This separate status is no longer enough for many North American pet owners, who are increasingly turning dogs into people by ascribing to animals their own motives, feelings, beliefs, and neuroses. A related trend involves turning people into dogs. A populist misreading of scientific research into the social behaviours of dogs and their instincts as pack animals and predators has created a bizarre form of behaviourism in which human families are replicating wolfpack dynamics so that Rover can feel securely slotted into a canine hierarchy.

This top-dog approach accounts for the strange suburban spectacle of that nice guy down the street suddenly grabbing the family pet by the throat and flipping it on its back in order to establish dominance — a training moveknown as the “alpha roll.” This controversial technique was first advanced by the Monks of New Skete, an Eastern Orthodox order that describes the raising of German shepherds in upstate New York in their 1978 book, How To Be Your Dog’s Best Friend. (They have since recanted.) Cesar Millan, the celebrity “dog whisperer” on the National Geographic Channel, is the current dominance guru. Defenders say that he taps into canine instinct; critics suggest that his alpha-male act has little to do with wolf behaviour, nothing to do with domesticated-dog behaviour, and a lot to do with macho human posturing.

With all this confusing overlap going on, it’s a relief to come across dog memoirs that clearly delineate human roles and animal roles. These works understand that dogs are dogs and people are people; that the needs of dogs and humans are often different and conflicting. This matter-of-factness in no way discounts the relationship between humans and animals; if anything, the bonds between the two are all the more astonishing because they force us to reach across the species gap.

The goofball protagonist of John Grogan’s Marley & Me defines dogginess. Easy to love but hard to anthropomorphize, Marley is bouncy, messy, drooly, and humpy, prone to inscrutable but unstoppable canine instincts that drive him to swallow speaker components and dig through drywall. Marley isn’t actually the world’s worst dog; he’s just overly enthusiastic, a quality that carries both advantages and disadvantages as Marley helps his master and mistress, John and wife Jenny, form a family. John and Jenny start out as two independent professionals with time and money to spare. Their clothes are intact, their furniture clean, their garden free of trenches. They spend Sunday mornings drinking coffee and reading newspapers. Then, after five-week-old Marley moves in, their lives start careening toward the responsibilities of dog ownership, then parenthood, and finally the quotidian joys and sorrows of domestic life. All along, Marley is teaching the Grogans something important — mostly that a high tolerance for chaos, catastrophe, and expense is a good foundation for family happiness.

Of course, Marley “teaches” the Grogans about the meaning of life and family the same way he does almost everything — by accident. Some dog tales read like self-help books, making it seem as if dogs are on a mission to solve the problems of the North American middle class. Fortunately, good analytic writers find that dog ownership breeds more questions than answers. Susan Cheever, for instance, grew up in a, well, Cheeveresque home that favoured large sporting dogs bought from waspy breeders and named after eighteenth-century ancestors. As an adult, she finds herself in the piquant position of acquiring a miniature dachshund named Cutie. In an essay anthologized in Woman’s Best Friend: Women Writers on the Dogs in Their Lives (Seal Press, 2006), she muses on this unlikely event and on the ethics of the animal-human bond: “I have become increasingly haunted by our treatment of the animals in our lives . . . . What does it mean to own a living creature? What responsibilities does that entail? ” She also realizes, with a clear-eyed view of Cutie’s priorities, that he is not about to rescue her from this moral wrangling: “Cutie doesn’t seem concerned about the questions his presence poses for me. All he wants is to have his back scratched . . .”

Roger Grenier’s thoughts also run to doubts in The Difficulty of Being a Dog (University of Chicago Press, 2000), a collection of infinitely delicate observations on the condition of dogness. Originally published in Paris in 1998 as Les larmes d’Ulysse (The Tears of Ulysses), this small volume was a bestseller in France, partly because the French love their dogs — they bring them to cafés, remember — and partly because Grenier’s writing is intellectually stringent enough to be discussed at dinner parties. Grenier is a novelist and essayist who has worked for many years at the publishing house Éditions Gallimard. His musings on dogs are learned, literary, and existential. (Albert Camus once dog-sat for him.) If Grenier suggests that the experience of loving a dog is life-affirming, he means it in the very Gallic sense that life is lived more keenly in the knowledge of death. Dogs help with this, in short, because they generally predecease their owners: “Because dogs inflict the suffering of loss upon us, the French sometimes call them ’ beasts of sorrow,’ bêtes de chagrin,” Grenier points out, making it quite clear that this is not Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul.

While Grenier derives great joy from strolling the Rue du Bac with his dog Ulysses, he often finds himself looking at the situation from the other end of the leash, wondering what dogs’ psychologically entangled relationships with humans might cost them. Being a man of letters, he summons literary sources, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke, who says of dogs, “Their determination to acknowledge us forces them to live at the very limits of their nature.” French writer Antoine de Rivarol puts it this way: “We have dragged [domestic animals] far from their own realm without transporting them into ours.” Grenier sees dogs as tragic exiles. For him, the bond between animals and humans is this slightly melancholic sense of loss and alienation.

In a very real, evolutionary sense, dogs were made by people. Once wide-ranging wolves, they have been domesticated into the warmer, softer creatures that lie next to our beds at night. We are still shaping dogs today, making them into what we want and need them to be and accepting precious little responsibility for doing so. The dog-book writers in North America — with note-worthy exceptions — set up dogs as soul-mates, spirit guides, and savants. If dogs could read these inflated images, they would probably look sad-eared and embarrassed, the way they do when their owners dress them up for Halloween. Fortunately, dogs remain unaware of their current celebrity status; they just carry on doing what they do. It’s the humans, as usual, making all the fuss.