And editor once told me that I was a fine writer, but that my true genius was being ahead of my readers and the rest of the world, and of telling people what they didn’t really want to hear. This, she said bluntly, is why you are not rich. She was trying to prod me into going with the flow, but I never really had it in me. She was right, I will never write a book like the Rainbow Bridge, call my dogs “furbabies” or say that my pets mean more to me than my spouse, or that they are my children. If I could do these things, I might be wealthier and have a bevy of assistants to transcribe my editing changes or to call customer service for me.
In 2004, I wrote The New Work Of Dogs, a book way ahead of it’s time. It wasn’t cute, and nobody was rescued in it, so it got a ton of great reviews and very few sales. This has more or less been my place in the literary firmament, I am okay with it. The book was about my growing awareness that dogs and cats were serving a powerful new function in America – they were no longer about work, protection or hunting, their new work was providing emotional support and connection to increasingly dis-connected, fragmented, stressed and unhappy Americans.
In most of the world, dogs are not given human names, regarded as children, brought into bed, lavished with billions of dollars of gourmet food and treats, taken to day care, dog parks and hotels, and given better health care and nutrition than many human citizens have. Our dysfunctional politicians rage against helping the poor, but nobody on either side of our narrow political spectrum ever complains about the burgeoning welfare state growing around animals.
When I wrote New Work Of Dogs, I never imagined how on target that book was, how deep our emotional connections to pets would become, how emotionalized and personified and anthropomorphisized dogs and cats would be, that hundreds of thousands of them would be on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications, that people could not go to work or vacation without them, or leave them alone, and that the best selling dog book in history would be about meeting them in the afterlife across a bridge in heaven and spending all eternity playing with them. I was right, but not nearly right enough.
The question in our time is no longer whether supporting the emotional needs of humans is the new work of dogs (and cats) but is now much larger and deeper. The real question now is this:
What Are Animals For?
In our culture, we rarely use animals for work. Burglar alarms and fancy locks and cell phones have supplanted dogs as our primary warning and protection systems. Very few people hunt with dogs any more, and hunting breeds like Labs have become the national cuddle-bugs, like many other hunting and working breeds. Border collies are mythic for their supposed intelligence, but very few of them get to herd anything but other dogs and rubber balls.
Animals are here to give us unconditional love. To make us feel connected. To offer us companionship in a world where most people spend six hours a day in front of a screen. Where politics is too ugly and dispiriting to bear, the Internet brings anger and warnings and religion has lost it’s power to lift us up. Animals provide succor and laughter when our spouses are other people can’t or won’t. This is viscerally selfish, even exploitive. We use them in ways unthinkable even a generation ago. While humans get booted out of their homes by greedy banks by the tens of thousands, dogs and cats are moved into “no-kill” shelters to languish in small crates for years, even their whole lives.
It is rarely a bad thing when animals are treated well. I think it is a wonderful thing that animals are filling some of the emotional gaps in our lives, especially of religion, politics, technology and other people aren’t doing it. I value my dogs greatly, they are great supporters of me and my emotions. It’s also a complex thing.
I worry about several things: one, that they are not really a complete substitute for people in my life, and I have tried both. Lenore was wonderful to snuggle with in bed, Maria is better in very many ways. I am grateful I didn’t accept dogs as a substitute for human love, and never gave up on finding it. I know many people who have given up on humans because they love their dogs and cats so much. Is this really a good thing?
I worry that we are transferring our many neuroses onto these animals because our feelings for them have become so emotional. I have never had a dog who suffered separation anxiety, who tore up my house, who ran off after a truck, who needs medication for anxiety or depression, who grieved noticeably when another dog or human died, who fought with other dogs. I wonder why this is so? Is it because I am a genius at training? Not likely. I think it is because I mostly believe these are human, not animal traits, and I just don’t believe in them much, as loudly and insistently as people tell me they are true. Dogs reflect us, they become what we want them and need me to be. Increasingly, we seem to need them to be like us.
I love dogs, they are central to me, my life and my work. I work every day to keep them in perspective. I recognize that their primary role in my life is to provide emotional support and companionship and work for me, yet I work every day to preserve their identities as a separate species, as animals who are very different from me, from us. They have enough troubles of their own, I will not make them a receptacle for my human garbage.
What Are Animals For?
They exist in our world to help us navigate a world of fear, confusion and uncertainty. We do not just love them because we are wonderful and saintly animal lovers, we love them because we need them, and being honest about that seems a healthy thing for me, however we like to dress it up. That is good and important work, and I can see it now much more clearly than I ever did when I first wrote about it nearly a decade ago.
I recognize their importance to me, but I will work to be careful not to exploit them or turn them into needy versions of humans because that is what I often have been, and that is what I have sometimes needed. When I lost awareness of this, it was my dogs who paid for it, not me.
