Looking For Love?

The reason people get a dog is they want something to love them. They might also want to love something but those are two sides of the same biscuit. Dogs satisfy a human need and sometimes they do it better than other humans do. Or, at least, more reliably.

In fact, you don't even have to do much for a dog to love you. You just have to be that dog's person.

How much a person needs love can be reflected in their dog situation. Some people who need a lot of love get a lot of dogs, but it isn't necessary. They could just get one Golden Retriever. Because some dogs, like Golden Retrievers, need our love more than other dogs. Our old dog, for instance, was perfectly suited to us. Our dog loved us and enjoyed our company and also enjoyed the company of anyone willing to share their breakfast, so she wasn't an exclusive sort of dog. And we didn't want to be looking after our dog's emotional needs every second of the day. 

 

We spent a lot of time training her when she was a pup. She trotted at heel without a lead, sat when we stopped, stayed when we told her to stay, and came when we called every single time, even if she didn't really want to. What we didn't think to teach her was "Don't climb the fence paw-over-paw" because we didn't think she could do that. But a five-foot fence was no impediment whatsoever to a twelve-inch dog if she was on one side of it and the neighbor's plate of sausage and biscuits was on the other side.

She took care of her own needs.

And--this is probably telling--we didn't necessarily notice when she was missing. Once, during fireworks season, which used to last three months around here, Dave's mom called from a mile down the hill. "Is Boomer with you?" she said, and we said Yeah, we think so, although we couldn't actually lay eyes on her right that second. "Because I think she's at my back door," she said. And she was.

It was a little embarrassing the number of times people returned our dog to us when we didn't know she needed returning.

Anyway we were emotionally a good fit. A Golden Retriever would have been too much dog, needing too much affection. On the other side of the scale, there was my friend Fred, who lived with a perfectly wretched bunwad of a Pekingese, a flat-fronted wheezer with an asthmatic growl, a dog that would sneak up on you just to staple you with its face. Sometimes it bit Fred. "Why do you like that dog?" we asked, because he did, and he said "Well, if this dog likes you, you know you're really special." And after its own fashion, that dog did like Fred. Fred was chewy.

People have different emotional needs. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to get a dog so something loves you. In fact, it's the best reason. You shouldn't get a dog to threaten other people. Or to guard the yard on a long chain. Or to match your purse.

But if you really want affection, if you really need affirmation from across the globe, if you want to be an object of desire, if you want to get fan mail all day long and be pursued by millions, without feeling any obligation to reciprocate? Skip the dog.

Become a literary agent.

The Loaner Dog

My presidential aspirations were shot years ago because of some photographic evidence that doesn't play well in Iowa. Also, I've said a lot of things that shouldn't be said in polite company, because I'm never in polite company. Now I hear that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is in political trouble because he's allergic to dogs, which is widely considered a fatal character flaw in America. So I'm screwed on that account too. I'm not allergic to dogs, but I don't have one, and, worse, I don't want one.

It's nothing personal. We had a dog, back in the days where you let your dog out to poop in the neighbors' yards and they let theirs out to poop in yours, and maybe you picked it up with a shovel every couple of weeks when it turned hard and white, but you certainly didn't bag it up like mixed nuts and carry it around with you. I'm not saying the new protocol isn't an improvement in many ways, but it took the shine off of dog ownership for us.

Anyway, dogs are lovely. They're almost guaranteed to like you whether you deserve it or not, and like you all the time, even when it's not convenient. We do get to have a really swell dog from time to time as a loaner, when her people cut out for the hinterlands. Dana is a big old orangey dog with the finest smile on two continents, and we like her a whole bunch. Turns out Dana is a poop-on-the-fly sort of gal. She keeps walking and drops a bomb every few feet, as though that's how she's planning to find her way back home.

She isn't at all barky, I'll give her that. She might pop out a whuff if she sees a critter that needs investigating, but she doesn't go on and on. Still, there's a whole drum kit of noise that comes with the dog package, and it takes some getting used to. The cat, not so much. Worst you're going to get out of the cat is a sort of muffled galloping with auxiliary punctuation in the form of, say, a crashing Christmas tree, but that's seasonal. But even with the quiet, polite form of dog such as Miss Dana, there's a lot of clickety clickety clickety of the claws on the floor, and then more clickety clickety clickety, and yet more clickety, followed by someone saying go lie down, followed by the whump of the dog hitting the floor, followed by a prolonged, exquisite sigh of disappointment that there isn't more going on, followed by the shlurp shmack shloop of a sleepy dog getting her lips at ease for the nap.

Ordinarily you get a dog like Dana and you wouldn't expect a lot of ball-licking, though. She never used to have balls, but when she turned five hundred, she started up a ball collection of her own, and she's gone at it with all the fervor of a girl with a Bedazzler. They're all over. Back, belly, legs. When she trots it looks like dingle balls on a sombrero. The bigger ones apparently require regular lingual attention.

So add ball-licking to the list.

It took a few days for the last item in the sound repertoire to register. It was subtle, almost imperceptible at first--the soundtrack of foreboding, a sort of velvety, benign tinnitus. I couldn't place it until the day I caught a little movement out of the corner of my eyes. Something was roiling in the periphery: clouds of blondness tumbled along the baseboards, clumps gathered and holed up in the upholstery and thundered across the carpeted plains. Yes. The liberated undercoat of the dog was rounding up a posse and getting ready to do everything but clean up this town. Dana's a good-natured dog. She'd probably let me vacuum her. If she lets me use the crevice device, that would take care of that other thing.

As it is, though, I think I have enough material to make a swell new dog if I ever get the urge.

Choosing Sides

I heard on the TV that dogs really are good at reading human emotions because they spend more time studying the right side of our faces, and that's what we do with each other, too. I was startled to realize that I actually do look at the right side of people's faces, which present at my left, and that I'd never noticed this before. I also chew my food on the left side and slouch to the left and my left breast is--well, let's just say it's closer to the ground now, and it's no wonder I tip over so often.

The phenomenon is called "left gaze bias" and the explanation is that our eyes flick to our companion's right side (left to us) because that's where all their emotions are displayed. The theory is that the left brain controls the right side of the body, and the right side controls the left, in those people whose bodies can be said to be responding to a brain at all. And presumably the left side of the brain is in charge of feelings, and leaks them out the right side of our faces. If you have any interest in knowing what's on someone's mind, which can come in handy if they want to murder you, for instance, you're more likely to make the gene pool cut by looking at his right side. All the strategy, the ambush plan and the sharp rock and the alibi and the like, are being worked out on the right side of the brain, but the murderous intent is totally happening on the left.

So somewhere along the evolutionary line, dogs learned where to look on a person to find out what was on his mind, and that means they are now exquisitely attuned to our emotions. Most people like that about dogs. They intuitively feel that their dogs understand them and sympathize with them and offer themselves up for comfort. As a mail carrier, I too learned to appreciate that dogs were able to gaze into my right eye and determine that I looked chewy-crunchy, with a salty finish.

Supposedly we only have left-gaze bias toward other humans, and not (say) paintings of people, or monkeys. (I will, however, note here that I reflexively look at Pootie's right eye button, and leave it at that. No one wants to be ambushed.)

We had a dog once, the cutest dog in the whole wide world, and she was very good at reading our emotions, but then again we aren't complicated people. She would cock her little head to the right and think "you look like you want a beer" and nail it most of the time. We would look at her and get a mixed message. "I like you," she emoted, "but I need to go outside now and climb over the hedge and go over

to the neighbor's house and knock, and he will give me a plateful of biscuits and gravy." It was nothing personal. She didn't care for kibble, even after the 25-pound bag of it we bought when she was little had aged nicely. From time to time we'd give in and feed her from the table, but we made up for it by teaching her to take whatever we gave her into the kitchen before eating it. So when she knocked at the front door after visiting the neighbor's house, she would bolt to the kitchen before yarfing up a quantity of biscuits and gravy that could not physically have fit in her body. Boomer and I both operated on the principle that you're not done eating until all the food is gone. It was our bond. We gazed into each other's right eyes in perfect understanding, and then one of us went and got the paper towels.

I have learned to be attuned to other people's dogs, too. For instance, I know exactly what the neighbor's dog is saying every day. He's saying "IT'S 7AM! IT'S 7AM! IT'S 7AM! IT'S 7AM! IT'S 7:01AM! IT'S 7:01AM! IT'S 7:01AM! IT'S 7:01..."

The Dog's Lunch

Dave has an affinity for terriers, and they look good on him. So when Mary Ann got her new dog Cooper, a pound mutt, we took lots of pictures. This is her first terrier.

Cooper will actually let Mary Ann get some work done. Her previous two dogs borrowed heavily from the border-collie genome, and tended to last about three minutes on a "stay" before they reminded her that it had been about three minutes since she taught them anything. Consequently they both knew several thousand different things to do, fetch, slide down, point at, look for, etc., and it was a miracle she was ever able to get anything done at all. Ultimately in order to have ten minutes to herself she resorted to telling them to open the front door, close it behind them, pop down to the grocery store, pick up some evaporated milk--not the condensed, and the 5-ounce, not the 12-ounce--bag up some arugula, count out the exact change, drop a quarter in the Jerry's Kids box, see who was on the cover of People and report back. And if she was lucky, she was finished wiping by then. Cooper is a little more relaxed.

Our old dog Boomer, also a terrier mutt, was a good fit for us. She was so cute it wobbled your heart. She was so cute as a puppy that when she'd roll over and piddle on herself, that was cute, too. We snapped her up and stocked up on Lysol and called it a bargain. She was affectionate and loyal, but she also had an independent spirit that we appreciated, because we are not the sort of folk who want a dog's undivided attention. It was months before we were able to observe how she got out of the back yard, because it hadn't occurred to us that a fourteen-pound dog could climb a six-foot hedge, hand-over-hand. Then off she'd go on her daily route. Visits included the neighbor man, a set of pre-toppled garbage cans at the end of the alley, and the local tavern, where she'd enjoy a nice bowl of Heidelberg while the proprietor dialed us up for retrieval.

The neighbor man thought she was so cute that he routinely gave her as much food as she would take in. She could maintain that for the amount of time it took to get back home, where she would knock urgently at the front door, run inside and hurl on the floor, presenting us with the neighbor's dinner in virtually original condition. "That's bigger than her whole head," we would marvel in disbelief, and then she'd take two paces and do it again. Fortunately, she never ate the baking powder biscuits. Those were strictly for burying in the back yard. She didn't know how to climb back over the hedge, and so she would knock at the front door, run to the back door, shoot outside and stuff the biscuits in the garden somewhere. Boomer's Biscuit Mulch kept the weeds down for years.

For a dog this resourceful, dry kibble was definitely the food of last resort; she'd take one at a time and crunch it down, lips peeled back in distaste. We went through almost two bags of it in her entire lifetime. Who knows how much longer than seventeen years she would have lived with a proper diet?

I guess it's just as well we never had children, because we probably overvalue the ability of animals to fend for themselves. Consequently, in the post-Boomer years, we have become cat people. We are still the recipients of intense affection, expressed somewhat differently in the form of head-bonking, eyebrow-chewing, and kneecap-gnawing, but now we can go away for up to three days, leaving behind a critter with world-class napping skills and a rich interior life. When we come home, it will be to a very well-rested cat with three days of love stored up and a kneecap jones. Ain't nobody going to sleep tonight.