When I was a boy growing up in a small-colony Bangalore , my family had a German shepherd dog named Jimmy . He was black & white-faced and massive, and he ruled over our neighborhood’s other dogs. When I was in grade school he would accompany me and my mum on our walk to school, and he’d be waiting in the afternoon to accompany us back home. Occasionally he’d need to fight some dog to reaffirm his dominance over his territory. He never killed another dog, but he never lost either.
By the time I was in high school, Jimmy face was matted with grey hairs, and he only rarely decided to accompany me anywhere. I vividly recall one of those times: I was walking to my high school one afternoon on some after-school errand, and Jimmy was with me. He’d been with me my whole life 15 years , so I really didn’t notice that he was walking a little slower, that perhaps his posture wasn’t as perfect as it was in old family pics. To me he was my best friend; he seemed eternal.
Passing an open lot, we encountered a dog neither of us knew. The newcomer was a big shaggy lab-mix, and he approached us with that stiff-legged stillness dogs use to signal their unhappiness at meeting a stranger. I’d learned from childhood to let Jimmy come forward and handle such situations, so I stopped walking and stepped aside. To my amazement, Jimmy didn’t move. He was watching the dog come closer, and he was growling in his throat, but it wasn’t a public growl, not really, and certainly the other dog paid it no mind.
I belatedly realized I had to do something myself. I reached down and picked up a rock, and the other dog froze (National Geographic photographers have confirmed what the Roman poet Lucian wrote two thousand years ago: the human gesture of facing a dog while stooping to pick up something off the ground seems universally known to dogs as a sign of danger to themselves – from Pakistan to Paraguay, dogs instantly grow wary when they see it). As soon as he saw that I was preparing to defend myself, Jimmy began growling and then barking in earnest, but he didn’t sally forth to meet the other dog nose-to-nose, as he would have when I was in grade school. Instead, he stayed right by my side as he did his protective barking, occasionally glancing toward me during the racket.
That evening and the next day, Jimmy wouldn’t make eye contact with me, and he stayed in our yard. I got the distinct impression he was ashamed of the way he’d behaved the day before.
I told my high school biology teacher about it, he sniffed and said I was guilty of anthropomorphism. Jimmy wasn’t feeling ashamed, he told me; Jimmy was incapable of feeling ashamed, since that was a human emotion. I was feeling ashamed, and I was projecting that onto my dog. When I told this to my father, he grunted and said, “Of course Jimmy is ashamed. He isn’t young and strong of the walk anymore, and he knows it.” Then he paused, looked me straight in the face, and said, “Dog ‘experts’ don’t know beans.”
There’s an inverse relationship between the ubiquity of a subject and the esteem in which we hold those who claim expertise in those subjects. What really active person hasn’t caught themselves wondering if the ‘fitness expert’ employed by their health club isn’t just some pretty guy who likes hanging out in the weight room? Who hasn’t excoriated the evening news’ meteorologist for not knowing what we can all see going on right outside the window? And really, which of us doesn’t fancy himself an expert on dogs? After all, they’re all around us, they always have been, and they’re not exactly secretive. If somebody writes a field guide to ocelots, readers will say, “Huh – I never knew all this stuff!” But if somebody writes a book about dogs, those same readers are apt to say, “Huh – what the Hell do you know?” Even Cesar Milan, the famed “dog whisperer,” isn’t the exception that proves the rule: we’re willing to grant him supernatural powers specifically because we don’t want to cede him actual expertise.
These two obstacles – the suspicion of anthropomorphism and the suspicion of fraud – loom before anybody who wants to write a book on dogs, and the library shelves are crowded with authors who tried and to some extent failed. In Dogwatching, Desmond Morris, legendary author of The Naked Ape, calmly informs his readers that tail-wagging in dogs never means simple happiness – and all those readers promptly drop his book right at that point. In No Bad Dogs, Barbara Wodehouse, legendary British “dog whisperer” of a previous generation, sternly tells her readers that they themselves are the worst thing that’s ever likely to happen to their dogs – and all those readers (nearly bankrupt from gourmet dog foods, expensive vet visits, and all the other components of the one billion dollar pet-care industry in the West) promptly drop her book right at that point. In The Hidden Life of Dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas lets her dogs run out into four-lane highway traffic in order to ‘study’ how they deal with it.
In virtually every case, the authors of these books will look guilty of either one obstacle or both. Either they tell us things that we know from our own experience aren’t true – i.e. they’re full of beans – or they start prattling about ‘spiritual’ connections with their dogs, or about how their dog really likes their new therapist – i.e., they’re anthropomorphizing to beat the band.
