For the Love of a Dog (30 page)

Carley would let Martha take away her chew toys—although, when
she thought about it, Martha admitted that sometimes Carley growled when she did so. She also confessed that she’d stopped trimming Carley’s nails herself; Carley’s growls seemed a bit too serious for her to handle. That was an important piece of information, because at that point in our conversation I was wondering whether there was anything about Carley’s hips or back legs that might cause her pain. As we discussed that possibility, it began to seem highly unlikely. Carley’s growls weren’t only a matter of her back legs; she’d growl when Martha picked up her font ones, too. In addition, several veterinarians and chiropractors had done extensive evaluations, finding nothing that might have caused Carley pain
.

After we talked, I sat down beside Carley and let her sniff my hand. She wiggled from the shoulders back and play-bowed. We had a great time together for a few minutes, playing and laughing (at least, I was), but once we’d established a relationship, I quieted Carley down and touched the back surface of her rear leg. Her face became serious. She turned her face toward my hand and stared at it. I gently pulled a bit on some of the hair on the back of her leg. She switched to looking directly into my eyes, and began to growl. Her face was full of emotion, but there wasn’t a hint of fear in it. Carley didn’t look fearful, surprised, or inquisitive. Pure and simple, Carley looked angry
.

Anger and aggression can go hand in hand, and are so closely connected that many writers, including scientists, use the words interchangeably. This makes sense, given that anger probably evolved as a mechanism for recruiting the brain and body to prepare for battle. It’s the “fight” part of “fight or flight.” In its absence, most animals wouldn’t survive, so it’s no wonder it comes hardwired in so many species.

Although we have far to go, we’re starting to understand a lot about the biology of anger. We know that, as part of the body’s security system, the amygdala plays as important a role in anger as it does in fear. If you remove certain sections of the amygdala you can’t elicit anger, no matter how hard you try. Conversely, you can stimulate those same areas
with mild electrical currents and elicit a full-blown rage. That’s how you get little tiny mice attacking cats in a laboratory version of David and Goliath.

Most biologists don’t hesitate to attribute the emotion of anger to nonhuman animals. The neurobiologist John Ratey calls anger “the second universal emotion,” as primal an experience as fear. Antonio Damasio even talks about “angry house flies,” although he isn’t implying that flies experience anger with the same kind of feelings that we have. Darwin has an entire chapter on anger in
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
.

That acceptance isn’t universal, though, especially outside the fields of zoology and neurology. I had a client, a clinical psychologist, who said: “I know I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes my dog looks so angry.” Given that her dog had just shot Lassie a look that could only be described as murderous, I saw no reason not to use the term myself. I suggested that it seemed appropriate in this context. My client explained that her training had been explicit: anger was something experienced by humans; attributing it to nonhuman animals was unscientific and hopelessly anthropomorphic. Similar concerns about attributing anger to animals are not uncommon, perhaps because of the influence of the early behaviorists we talked about earlier. While surfing the web for articles on “anger management,” I found a psychologist’s statement that “all anger is learned.” I sympathize with the author’s thesis that people can learn to control their anger. I think sometimes dogs can, too, and we’ll talk about how to help them do that later in the chapter. But that doesn’t negate the biological basis of anger, and the fact that animals and people come hardwired to experience it.

In
The Other End of the Leash
I wrote that my noble dog Luke had a look best translated into two words, the second being “you.” The first word was not “love.” I’ll leave it to you to figure the rest out. His sweet, docile daughter, Lassie, who has the most expressive face of any dog I’ve ever known, nailed her veterinary chiropractor with one of those looks after an atypically painful needle insertion. Lassie flinched, moved away, and then turned her head and looked back at Dr. Julie James—one of the kindest, gentlest veterinarians imaginable—with a look so hateful we both burst out laughing. There was no “I’m going to
bite you” in it, but her eyes had such fury in them we could almost feel her anger moving through the air.

It’s true that anger isn’t the emotion most of us associate with dogs. I’ve had several conversations with professionals in medicine or behavior who suggested that dogs were the epitome of “pure love.” Implied is that while dogs are like humans in their ability to experience love and joy (and/or are better at it), they don’t share our more “negative” emotions, such as anger and hatred. A famous passage by John Cam Hob-house about Lord Byron’s loyal dog Boatswain includes the words “and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.” Jeffrey Moussaieff Massons deeply felt book about the emotional lives of dogs speaks compellingly about their loving nature—he tells us that “the dog
is
love, that dogs are all about love.” He has extensive chapters on the ability of a dog to suffer from fear and sadness, but only briefly mentions anger in the chapter on aggression. You can’t blame him: most of us don’t want to come home from a hard, frustrating day at work to an animal who reminds us about an emotion as aversive as anger.

In a general sense, our image of dogs as docile, loving individuals is valid. Dogs continually amaze me—they put up with treatment that would infuriate humans, remain seemingly cheerful in appalling circumstances, and, amazingly often, avoid using the weapons they carry, cocked and loaded, in their mouths. We’ve all known dogs who never seemed to experience even a flicker of irritation. Perhaps they felt it, but never expressed it, going through an entire life with the carefree demeanor of a happy three-year-old child at play I suspect many dogs really are the joyful creatures that they seem. This is no accident: dogs’ closest relatives are wolves, and those who know wolves are impressed by how purely they seem to express pleasure and playfulness. Additionally, domestic dogs carry a set of genes that emphasizes innocent docility, which comes as part and parcel of the joyful abandon we associate with childhood.

The evidence is growing that domestication itself, whether it resulted from natural or artificial selection (most probably both took place), includes a process of developmental inhibition in which adult
individuals retain the docile characteristics of the young. Nowhere is that better exemplified than by dogs and wolves. In one sense, dogs
are
wolves—their genetics are so similar that they freely interbreed. Much of their behavior, too, is strikingly similar: a threatening or appeasing posture in a dog, for instance, is the exact replica of that posture in a wolf. And yet, dogs aren’t wolves at all. Those who work with wolves unanimously agree that one never, ever commands a wolf to do anything. No matter how skilled or experienced you are, you work with wolves on their terms or not at all. It makes no difference whether the wolf was taken away from its mother at a few weeks of age and raised by humans, or captured in the wild; trying to force a wolf to do something is a poor tactic indeed. Apparently the people who have tried it have been selected out of the gene pool, because you never hear from them.

I thought about wolves once when I had to grab the collar of a frenzied and unfamiliar Husky. My friend Marilyn Fowler was doing a herding dog demonstration at a summer camp for dogs, while a group of people and dogs watched. Overwhelmed with the excitement of it all, a young Husky yanked the leash out of his owner’s hands and began to chase the panicked sheep through the forest. I have a blurry video game-like memory of sheep, people, and dogs streaking around trees (and occasionally into them) while we tried to stop the dog before he did serious damage. We didn’t succeed.

I was the first to find him and the sheep he had managed to catch.
¹
The poor ewe was down on her side, with the Husky shaking her shoulder, his teeth sunk up to the gums in the muscles of her foreleg. Panting and shaking with adrenaline myself, I grabbed his collar, said a prayer, and began to pull him away. I knew perfectly well that even the nicest dog might bite my arm in that context. He was highly aroused, lost in a predatory haze, and he’d never even met me. Bless his heart, the dog instantly dropped the ewe and, without a flicker of anger, allowed me to pull him off. The owner was devastated at the sight of her beloved pet ravaging a sheep, but even though I felt bad for the injured ewe, I thought the dog’s response to me was marvelous. This was not a vicious dog. He was a dog doing what eons of evolution had primed him to do—run after moving prey and pull it down—nothing more. Of course, I’d rather he hadn’t injured the ewe, but what he did wasn’t about anger or aggression, it was about discovering his predatory past. He could have been angry and aggressive when I pulled him off, and he gets all the credit in the world for allowing me to do so. If he had been a wolf, I wouldn’t be writing this, unless perhaps I had learned to type with my toes.

Some people object to describing dogs as “juvenilized” wolves, as if to do so demeans dogs in some way, but I don’t think of it as demeaning at all.
²
I had more respect and admiration for Cool Hand Luke than I do for many of the people I know, and that’s not because I don’t like people. I love people, I think we’re an amazing species, but the fact is that Luke was kinder and nobler than just about anyone I’ve ever known. I knew twenty-four hours after I got him that I was living with a very special individual. However, Luke was an intelligent, complex adult male, perfectly capable of having his own expectations and desires. As a result, there were times when he and I disagreed about what should happen next, and I have no illusions that I never made him angry. There were times when, having chosen another dog to go to the barn with, I told Luke to stay at the house, and he shot me a look I can’t imagine describing as anything but angry.

Neither did he do everything I asked. When he was young, there were times when he’d lie down in front of the sheep, focused like a laser, and ignore my signals to return to me. “That’ll do,” I’d call, my words dissipating in the air like a trail of smoke. Nothing. Not even an ear flick. Luke stayed flattened to the ground, face riveted on the flock, his drive to work overpowering his interest in doing what I asked. This is a high-quality problem for a herding dog trainer—we love it when a young dog doesn’t want to stop working—so I would gently take him by the collar and direct him away from the sheep for a moment. Luke quickly learned that coming off the sheep when called led to getting to work them again, so it didn’t take long to teach him to respond to my voice. But in the beginning, I didn’t hesitate to take him by the collar
and coax him away. Try that with a wolf sometime. No, please, don’t. The results wouldn’t be pretty, although they might make great footage on
The World’s Most Amazing Animal Videos
.

That dogs are juvenilized doesn’t mean they are somehow lesser beings than their wild ancestors. I consider the domestic dog to be one of the world’s most admirable creatures, and wouldn’t want to live in a world that didn’t include them. I couldn’t live on my farm without my dogs, relying as I do on their ability to read sheep, their stamina, and their athletic ability on a daily basis. Dogs are better than our most advanced technologies at detecting land mines and rounding up flocks of sheep in rough terrain. They can detect lung cancer in the smell of a person’s breath. That they cooperate with us in so many endeavors is nothing less than a biological miracle. I love wolves, too—I confess to getting tears in my eyes while watching two wolves rejoin the Slough Creek pack in Yellowstone National Park—but I won’t be bringing one onto the farm to help me load up the market lambs.

However, just because dogs are more docile than wolves doesn’t mean that every dog on the planet goes through life overcome with the joyful abandon of a floppy-eared puppy in a Kodak commercial. Although many of us do expect our dogs to radiate love and joy every minute of every day, surely it’s a rare dog who never gets irritated, much less angry. After seventeen years of working with problem dogs, I can’t imagine how to make sense of what I’ve seen without attributing the emotion of anger to dogs.

Of course, there’s a danger in attributing any emotion to a dog’s behavior, because we are so often wrong about it. That doesn’t mean they don’t have emotions, it just means that we need to get better at reading their expressions and must avoid projecting our own feelings onto them. Out of all the emotions we may or may not share with dogs, I suspect that anger is the one we’re most confused about. On the one hand, we have a collective expectation that dogs should exemplify our positive emotions, such as love and joy. On the other hand, we are quick to project anger onto them inappropriately. For example, the most common assumption of novice dog owners—the same ones who
will tell you that dogs are better than people because they are so loving—is that dogs urinate on the carpet because they’re angry they were left home all day. However, dogs go to the bathroom in the house because they haven’t been housetrained, or because they’re scent marking, or because they’re anxious when left alone. They don’t expect us to have a trust fund that enables us to stay home all day, but it seems to be oh-so-human to imagine that those sweet, loving dogs we see in the evenings are so angry during the day that they poop on purpose just to get back at us. We also tend to imagine the worst possible motivations for any example of what we call (usually inappropriately) disobedience. People imagine their dogs are “angry” or “getting back” at them when they don’t come when called or when they refuse to return the ball their owner threw. In truth, the poor dogs usually don’t know what we want or, or worse, have been inadvertently trained not to do it.