ella in Europe), or help their owners lose weight (The Dog Diet, A Memoir). Occasionally they give business advice (Short Tails and Treats from Three Dog Bakery). More and more, they are expected to provide the emotional and spiritual “life lessons” that used to come from teachers, preachers, shrinks, and philosophers. The phrase “unconditional love” pops up often in these books.

There are probably dry, statistical, socio-economic reasons for our current obsession with dogs. In an urban, accelerated, mobile culture, the affection of an animal is reassuringly physical and direct. Another reason — one we’re less willing to acknowledge — is that dogs are blank slates, tabulae rasae onto which we can write ourselves. Jon Katz, the author of several dog books as well as the Heavy Petting column for Slate, suggests that people find in dogs whatever they need. In The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family (Random House, 2004), Katz argues that people can “perceive in their dogs any trait or emotion they like, unencumbered by the dogs’ own voices.” Katz, a self-described “dog-love rationalist,” believes that loving a dog can be an “incalculably rewarding experience,” but he counsels us to be aware of what we’re asking of dogs and why we’re asking it.

One would think that writers would be especially conscious of this sensible stance, but a quick look at current dog books suggests that many are not. The rapidly expanding market for anything dog-related — along with the phenomenal success of John Grogan’s Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog (William Morrow, 2005 ) — means that publishers are rushing to grab any manuscript that can be sent out with a wagging tail on its cover. Some of these books function at the same harmless level as dog-park bragging, but unfortunately dogs’ best qualities are also those that make them magnets for lousy prose. To paraphrase the late British dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse: there are no bad dogs, just bad dog writers. Dogs’ sweet, snouty faces can easily lead people into sentimentality, and their decent, frank, four-square personalities make it tempting to fall into certainty — and sentimentality and certainty are rarely good for writers. It takes a real act of authorial will to turn away from those big puppy eyes, but the best dog writers manage, tackling the mysteries of the human-canine connection with contrariness, caution, and a careful delineation of where dog nature ends and human speculation begins.

One way to get around the warm-and-fuzzies is to take the usual conventions of the dog narrative and give them a good shake. Take Scottish writer Thomas Healy, who wouldn’t know a feel-good story if one smacked him in the face. His memoir, I Have Heard You Calling in the Night (Harcourt, 2006), is crafted with the stylized bluntness one might expect of a poetic man who hangs out at boxing clubs. Healy grew up in a tough corner of Glasgow in the 1950s, “when the Gorbals was the Gorbals.” A self-described hard man, he drinks and brawls. (At one point he gets a badly infected hand, only to find that someone else’s tooth is lodged in his knuckles.) In the 1980s, with his fortieth birthday approaching, he acquires a Doberman puppy that he names Martin — a dignified name for a dignified dog. Healy is not quite sure what makes him decide to buy Martin, and people who know him are taken aback. “They had not thought I was a doggy sort of man. Well, neither had I.” In the end, he sees it as a kind of providence.

The memoir’s title is taken from a hymn sung at a Catholic ordination service Healy attends one night, and there is a thin, tough line of spiritual grace running through the book. Healy believes that Martin saves him, not by being an angel in canine form but simply by being. Healy realizes that he can’t drink until he blacks out because there will be no one to feed Martin. He can’t pick fights and go to jail because there will be no one to walk Martin. Healy’s redemption is neither quick nor easy — he has many setbacks, including a spectacular lapse that sees him getting blind drunk on something called scrumpy. This may be a story about a dog rescuing a man, but it’s an unusually stark and unsentimental one, and all the better for it.

New York writer Abigail Thomas, author of A Three Dog Life (Harcourt, 2006), also subverts expectations. A phrase that comes up frequently in goopy dog books is “living in the moment” — the notion that a dog’s happy talent for focusing on whatever is in front of its nose can help humans stop fretting needlessly about the future and the past. Thomas has good reason to be wary about living in the moment: her husband, Rich, lives with a traumatic brain injury that has robbed him of his short- and long-term memory. As she explains in this plainspoken memoir, he “is lodged in a single moment and it never tips into the next.”

Seven years into Thomas’s marriage, Rich was walking their dog, Harry, when the leash broke and Harry bolted onto Riverside Drive. Rich ran after the dog and was hit by a car. The dog that inadvertently caused the accident helps Thomas deal with its terrible aftermath, but she refuses to turn it into a literary situation: “There is no room for irony here, no room for guilt or second-guessing. That would be a diversion, and indulgence.These are hard facts to be faced head-on.” Thomas’s three dogs all help with this task. Their warmth and simple routines comfort her and give structure to what might otherwise be shapeless days.

Healy and Thomas kick against the tendency to give dog stories aggressively uplifting messages, eschewing the jollier writers’ “if only dogs could talk” premise. If dogs really could talk, they might have something to say about the platitudes being put forward in their names. In 10 Secrets My Dog Taught Me (Rodale, 2005 ), Carlo De Vito offers some syntactically challenged life lessons (“Simplicity is the stripping away of the things that occupy us instead of what make us whole”) that he claims to have learned from Exley, his German shorthair pointer. The sentiments attributed to Exley would make any self-respecting dog pine for the days when its ancestors ran behind coaches in Dalmatia or chased wolves in the Pyrenees. That may have been hard work, but it was clean; a dog knew where it stood at the end of the day.

Increasingly, the image of dogs in contemporary North American culture is stranded somewhere between their sharp-toothed primal past and the luxe lure of Burberry canine couture. It wasn’t always like this. In The Dog and I (Penguin, 2006), veteran Canadian journalist Roy MacGregor measures out his life in the dogs he has walked — Buddy, Cindy, Bumps, Bandit, Cricket, and Willow. While this gentle memoir portrays dogs as stalwart creatures and wonderful companions, it makes no extravagant emotional demands on their good natures. MacGregor is old enough to remember when dogs were just dogs. They lived outside, “or, if they were lucky, in a shed,” and were fed random table scraps. As MacGregor grows older, his dogs are promoted to warmer, comfier berths, but they remain animals.