My heart lifted when I saw what you did this afternoon at the RISSE after school in Albany. Everything in this photograph except for the books were things you brought from the RISSE Amazon Wish List – the table, the chairs, the light, and soon, the rugs.
A dead space has come to life, a place to read, think, study, sit with friends, be quiet, think. What an incredible gift. “Something we have wanted for so long,” said one of the teachers, who came up to thank me. A miracle. Indeed. Think of it, a safe place to be for children who have never had a safe place to be.
I was in Albany this afternoon taking photos of the refugee kids, and I felt quite old. I was hauling my camera bags around, and I just felt spent. Ali, my friend, came up to me and asked me if I was all right. I was surprised, he has never asked me that before.
I asked him what he meant?, and he said I looked tired, sad, he had never seen me look like that before. I drove home to Cambridge, and Maria came back from her belly dancing class, and she said I looked tired and perhaps I could skip blogging tonight.
I can’t do that, I said, I am loyal to my blog but I’ll wait until morning to put up the beautiful photos I took of the RISSE kids in Albany, I can at least do that.
I remember a friend who told me he was tired once, he called to tell me that, and then he died the next morning, he was young and strong.
Perhaps I am still sick, I thought, perhaps I crashed today and the black dog came to sit beside me. I do that, when there is trouble I am on fire, and then, when nobody i looking, I pull inside like a turtle. I am up so much, I fall hard when I come down. I suppose I am quite predictable.
Fate and Gus were close, they were together all day and played all day, they stole one another’s toys, played hide-and-seek, happily tormented one another. When one of my dogs die, I always pay attention how the other dogs react to a dog’s death.
There is, of course, tremendous anguish and debate in the dog world about this, I have had people storm out of readings when I said I have never seen grief and do not believe dogs grieve in the way people do. For one thing, they don’t know what death is, they have no way to comprehend whether a dog or a person is gone for a minute or forever.
For another, they have no vocabulary with which to process grief. Dogs do have emotions, they do feel things, but because we love them so much, we insist on projecting our thoughts onto them, thus all of the beautiful statues and paintings of devoted dogs waiting for their shepherds or loved people, or even one another.
Everyone seems to have a story of how their dog grieved when another dog died, moped, didn’t eat for a while, seemed disoriented. I have lost many dogs over the years, and I have yet to see a dog grieve for a lost mate in any way that could be called human. Dogs are pack animals, they are keenly aware of who is in the pack and who isn’t, and they can become anxious, disoriented, even depressed when a dog disappears. But I have never seen that, and I believe most of these stories to be a human kind of projection – they take what they see and translate it into feelings they might have or know.
I love Dr. Stanley Coren’s essay in Psychology Today, “Do Dogs Grieve Over A Lost Loved One?” Coren, an author and psychologist who has written extensively – and quite rationally – about dogs and grief. Dr. Coren is too wise to believe that dogs know what death is, or grieve like people, but he is deeply moved by the idea they look for lost people and miss them. That is different from human-like grief.
Grief in the human sense, he writes suggests that dogs understand the concept of the nature and implications of death. This, he points out , is beyond the mental ability of human children before the age of four or five years. Behaviorists believe that mentally and emotionally, dogs are equivalent to humans aged two to three years old.
Like children, they do not comprehend that death is irreversible. In their natural lives, dogs come and go, vanish and die, run off or get lost all the time.
Dogs are among the most adaptable of all animals, they may show some sadness or signs of confusion or depression, but their instincts move them along. None of the Katrina dogs are known to have died of grief when they lost their homes, they found new homes and their next meals right away.
Coren believes that dogs might feel hope. Some might wait, hoping their human people might return. “Because dogs do not have the knowledge that death is forever, or even that there is such a thing as death, “at least there is the option to hope – a hope that their loved one might come back again.”
This seems more plausible to me. Frankly, I want to like the idea, it is endearing and I can comprehend it. The harsh truth is that we don’t precisely know what dogs think or how, they are believed to think like autistic children, in imagery.
Fate and Red have shown no indication that they miss Gus, they are not searching for him, reacting to his loss, and of course, they have no idea he is dead. They are eager to get to work, get to the sheep, chase balls, and eat. Just like normal. Nobody skipped a meal, lay around for hours, stared longingly at Gus’s crate. I have never owned a dog who manifested human-like signs of grief.
I do not alter my voice when I see them, speak of Gus i mournful tones to them, ask them if they are sad in that squishy voice, or if they miss him. In my mind, it is none of their business, really.
It is quite easy to misread dog’s responses to loss as grief. Pack animals become disoriented when an animal leaves the pack, they may be confused, they may get anxious or depressed. Even aggressive. That is common pack behavior. That does not mean they are grieving in the way we grieve.
I always remember this when a dog dies, as I did after Gus was euthanized and I was watching Red, and especially, Fate: I know Gus has died. They don’t. Gus left the house all the time, to ride with us, go to the vet, go for a walk. They don’t know the difference, they have no idea he is not coming back, not unless I project my loss onto them.
Why do so many people see clear signs of grieving in dogs and I never do? In a biological sense, it isn’t even possible for them to grieve in the way I do. Am I just cold and heartless, as so many people have suggested over the years? Why do so many dog lovers need them to grieve so badly?
My own idea is less dramatic.
I believe that dogs read their cues from us. I’ve never had a dog with separation anxiety either. I don’t really believe in it as an instinctive trait. When people are anxious, dogs get anxious. When people are deeply upset, dogs reflect that. They mirror us and are masters at reading our moods, that’s why they are treated so well, because we are always emotionalizing and personifying them. We reinforce behaviors all the time, every minute.
If dogs don’t feel grief, we can certainly train them to act like it easily enough.
If you believe it is a trauma and drama to leave a dog alone for awhile, I promise you the odds of your dog being upset are high, and upset dogs look for something to do to calm themselves, and you almost surely won’t like it. That’s why 340,000 dogs in America are on anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medications.
For many thousands of years, dogs didn’t need Prozac. We insist on making them crazy, like us.
I know people don’t want to hear that dogs don’t grieve like us, and don’t like it. They might be right and I might be wrong. I’m not God, or even an angel. I don’t tell other people what to do or think.
The fact that people get so upset about the topic tells me this is something they need to believe, and is hard for them to let go of. In my informal polling over the years I’ve found that people who believe their dogs are traumatized when they leave them (or they hate to leave their dogs), and make a big deal out of it, are the ones most likely to experience dogs with separation anxiety (litter issues can also cause this).
If you believe it, it will come.
People who don’t believe their dogs grieve like humans do not have dogs who they believe grieve like humans. People who come and go without drama usually have dogs who react the same way. Dogs are selfish, they worry about the things that effect them.
You can conduct your own survey and make up your own mind. We get the dogs we need, and they very often become the dogs we need after living with us awhile, that is their remarkable survival tool. That is why dogs have thrived when more than half of the species of animals on the earth are gone.
When I come home this week, I do not look at Fate mournfully or comfort her, just as I do not make a fuss when I go out or come in. I’m not talking baby talk in that high voice asking is she misses Gus.
Since the dogs don’t know the difference between my leaving for ten minutes or an hour – they don’t tell time – they barely notice. If I don’t miss them for a few minutes, or hours, they don’t miss me. The same applies to other dogs.
Millions of dogs are rescued, purchased and re-homed each year. They don’t wither and die or grieve, they adapt and evolve. That is the miracle of dogs, the lesson they taught me, one of the things I most love about them. They are not like us.
If I do not expect them to grieve, they don’t need to or want do. And, of course, they don’t even know what it is.
They mirror us, every behaviorist and trainer and breeder knows that, they are our mirrors in many ways. We are the key to their behavior, not fate.
Fate adapted quickly to Gus’s absence, and I believe he was important to her.
She immediately stole every one of his toys, put them in a pile under the dining room table, and now plays with them constantly. It’s almost as if she never noticed he was gone. She sure never missed a meal.
One friend came by after Gus died and said, “oh, how adorable. Fate is remembering Gus by playing with his toys, she is mourning him in her own way.”
This is a classic example of projection – putting our feelings into the dog’s head.
I said nothing. But what I was thinking is this: Like all dogs, Fate is adaptable, and she was delighted to get all the toys for herself and ready to play with them all by herself. My friend was projecting her feelings about loss onto Fate.
She didn’t know it, but she was training her to grieve, or appear to be grieving. Dogs are emotion magnets, they are extraordinarily sensitive to our moods and feelings.
If Fate were my friend’s dog, my friend would be telling stories about how upset she was when Gus died.
It’s a great topic, and I think it’s important to write about. I never believe I am always right, I just write about what i see and feel, as honestly as I can.
One thing, I am sure of, we are all hoping for another dog.
The RISSE children wish me to thank you for the whiteboard hanging in the main classroom. They are using it for all kinds of things, messages, drawings, sketches, lessons. RISSE has put another whiteboard on the Amazon Wish List, this one is so popular many can’t get a chance to use it.
This kind of gift opens up a whole new vein of creativity with these children, they are finding all sorts of creative ways to use it. It pulls the creativity right out of them.
The RISSE after school kids wish me to tell you that they are using and loving the gifts you are getting for them on the RISSE Amazon Wish List. It lifts the heart to see them, these are not things they had before your generosity.
