Pearl reminds us to be thoughtful separation anxiety.

If you do what I do for a living, you hear a lot about the anxious dog who can’t be left at home. And the anxious dog owner who can’t bear to leave them at home.

My dog goes on vacation because she can’t bear to be alone. She can’t be in a kennel. She hates it when I go to work.  I hate to leave her. I can’t be without her.

More than 300,000 American dogs are now on medication for seperation anxiety and anti-depressants relating to mood disorders – sadness, anxiety, clinical depression. Dogs made it through most of their long history with humans without drugs. Perhaps we are driving them nuts.  Many veterinarians seem comfortable medicating dogs to placate their troubled owners, rather than advocate training approaches first. There is, of course, lots of money involved in medicating dogs, as there is human beings.

At a reading this weekend, I met a man who will not travel without his dog, mostly because he believes the dog couldn’t bear a housesitter or a kennel. “I just couldn’t put him through that,” he said. Why? I asked. “Because he was abused.” How do you know that? I asked. “Oh,” he said, “I can just tell.” Like other people I have met, I wonder if he uses the notion of the abused dog as a way of justifying his fears and guilt. I saw that he needed his dog to be anxious about being alone, as he needed his dog to be abused when he really had no idea if that was true.

I have five dogs right now. Pearl is here for the summer. She adores my daughter, and may or may not miss her, but she eats well, has a great spot on the porch, loves her walks and biscuits, snores through the night, and has had no problem with sleeping, anxiety or depression. Neither do most of the 12 million dogs who are re-homed every year. If there is a signature trait of my life with dogs, it would be their sometimes ruthless adaptability.

My dogs have several caretakers who they are very fond of. They sleep over at other people’s houses. I do not miss them when I am away. Pearl speaks to this. She and my daughter are inseparable in their Brooklyn lives. But in the great and true adaptable nature of dogs, Pearl separates quite easily, especially if there is food and rawhide around. I have never, in fact,  had a dog with separation anxiety, or a dog who couldn’t be left, and I  am bewildered by the idea that dogs – den animals who spend most of their natural lives sleeping in dark spaces – cannot be left alone, or in a good kennel, or with a good dogwalker, or in a crate or home – while their owners work or go on vacation or go to the movies.  When I go out, I toss biscuits into the dog’s crates, and yell “crate” and have to step out of the way while my dogs rush into their crates. This is where they are when I come home, sleeping happily and gathering themselves.

This emotionalizing is a sad evolution in the life of dogs and humans. We need and love one another. But we don’t need to love and need each other that much. They deserve their lives and we deserve ours. For me, it is something of a dignity question. They serve me, and I take good care of them, not the other way around.

I once asked a great trainer if we should turn the lights on for the dogs in her house as we went out to dinner. “What for?” she asked. “They don’t read.”

We left them in the dark. Pearl was happy here. She will be happy to go home.