In Praise of the Dog
And my belief that dogs are better than us, via excerpts from the short stories of Joy Williams.
*A note: you may have noticed the logo color has changed; we designed it so that it can hold many iterations. I plan on changing the color often, so don’t be confused if it shows up different from time to time, maybe even seasonally. Though I will often return to the original color scheme (my favorite) too. Until then, blood red for the spooky season! Also, thanks to Range Left for the design.
I must admit that in the last two years I’ve grown judgmental. I’ve begun dividing people into groups. Particularly, two of them. The first is reserved for those who really, truly love dogs. The second relegated for those who really, truly don’t. Let me be more clear, more precise. Those who tolerate dogs might as well be grouped with the latter; the same goes for those who have dogs but don’t really love them. (Would you run into traffic for your dog? Would you die for your dog?)
I relate to those who adore this most exalted creature without shame. This animal, which through human intervention and evolution became our most loyal companion; a domestication process unfolding over thousands of years, remaining one of the few positive examples of man meddling with nature. Yes, I’d argue that the dog remains our most victorious intervention of the wild.
If you don’t love dogs, I don’t doubt you are a good person otherwise. The truth is, if you don’t love dogs, I am prone to the belief that you lack a significant portion of empathy and share, perhaps unwittingly but unfailingly, a common trait of serial killers. If you abuse or harm dogs, I am stunned by what my imagination wishes upon you.
Don’t be alarmed! I never proclaimed myself, or any other human being for that matter, wholly rational. I’m only describing a belief, and beliefs are wont to be skewed, aren’t generally known to be steeped in reality or fact.
And it is my belief that we honed a beast better than we, partly because the animal cannot be separated from the nature of which it came. The dog: descended from ancient wolf, pack animal of winter tenacity and inborn community, endlessly loyal, protective, and graceful, now lying beside us, the slothful human.
***
When the girl and the shepherd had first begun their life together, they had lived around Mile 47 in the Florida Keys. The girl worked in a small marine laboratory there. Her life was purely her own and the dog’s. Life seemed slow and joyous, and remembering those days the girl felt she had been on the brink of something extraordinary. She remembered the shepherd, his exuberance, energy, dignity. She remembered the shepherd and remembered being, herself, good. She lived aware of happiness. – Joy Williams, Shepherd1
It all changed when I acquired my own dog, a German Shorthaired Pointer named Franny.
If you are uneducated about this particular breed—the GSP or Pointer by shorthand—I can assure you, they are not a regular dog. Bred as supreme hunters of fowl, they are renowned for their boundless kinetic energy which can transmute from nervous to astute in an instant; their stalking prowess that precludes a piercing awareness of surrounding; and their zero to blurring speed that can inspire awe or terror, depending on circumstance. (Particularly if you haven’t trained good “recall,” the ability to call your dog back from oblivion).
Choosing a GSP ensures a complete overhaul of life. (One woman wrote about this process in the Wall Street Journal.) They are a working breed, created by the Germans by crossing a motley lot of very good hunting dogs to birth a Frankenstein of sorts—the absolute best of hunting dogs. Pointers indeed work, are demanding of their owner’s time and energy; a popular meme compares their puppy stage, which achingly lasts until the age of three, to a velociraptor. Part of the responsibility of ownership, then, is to satisfy this innate purpose, this infinite energy, which includes a daily allotment of physical activity as well as ample mental stimulation. Otherwise, the dog is prone to anxiety and destruction; otherwise, the owner suffers greatly.
Pointers are likewise known to be deeply emotional, vocal, and sensitive; one of the early breeders we contacted, a rural farmer from the Central Valley of California, cautioned me to never raise my voice or use a rolled-up newspaper for discipline. “You’ll ruin that dog forever,” he warned. Raising a hunting dog in New York City might be considered offensive to some; not hunting them, a sin. But most who are familiar with the breed would agree, the Pointer’s more overwhelming attribute, beyond any physical stamina, is their deeply bonded nature. Predisposed to separation anxiety, known as “Velcro dogs,” perpetual shadows, an owner must respect this inherent need to be close. Though confident and adventurous, this is not an independent dog; this is a life companion.
This profound sensitivity, deep attachment, and sheer commitment almost guarantees a weighty bond between Pointer and owner. It is an endeavor that requires a degree of loss: of one’s self and time which, given a dog’s fleeting life expectancy, is only certain to end in a degree of heartbreak.
This is a dog that cracked open my own understanding of how tender it can be to provide, to give something up, to exhaust one’s energy for another’s reward, to seek pleasure in another’s happiness over one’s own.
***
Before Franny, I certainly revered animals. I understood their role in nature, respected their intrinsic wild and acknowledged their sentience. Still, I quietly regarded vegetarians and vegans as misguided, naïve, a bit vitamin deficient. Animals, like us, were part of earth’s grand hierarchy—and a predator sustains life only through the consumption of prey.
The rational among us, a group in which I arrogantly inserted myself, understood these life cycles as necessary, natural. I ate animals without guilt. (Still do, actually.) I wore leather without guilt, too. (Still do that one, too.) I was increasingly wary of fur but not enough to chuck paint. (I no longer purchase fur, though I also haven’t bought any paint or joined a cult…yet.) Now, I find myself watching dog rescue videos in my spare time; I’m following a pig sanctuary on Instagram that has caused me to eat bacon remorsefully (though, lacking principle, I still eat it.); I’m shelling out monthly donations to the ASPCA.
I grew up with dogs. Each held distinct personalities and quirks, were important members of our family and given robust attention and adoration. Their companionship was absolute. Harming them was always unimaginable to me. When they felt pain, as many dogs do in elder years, so did I. Still, these pets weren’t exactly mine. The responsibility of keeping them alive mostly fell to my parents, an endeavor I only assisted in.
My father in particular was deeply bonded to our dogs, all dogs in general. Each night he returned home, our dog would abandon all allegiance to us plebeians and glue herself to his presence. When my father died suddenly, the most gut-wrenching aftereffect was the shifting sound of our dog’s paws faithfully rapping down the hallway to his home office. A few times a day she’d push open the door with her nose, expectantly. His absence must have been a complete and sudden mystery to her; we couldn’t communicate the loss. She became despondent, a morose cloud casted over her being. Though she regained energy eventually, she never really was the same.
And here lies the crux of deep feeling between woman and dog: what other sentient being remains so faithful, so unconditionally bonded to master, not only by what cynics dismiss as coercion or even basic codependence, but by what scientists have surmised is actual outright love? Children will eventually detach themselves from their parents if raised healthily enough, the end goal of good parenting being their independence. A dog shall remain entwined with us for a lifetime if we allow them to, are bred for the utmost loyalty. When I see a dog abandoned on the street or even living outside a home, I reflect on this attached nature, a trait we selectively propagated ourselves. To isolate them from a family unit seems almost as cruel as physical harm.
But they are resilient creatures, too, aren’t they? Sensitive and emotional, meant to be by our side but if abandoned can summon ancestral traits, find means to survive. But these are yet traits sculpted and honed by us over time, brightened or diminished to our will. Thus, a dog can survive without us, but only within proximity to us; we have designed them as such.
Dogs were cast as our hunters, our shepherds, our protectors, our companions; more tragically, sometimes our fighters, our entertainment. They act almost entirely in service to our whims. They are soothers of our anxieties and predictors of our ailments, can detect an oncoming seizure or fainting spell, and even act as our security, sniff out bombs or drugs in airports and stadiums.
And yet, enough of us regularly abandon these creatures who seek to serve us. Leave them in crates for eight or more hours a day. Tether them outside to fences or metal rods in inclement weather (sometimes, murderously, during a hurricane). Relinquish them to kill shelters because we don’t have the time. Tie them up in trash bags and dump them on the sides of highways. If we were to do the calculations, in these terms, the human would become the lowest common denominator; the human, the most unethical, disloyal being.
But aren’t we only being rational? For in a crisis, if waters are rising or a wildfire is raging or worse, one is under military bombardment, even the greatest lover of dogs might be forced to make the most reasonable of decisions; and if one must, they will surely leave their dog behind, to safe themselves, their children.
***
There was a yawning silence all around her, like an enormous hole. Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.2
If one were to begin a deep dive into the short stories of Joy Williams—a true virtuoso of the craft—as I have most recently, one would soon notice a certain refrain. In many of her stories there often appears, in some capacity or another, a German Shepherd. Either as subject or simply aside, it is evident that this animal relays an important narrative presence. The shepherd, as she often refers to it, and in a greater sense the dog, doesn’t just act as a metaphor but more as a conduit to understanding life’s reason. Particularly when life, and likewise dog, is most unreasonable.
Animals are closer to God than we, the girl thought, but they are lost to him. Her arms felt heavy. The sun was huge, moving ponderously toward the horizon. People were gathering on the beach to watch it go down. They were playing their radios. When the sun touched the horizon, it took three minutes before it disappeared. An animal can live for three minutes without air. It had taken the shepherd three minutes to die after however long he had been swimming in the deep water off the smooth seawall.3
The above excerpts are from a short story by Williams titled Shepherd, about a girl engulfed by deep and consuming grief after her dog (a shepherd, of course) escapes through the screen door of her boyfriend’s porch and drowns in the sea while she is out to dinner. Throughout the story she makes an attempt to resume life through a haze; after a short time, her boyfriend implores her to snap out of it. It reflects on the nature of grief, our discomfort with its lack of resolve, its open-endedness. Grief is time unencumbered, even if we attempt to quantify it, name it in stages so that we can expect an eventual end, provide it a lifecycle. Yet grief can indeed last forever, even if it only burrows itself away for later. And grief about a dog? Even more unmoored, less understood, certainly less validated.
Perhaps it’s because this inter-species relationship is so often unquantifiable, as it contains both profound intimacy and also gaping, unknowable distance. Though a dog can understand a multitude of words—scientists have surmised somewhere between 150 to even 1000 of them, depending on breed—they cannot speak our language back to us, cannot communicate vocally with much detail beyond a whine, bark, or growl. If you’ve stared into a dog’s eyes—a dog you have raised especially—you’d know there exists a kind of communication more kinesthetic and esoteric than language. Dogs communicate through energy, emotion, intuition, and body language; they often speak with their tails, tongues, and eyes, in the stiffening or loosening of movement.
And yet, there will always be parcels of the dog and its behavior we will never apprehend. As domesticated as dogs are, as faithful and loving, as much as they rely upon us and look to us for guidance and assurance, there persists an underlying wild, a feral nature we cannot breed out completely. Therein lies the wolf that can turn suddenly, with a violence or reaction unpredictable, reckless, or rash. There are entire courses and professions dedicated to teaching us how to tame and mold a dog to fit inside our environment; perhaps there is not enough attention given to their own proclivities, their wild autonomy. A dog, like a child, is an obligation rife with both reward and risk.
***
A quick internet search reveals Joy Williams herself owned (might still own) quite a few German Shepherds in her life. In fact, her most haunting story is an autobiographical one, about a shepherd named Hawk, her most beloved who suddenly and viciously attacked her one day.
I loved Hawk and Hawk loved me. It was the usual arrangement. Just a few days before, I had said to him, This is the life, isn’t it honey.4
Williams had spent two weeks on Nantucket with Hawk, and though she was feeling ill, she persisted with their daily walks, their routine. On the final day, she would head to the city to see a doctor and drop Hawk at a kennel he had stayed in before. It is at the entrance of the kennel that he attacked her, bit her breast and hands; there was ample blood, a right hand mauled. Williams leaves immediately, Hawk remains at the kennel, where they attempt to tame him, wash the blood off his fur, keep him for observation. She must drive to the city to have emergency surgery, where they piece the tendons and bones of her hand back together. She would never see Hawk alive again.
If there were a stage to the kind of grief Williams describes, one might call it shock or disbelief. An unmovable grief, one that hovers reality indefinitely. This disbelief can last forever, a grief most absurd, as she had little option but to put the dog down, of course, wasn’t even able to be present when he died. She would now have to mourn his death while acknowledging herself as his murderer. Though Hawk and Williams were deeply bonded, Hawk was only asserting the dog’s underlying unknowableness, this inability to communicate with any certainty. In the end, she would seek salvage in an explanation but never receive one. The owner of the kennel suggested, perhaps the dog had a brain tumor; when she asked the vet, he didn’t know for sure.
As regards to life it is much the best to think that the experiences we have are necessary for us. It is by means of experience that we develop and not through our imagination. Imagination is nothing. Explanation is nothing. One can only experience and somehow describe–with, in Camus’s phrase, lucid indifference. At the same time, experience is fundamentally illusory. When one is experiencing emotional pain or grief, one feels that everything that happens in life is unreal. And this is a right understanding of life.5
***
Hawk had engaging habits. He had presence. He was devoted to me. To everyone, this was apparent. But I really knew nothing of his psychology. He was no Tulip or Keeper or Bashan who had been analysed by their writers. He knew sit, stay, down, go to your place. He was intelligent, he had a good memory. And surely, I believed, he had a soul.6
Scientists believe dogs have memory, though theirs is more episodic and associative in nature. This would explain why they exhibit “single event learning,” can endure a trauma that alters their future behavior forever. Dogs have been known to dream, too, of things that happened to them, of things that might happen again. And though they can feel jealousy, anger, and fear, aggression in dogs is usually believed to be reactionary as opposed to malicious. Perhaps that’s why they often call aggressive dogs reactive.
Thus, a dog mostly harms by instinct, fear, confusion, or protection, on occasion maybe even disease. A human, though, has the capacity to understand deeply what violence is, the pain it can cause, can contemplate and comprehend it, and still seek to enact it upon another. Just as Hawk turned violent suddenly, so, too can we. While a human can act violently due to illness, trauma, or even psychosis, a human can also, and often does, harm another, either animal or human, with striking lucidity, with purpose.
I find this inherent knowledge, this capacity for thought, this intention to harm immensely worse than any animal instinct. I find our rational, thinking nature near insane.
***
We, too, can be loyal, sometimes as pure as dogs. There are shelters in Gaza and Lebanon (Sulala Animal Rescue7 and Mashala Shelter8, to name two), who, under relentless bombardment, employ the most noble among us. These tender and openhearted humans are suffering a war of immeasurable condition, risking real harm to fend for animals left behind, ones abandoned, maimed, and starved. Bombardment is a reality obscured, a nearly incomprehensible experience, something that can elicit the most elemental instinct within us to survive. And yet, there are humans enduring the onslaught and somehow having the wherewithal to look out, to ease not just the suffering of others but of animals, of dogs and cats and even donkeys that don’t belong to them, yet they choose to take responsibility for, nonetheless.
And deep in the mountains of rural North Carolina, too, where entire towns have been quite literally wiped off the map, earth and life ravaged by swallowing flood so that it resembles a war zone. I have watched neighbors and volunteers hike down steep, washed out roads to cocoon abandoned dogs in blankets, beckon them onto canoes to safety. Their humans may have abandoned them, or worse, died, but strangers multiplied to save them.
Still, compared to a dog’s, I believe our loyalty to be more feeble, though perhaps this is by scientific bent. Unless blunted by trauma or disease, our urge to save our child—sometimes at expense to our own self—is more primordial, biological in nature. A dog is a creature we must elect to love. An irrational sort of love, short lived and hardly praised, one where we must extend the little lot of concern for others we have and reach it far outside of our selves, outside of even our own species. The relationship is in fact an exchange, the reward can be great but not always appreciated or even measured—the love we receive in return from a dog cannot be ascertained in empirical data, cannot be measured in language, is steeped in blind trust.
Perhaps placing an animal’s life above one’s own is a rare and supreme empathy, though I know this thinking is not failproof; surely, there are those who might exhibit an undying love for animals and still wish harm upon others, hold bigotries and cruelties. A love of animals cannot ensure one is wholly good, but does reflect a part of goodness only a subset of humans can reach.
I say all this and yet wonder: if I were under bombardment, starving and displaced—would I have the courage, the altruism to run into fire for Franny? I hope so. Would I do it for a wounded animal who was not my own? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Would Franny run into the fire for me? I know she would.
She is most loyal.
From her collection of short stories, The Visiting Privilege.
Another excerpt from Shepherd, by Joy Williams, found in the The Visiting Privilege.
Also from Shepherd, by Joy Williams.
From Hawk, by Joy Williams. Published on Granta.com.
Also from Hawk, by Joy Williams.
Lastly from Hawk, by Joy Williams.
https://www.instagram.com/sulalaanimalrescue/
https://www.instagram.com/mashalashelter/