Kismet
UPH Guru
(Going through some old files, I found this, copied years ago from some post on the Internet. Enjoy.)
Remember these rules," said my new housemate Adam about my other new housemate, Diablo, a wolf-German shepherd mix who looked as though he had eaten more jugular veins than Snausages. "Don't make quick moves, don't try to touch him, don't look him in the eye, and you'll probably be fine."
I was 6 months out of college and hauling my cheap belongings into a cheaper Salt Lake City bungalow. Adam, an Apache construction worker, explained that he'd rescued his dog from a sadistic drunkard who had beaten the animal half to death with a golf iron. Then Diablo growled as if I were the guy's caddy.
"Quiet," Adam told the beast, not unkindly. Diablo's growling ratcheted down, but only a notch. No wonder the rent was so cheap.
For the next 3 weeks, the growl never stopped. I almost got used to it, the way I almost got used to navigating the bungalow with my eyes trained on the ceiling. Every once in a while, Diablo sniffed my groin with his elongated snout, which could snap moose femurs like pretzel sticks. It was all I could do to keep from fainting.
Our relationship changed one searing afternoon in August. Having come home early for lunch, I heard Diablo snarling at me from his fenced lair in the backyard. His growling carried its usual tone of hatred, but I sensed an additional chord, the barest tone of vulnerability in the heart of the largest carnivore I'd ever lived with.
As slowly and reassuringly as I could, I approached the fence. "It's okay, buddy," I said, trying to channel Saint Francis. "Easy, boy."
Diablo's problem was soon apparent: He'd upended his water dish in the 101? heat. What I decided to do next terrified me, but the alternative - doing nothing - seemed as cruel as beating the brute with a sand wedge. I unlocked the gate and slowly, slowly moved inside his territory. I could feel Diablo's breath on my leg, the guttural vibrations of his growl. Smoothly, slowly, I reached for the water dish, righted it, filled it from the wall spigot, and retreated. The growl was silenced by desperate, maybe even grateful, lapping from the dish.
When I returned home at 6:30 that night, Adam was cooking his dinner, and Diablo was in his usual evening spot beside his master's La-Z-Boy. He was sitting on his haunches, watching me silently. The growl had stopped.
From that point on, our bond deepened.
If you've ever become best friends with a former bully, you know how gratifying it can be. With Diablo beside me, I felt invulnerable - it was as if I'd developed a superpower. In the eons before modern weaponry, dogs like Diablo must have bestowed a sense of invincibility upon those fortunate human beings they trusted.
I got a delicious taste of this a month later, when I was jolted from a deep sleep by the sounds of Diablo in a rage. A couple of my ne'er-do-well friends had broken in late one night to invite me out for drinks, which they had hoped I'd pay for. Diablo backed the slackers against a wall.
I gave him an affectionate scratch behind his ears, which, of course, did nothing to calm him. "You know what they say about sleeping dogs, eh, fellas?"
After a quick recitation of Adam's list of "don'ts," I hugged Diablo around his neck and watched my friends slink off into the night. The last thing they heard in retreat was my voice switching to pupspeak.
"Who's a good boy, Diablo? Who's a good boy? You are! Oh, yes you are!"
My transition from prey to pal with Diablo mimics the flow of dog-human evolution. Like all good Hollywood buddy films, the relationship between our species opened in deep enmity, slouched toward begrudging tolerance, and only in the final act blossomed into the stuff of - let's admit it - love. Men and dogs now enhance each other's lives in so many ways, from the purely pragmatic to the deeply emotional, that it's hard to imagine any other type of relationship.
In exchange for daily kibble, a place to sleep, and a pat on the head, contemporary canines will do almost anything for us - guide us when we're blind, pull our sleds across the snowswept tundra, retrieve dead ducks from a lake, even sniff through toxic rubble in search of buried cadavers. As any cop will tell you, the dullest of tail waggers still exceeds by good measure the best burglar alarm ever invented.
Odd to think, then, that Homo sapiens and Canis lupus first saw each other as enemies: If we could kill and eat a wolf, or vice versa, there was one less meal to find and one less competitor for possession of the next hunk of protein. Mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests the d?tente between man and wolf probably dates back no more than 100,000 years. At this point, human hunter-gatherers were expanding their range, putting selective pressures on rival predators, such as the timber wolf.
Wolves, like men, come in an assortment of personality types. Some are naturally aggressive - a trait that hardly endeared them to Stone Age hunters. Such wolves learned to stay the hell away from humans altogether or they would have faced extermination by our Paleolithic forefathers. Those wolves blessed with a more peaceful nature, on the other hand, adapted better as the human population boomed. One theory holds that these laid-back wolves benefited from an easily accessible food supply: human garbage. We, in turn, benefited from their warning howls whenever predators or marauding tribes came near. At some point, perhaps following the adoption of orphaned pups by a Stone Age hunter, these pacified wolves stopped living beside us and started living with us.
This most likely happened toward the end of the last ice age. In a grave near modern-day Bonn-Oberkassel, Germany, archaeologists discovered the bodies of a Stone Age man and woman and the first "morphologically unambiguous" dog, dating back 14,000 years. "People have been burying or otherwise ritually disposing of dead dogs all over the world for a very long time," says Darcy F. Morey, Ph.D., a zooarchaeologist at the University of Tennessee at Martin. His hypothesis: Humans at this point in history began to view these animals less as beasts and more as creatures imbued with spiritual qualities and thus deserving of proper burial.
Once dogs and humans began cohabiting, our species took active control of canine evolution. Early dog breeds were clearly selected for their abilities in what was, at the time, a strictly masculine pursuit: hunting. We created, in remarkably short order, dogs - from rat terriers to lion-hunting Rhodesian ridgebacks - perfectly suited to tracking down and killing virtually every huntable beast on Earth. And with the advent of agriculture came herding dogs, such as collies and Australian blue heelers, followed by a host of other breeds that specialize in everything from water rescue to crooning on Letterman.
Humans and dogs have always had a lot in common. "Like wolves, dogs tend to live in groups, and so do we," says Richard D. Alexander, Ph.D., a University of Michigan evolutionary biologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. "It helps both species hunt and kill prey and compete against rivals." And unlike, say, horses or hippopotamuses, which also live in social groups, dogs aren't so large that they'd break our furniture when curling up on it. Moreover, they generally avoid pooping in their dens. Successful eHarmony.com matches have been forged on less.
No wonder the 2007-2008 National Pet Owners Survey found that nearly 40 percent of all U.S. households currently host at least one dog. Though women are hardly immune to canine charms, the expression "man's best friend" has statistical backing: Nearly one in 17 American dogs are owned by men living alone.
My dog Harvey was a compact mutt with a wiry coat, a quick mind, and unusually long legs for his torso. Most dogs like to chase birds. Harvey actually caught them: A pheasant and a starling were both guilty of underestimating him.
I never did. At one time in my life, he was my best friend and drinking companion.
There were lots of reasons this was so, but they were all encapsulated on the day I lost my keys. I remember walking down the hallway of my swinging-singles apartment complex while carrying Harvey in a laundry basket covered with a ratty sheet (there was a no-pets stipulation on my lease). But Harvey was anticipating the dog-food dinner to come, and after a good deal of wriggling and yelping, he thrust his irrepressible tail from under the sheet. I fished for my keys. They weren't in their usual pocket, nor were they in any of the unusual ones.
For the previous hour, Harvey and I had been playing fetch in a city park three blocks away. Sometime in the course of several hundred tosses of a tennis ball, my keys must have slipped out of my pocket. They could have been anywhere amid the brush and blowing litter.
The two of us returned to the park, where I began painstakingly plodding back and forth along a grid pattern, Harvey matching my every step. How dogged he was! He perfectly synchronized his mood with mine, a trick he'd done on other occasions. A month earlier, for instance, he'd lain in motionless vigil beside me for 6 hours while I suffered a migraine as disabling as a railroad spike in the left temple. In the park that day, his young terrier-mongrel face mirrored my own bewilderment and chagrin. The only difference between us was that Harvey's eyes retained a glimmer of optimism.
After a half hour of failed searching, I collapsed in a spasm of self-pity. My career at that time was going nowhere, I was invisible to women, and now I couldn't even provide Harvey with reliable shelter. I emitted a little choking sound. At this Harvey climbed into my lap and sighed in that utterly commiserative way that only an unconditionally loyal pack mate can provide.
Encouraged by his support, I dreamed up a last-gasp idea for salvation. I untied one of my shoes, took off a long-unwashed gym sock, and held it up to Harvey's snout - as if he needed even more of a reminder of what I smelled like. Then I said, "Harvey, find our keys!" It was ridiculous, I knew - something out of Rin Tin Tin. But Harvey took off running in a zigzagging, ground-scouring pilgrimage through the weeds and refuse. A couple of minutes later, he stopped 30 yards away, wagging his tail.
When I reached his side, Harvey was standing directly over the keys.
Over the course of 6 years, following his own crazy pattern along his own grid, Harvey steadfastly tugged me with his leash to a far better place than the one I was headed to on my own.
Cat people and other assorted loners have long argued that dog lovers are self-deluding dupes given to idiotic anthropomorphism. Dogs, in their view, are less pets than parasites - a species living exceptionally high on the hog by mere impersonation of friendship and affability. Still, we humans almost certainly reap far more than we deserve from our bargain with canines. As Charles Darwin reportedly observed, "We have bred our dogs to return our favors with interest."
Leave aside for a moment the fuzzier psychosocial benefits of companionship, key-locator service, and unconditional positive regard dogs provide us. In recent years scientists have increasingly documented a host of physiological benefits of dog ownership.
Given those benefits, you could legitimately ask, "Who's walking whom?"
I used to marvel at how serendipitous it was that each dog I had was so perfectly suited to my life stage at the time. When I was 3, I was protected by a Pembroke Welsh corgi named Foodoo, who kept strangers at a safe distance. A Saint Bernard named Heather stuck with me during my teenage years, when my peers turned away. And a mutt named Ivy helped me keep my octogenarian dad smiling, even as he slipped ever deeper into memory loss and dementia.
I've now come to wonder if, in fact, all my various dog buddies could have interchangeably served well at any of these life chapters. The true genius of their kind, I have come to suspect, is an ability to intuit whatever emotional vacuum might exist in our lives and to fill this up precisely through a mix of tail wagging and dog breath and unconditional positive regard.
In the 2006 Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy, researchers Chia-Chun Tsai and Erika Friedmann acknowledge that the research literature here is far from definitive. Still, some studies have indeed found that dogs can reduce loneliness, lower anxiety, and slap a smile on the depressed. Patrick McCathern, a retired Air Force sergeant and longtime spokesman for the National Institute of Mental Health's Real Men/Real Depression campaign, credits his dog Dunkin with preventing his suicide. McCathern recalls the moment when, blindsided by divorce, he draped a noose over his bathroom door, placed his neck inside it, and slumped forward.
"I was maybe 20 seconds away from passing out when one of my dogs walked in, wagging his tail," McCathern says. "I was beyond caring what my friends or family might think. But when Dunkin looked up at me with his bright beagle eyes, it was like he was saying, 'What about us? We love you.' It occurred to me that if I died, who'd care for my dogs? I'd be ending my pain but just starting the suffering for them." McCathern removed the noose and dialed a close friend, who drove him to an E.R.
Even Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, noted benefits of dog ownership. His dog, Jofi, provided him "affection without ambivalence, the simplicity of a life free from the almost unbearable conflicts of civilization..., [and a] feeling of intimate affinity, of an indisputed solidarity."
No couch. No "how does that make you feel?" Just a wagging tail, bright eyes, and motivation to leave the house when you need it most.
In a 2003 paper in the journal American Behavioral Scientist, Alan Beck, Sc.D., director of Purdue's center of the human-animal bond, and Aaron H. Katcher, M.D., a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, point out that cultures like ours have very few forms of play that mold caring and nurturing behaviors in male children. "Boy children," says Beck, "tend to be very self-conscious about having to take care of younger brothers and sisters. They don't play tea party or dollhouse, because that's Mommy stuff. However, taking care of an animal is a notable exception. Caring for your dog is always okay."
This license to love persists into adulthood. In virtually every public setting, women are, by and large, much more demonstrably touchy-feely than guys are. With dogs, however, this gender difference vanishes. "Men are just as likely as women to pet and stroke their dogs, hold them in their laps, kiss them, and so on," says Beck. "It doesn't matter whether they're male or female dogs, either: Men can hug them without inhibition, without feeling any less manly. It's one of the very few areas in life where men feel truly comfortable as nurturers."
Perhaps because they never interrupt us or make it hard to get a word in edgewise, dogs also encourage even the most taciturn of men to do what comes naturally to a lot of women: vent feelings verbally. "We did a study that showed 97 percent of people talk to their dogs," says Beck, adding, "and the other 3 percent probably lied." In some ways, dogs make better confidants than our girlfriends, relatives, and assorted other loved ones.
"The exchange of affection between people and animals differs from exchanges with close family members and other relatives. These interpersonal relationships are frequently charged with ambivalence and negative emotional states," argues Friedmann. "Human love and attention may be earned only with difficulty and sacrifice, or it may be entirely unavailable." The comfort dogs give their owners, on the other hand, can be scheduled anytime. And it's available, she adds, "in almost any quantity, without bargaining or supplication."
This willingness to go along with pretty much anything we say or do suggests yet another particular benefit dogs offer men: They not only allow but also actively encourage us to assume the top position in the social hierarchy - something most of us so rarely get to enjoy.
"Your dog, unlike your boss, friends, or wife," says Beck, "actually recognizes your leadership." Or as the great English novelist Aldous Huxley once put it, "To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."
Besides enjoying the perks of leadership, Napoleon had his Josephine. If you're hoping to meet and attract your own true love, a tail-wagging wingman may be your best shot at success. In a series of studies at the University of Pennsylvania, volunteers were asked to rate photographs of the same people shown with or without a dog. Those given the "with dog" scenes consistently rated the human subjects as happier, safer, and more relaxed. The reviewers also reported wanting to be in those pictures much more often than they did the dogless ones.
Peter Messent, M.A., D.Phil., an animal behaviorist, actually put such scenarios to a test. He asked volunteers to go on walks either solo or with a dog. He then systematically counted the social interactions each volunteer had on the walk. The results: Men who walked alone tended to stay that way. Those accompanied by a friendly dog significantly increased their social encounters.
Given dogs' femme-fetching skills, it was probably only a matter of time before they were marketed for this purpose. In Tokyo today, more than 100 "rent-a-puppy" shops now allow customers to take dogs on walks at a rate of about $15 per hour. Though most such customers are simply seeking a pleasant dog experience in a city where dog ownership can be prohibitively expensive, more than a few male clients specifically ask for cute breeds to help them attract women.
If anything, it's a man's ability to form close and intimate bonds with dogs, not the dogs themselves, that women find attractive. "When a dog is showing trust in and companionship with a man," says Alexander (the Michigan evolutionary biologist), "a woman knows that the man likely has whatever it takes to establish an affectionate relationship and keep it going."
Among his sundry gifts to my younger life, Harvey helped me establish several such affectionate relationships with women. The fact that I - a spotty wage earner at the best of times - could not always keep these going was surely no fault of his.
It was almost 2 in the morning, and my son Ben - then age 8 - couldn't go back to sleep. I tried to reason with him, calm him down, help him nod off. He was having none of it.
Ben had never seen any of the Child's Play movies, but a pal at school had - and recently relayed the entire gorefest that is Bride of Chucky. When Ben later saw a Chucky poster at the video store, that was all it took. The creepy little demon became an obsession and focal point for all the anxieties of third-grade life. I stayed with Ben till he was too exhausted to remain awake.
The next day, I ran into a psychiatrist friend at the supermarket and desperately opened the whole anxiety worm can in the checkout line. He smiled at me in that shrinky, your-hour's-up kind of way I've come to associate with an imminent brush-off.
But he caught me off guard by asking a question. "You guys have a dog?"
"Yeah," I said. "Two pugs: Lefty and Biscuit."
"Do you ever let them sleep with your son?"
When I answered no, he suggested giving this a try before moving on to more-expensive therapeutic options.
That night when Ben was heading for bed, I let Lefty and Biscuit into his room. The pugs were used to sleeping in a doghouse outside. The two of them were so excited by the new inside arrangement that they scampered around in tight circles on the hardwood floor. Ben was beaming with reciprocal joy.
"Lefty and Biscuit are going to sleep in here tonight," I said. "I almost hope that little beast comes tonight, because these dogs, I swear, will tear... his... throat... out!"
Ben actually laughed. "You think so, Dad?"
"Remember that raccoon last summer?" I asked, recalling a shrieking hellion the dogs had attacked.
At breakfast the next morning, Ben told me he had woken up twice in the night, noticed the pugs awake and keeping watch, and considered waking me up for reinforcement. Instead he'd decided to try falling asleep on his own.
Within 2 months, all vestiges of Chucky had been banished - objective proof, to Ben and me at least, that no bogeyman alive dares face a dog. As Harvey, Diablo, Lefty, Biscuit, and so many other wonderful canines have taught me, the flip side to this is also true: No man seeking a full life should have to face his fate without a dog.
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Remember these rules," said my new housemate Adam about my other new housemate, Diablo, a wolf-German shepherd mix who looked as though he had eaten more jugular veins than Snausages. "Don't make quick moves, don't try to touch him, don't look him in the eye, and you'll probably be fine."
I was 6 months out of college and hauling my cheap belongings into a cheaper Salt Lake City bungalow. Adam, an Apache construction worker, explained that he'd rescued his dog from a sadistic drunkard who had beaten the animal half to death with a golf iron. Then Diablo growled as if I were the guy's caddy.
"Quiet," Adam told the beast, not unkindly. Diablo's growling ratcheted down, but only a notch. No wonder the rent was so cheap.
For the next 3 weeks, the growl never stopped. I almost got used to it, the way I almost got used to navigating the bungalow with my eyes trained on the ceiling. Every once in a while, Diablo sniffed my groin with his elongated snout, which could snap moose femurs like pretzel sticks. It was all I could do to keep from fainting.
Our relationship changed one searing afternoon in August. Having come home early for lunch, I heard Diablo snarling at me from his fenced lair in the backyard. His growling carried its usual tone of hatred, but I sensed an additional chord, the barest tone of vulnerability in the heart of the largest carnivore I'd ever lived with.
As slowly and reassuringly as I could, I approached the fence. "It's okay, buddy," I said, trying to channel Saint Francis. "Easy, boy."
Diablo's problem was soon apparent: He'd upended his water dish in the 101? heat. What I decided to do next terrified me, but the alternative - doing nothing - seemed as cruel as beating the brute with a sand wedge. I unlocked the gate and slowly, slowly moved inside his territory. I could feel Diablo's breath on my leg, the guttural vibrations of his growl. Smoothly, slowly, I reached for the water dish, righted it, filled it from the wall spigot, and retreated. The growl was silenced by desperate, maybe even grateful, lapping from the dish.
When I returned home at 6:30 that night, Adam was cooking his dinner, and Diablo was in his usual evening spot beside his master's La-Z-Boy. He was sitting on his haunches, watching me silently. The growl had stopped.
From that point on, our bond deepened.
If you've ever become best friends with a former bully, you know how gratifying it can be. With Diablo beside me, I felt invulnerable - it was as if I'd developed a superpower. In the eons before modern weaponry, dogs like Diablo must have bestowed a sense of invincibility upon those fortunate human beings they trusted.
I got a delicious taste of this a month later, when I was jolted from a deep sleep by the sounds of Diablo in a rage. A couple of my ne'er-do-well friends had broken in late one night to invite me out for drinks, which they had hoped I'd pay for. Diablo backed the slackers against a wall.
I gave him an affectionate scratch behind his ears, which, of course, did nothing to calm him. "You know what they say about sleeping dogs, eh, fellas?"
After a quick recitation of Adam's list of "don'ts," I hugged Diablo around his neck and watched my friends slink off into the night. The last thing they heard in retreat was my voice switching to pupspeak.
"Who's a good boy, Diablo? Who's a good boy? You are! Oh, yes you are!"
My transition from prey to pal with Diablo mimics the flow of dog-human evolution. Like all good Hollywood buddy films, the relationship between our species opened in deep enmity, slouched toward begrudging tolerance, and only in the final act blossomed into the stuff of - let's admit it - love. Men and dogs now enhance each other's lives in so many ways, from the purely pragmatic to the deeply emotional, that it's hard to imagine any other type of relationship.
In exchange for daily kibble, a place to sleep, and a pat on the head, contemporary canines will do almost anything for us - guide us when we're blind, pull our sleds across the snowswept tundra, retrieve dead ducks from a lake, even sniff through toxic rubble in search of buried cadavers. As any cop will tell you, the dullest of tail waggers still exceeds by good measure the best burglar alarm ever invented.
Odd to think, then, that Homo sapiens and Canis lupus first saw each other as enemies: If we could kill and eat a wolf, or vice versa, there was one less meal to find and one less competitor for possession of the next hunk of protein. Mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests the d?tente between man and wolf probably dates back no more than 100,000 years. At this point, human hunter-gatherers were expanding their range, putting selective pressures on rival predators, such as the timber wolf.
Wolves, like men, come in an assortment of personality types. Some are naturally aggressive - a trait that hardly endeared them to Stone Age hunters. Such wolves learned to stay the hell away from humans altogether or they would have faced extermination by our Paleolithic forefathers. Those wolves blessed with a more peaceful nature, on the other hand, adapted better as the human population boomed. One theory holds that these laid-back wolves benefited from an easily accessible food supply: human garbage. We, in turn, benefited from their warning howls whenever predators or marauding tribes came near. At some point, perhaps following the adoption of orphaned pups by a Stone Age hunter, these pacified wolves stopped living beside us and started living with us.
This most likely happened toward the end of the last ice age. In a grave near modern-day Bonn-Oberkassel, Germany, archaeologists discovered the bodies of a Stone Age man and woman and the first "morphologically unambiguous" dog, dating back 14,000 years. "People have been burying or otherwise ritually disposing of dead dogs all over the world for a very long time," says Darcy F. Morey, Ph.D., a zooarchaeologist at the University of Tennessee at Martin. His hypothesis: Humans at this point in history began to view these animals less as beasts and more as creatures imbued with spiritual qualities and thus deserving of proper burial.
Once dogs and humans began cohabiting, our species took active control of canine evolution. Early dog breeds were clearly selected for their abilities in what was, at the time, a strictly masculine pursuit: hunting. We created, in remarkably short order, dogs - from rat terriers to lion-hunting Rhodesian ridgebacks - perfectly suited to tracking down and killing virtually every huntable beast on Earth. And with the advent of agriculture came herding dogs, such as collies and Australian blue heelers, followed by a host of other breeds that specialize in everything from water rescue to crooning on Letterman.
Humans and dogs have always had a lot in common. "Like wolves, dogs tend to live in groups, and so do we," says Richard D. Alexander, Ph.D., a University of Michigan evolutionary biologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. "It helps both species hunt and kill prey and compete against rivals." And unlike, say, horses or hippopotamuses, which also live in social groups, dogs aren't so large that they'd break our furniture when curling up on it. Moreover, they generally avoid pooping in their dens. Successful eHarmony.com matches have been forged on less.
No wonder the 2007-2008 National Pet Owners Survey found that nearly 40 percent of all U.S. households currently host at least one dog. Though women are hardly immune to canine charms, the expression "man's best friend" has statistical backing: Nearly one in 17 American dogs are owned by men living alone.
My dog Harvey was a compact mutt with a wiry coat, a quick mind, and unusually long legs for his torso. Most dogs like to chase birds. Harvey actually caught them: A pheasant and a starling were both guilty of underestimating him.
I never did. At one time in my life, he was my best friend and drinking companion.
There were lots of reasons this was so, but they were all encapsulated on the day I lost my keys. I remember walking down the hallway of my swinging-singles apartment complex while carrying Harvey in a laundry basket covered with a ratty sheet (there was a no-pets stipulation on my lease). But Harvey was anticipating the dog-food dinner to come, and after a good deal of wriggling and yelping, he thrust his irrepressible tail from under the sheet. I fished for my keys. They weren't in their usual pocket, nor were they in any of the unusual ones.
For the previous hour, Harvey and I had been playing fetch in a city park three blocks away. Sometime in the course of several hundred tosses of a tennis ball, my keys must have slipped out of my pocket. They could have been anywhere amid the brush and blowing litter.
The two of us returned to the park, where I began painstakingly plodding back and forth along a grid pattern, Harvey matching my every step. How dogged he was! He perfectly synchronized his mood with mine, a trick he'd done on other occasions. A month earlier, for instance, he'd lain in motionless vigil beside me for 6 hours while I suffered a migraine as disabling as a railroad spike in the left temple. In the park that day, his young terrier-mongrel face mirrored my own bewilderment and chagrin. The only difference between us was that Harvey's eyes retained a glimmer of optimism.
After a half hour of failed searching, I collapsed in a spasm of self-pity. My career at that time was going nowhere, I was invisible to women, and now I couldn't even provide Harvey with reliable shelter. I emitted a little choking sound. At this Harvey climbed into my lap and sighed in that utterly commiserative way that only an unconditionally loyal pack mate can provide.
Encouraged by his support, I dreamed up a last-gasp idea for salvation. I untied one of my shoes, took off a long-unwashed gym sock, and held it up to Harvey's snout - as if he needed even more of a reminder of what I smelled like. Then I said, "Harvey, find our keys!" It was ridiculous, I knew - something out of Rin Tin Tin. But Harvey took off running in a zigzagging, ground-scouring pilgrimage through the weeds and refuse. A couple of minutes later, he stopped 30 yards away, wagging his tail.
When I reached his side, Harvey was standing directly over the keys.
Over the course of 6 years, following his own crazy pattern along his own grid, Harvey steadfastly tugged me with his leash to a far better place than the one I was headed to on my own.
Cat people and other assorted loners have long argued that dog lovers are self-deluding dupes given to idiotic anthropomorphism. Dogs, in their view, are less pets than parasites - a species living exceptionally high on the hog by mere impersonation of friendship and affability. Still, we humans almost certainly reap far more than we deserve from our bargain with canines. As Charles Darwin reportedly observed, "We have bred our dogs to return our favors with interest."
Leave aside for a moment the fuzzier psychosocial benefits of companionship, key-locator service, and unconditional positive regard dogs provide us. In recent years scientists have increasingly documented a host of physiological benefits of dog ownership.
Given those benefits, you could legitimately ask, "Who's walking whom?"
I used to marvel at how serendipitous it was that each dog I had was so perfectly suited to my life stage at the time. When I was 3, I was protected by a Pembroke Welsh corgi named Foodoo, who kept strangers at a safe distance. A Saint Bernard named Heather stuck with me during my teenage years, when my peers turned away. And a mutt named Ivy helped me keep my octogenarian dad smiling, even as he slipped ever deeper into memory loss and dementia.
I've now come to wonder if, in fact, all my various dog buddies could have interchangeably served well at any of these life chapters. The true genius of their kind, I have come to suspect, is an ability to intuit whatever emotional vacuum might exist in our lives and to fill this up precisely through a mix of tail wagging and dog breath and unconditional positive regard.
In the 2006 Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy, researchers Chia-Chun Tsai and Erika Friedmann acknowledge that the research literature here is far from definitive. Still, some studies have indeed found that dogs can reduce loneliness, lower anxiety, and slap a smile on the depressed. Patrick McCathern, a retired Air Force sergeant and longtime spokesman for the National Institute of Mental Health's Real Men/Real Depression campaign, credits his dog Dunkin with preventing his suicide. McCathern recalls the moment when, blindsided by divorce, he draped a noose over his bathroom door, placed his neck inside it, and slumped forward.
"I was maybe 20 seconds away from passing out when one of my dogs walked in, wagging his tail," McCathern says. "I was beyond caring what my friends or family might think. But when Dunkin looked up at me with his bright beagle eyes, it was like he was saying, 'What about us? We love you.' It occurred to me that if I died, who'd care for my dogs? I'd be ending my pain but just starting the suffering for them." McCathern removed the noose and dialed a close friend, who drove him to an E.R.
Even Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, noted benefits of dog ownership. His dog, Jofi, provided him "affection without ambivalence, the simplicity of a life free from the almost unbearable conflicts of civilization..., [and a] feeling of intimate affinity, of an indisputed solidarity."
No couch. No "how does that make you feel?" Just a wagging tail, bright eyes, and motivation to leave the house when you need it most.
In a 2003 paper in the journal American Behavioral Scientist, Alan Beck, Sc.D., director of Purdue's center of the human-animal bond, and Aaron H. Katcher, M.D., a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, point out that cultures like ours have very few forms of play that mold caring and nurturing behaviors in male children. "Boy children," says Beck, "tend to be very self-conscious about having to take care of younger brothers and sisters. They don't play tea party or dollhouse, because that's Mommy stuff. However, taking care of an animal is a notable exception. Caring for your dog is always okay."
This license to love persists into adulthood. In virtually every public setting, women are, by and large, much more demonstrably touchy-feely than guys are. With dogs, however, this gender difference vanishes. "Men are just as likely as women to pet and stroke their dogs, hold them in their laps, kiss them, and so on," says Beck. "It doesn't matter whether they're male or female dogs, either: Men can hug them without inhibition, without feeling any less manly. It's one of the very few areas in life where men feel truly comfortable as nurturers."
Perhaps because they never interrupt us or make it hard to get a word in edgewise, dogs also encourage even the most taciturn of men to do what comes naturally to a lot of women: vent feelings verbally. "We did a study that showed 97 percent of people talk to their dogs," says Beck, adding, "and the other 3 percent probably lied." In some ways, dogs make better confidants than our girlfriends, relatives, and assorted other loved ones.
"The exchange of affection between people and animals differs from exchanges with close family members and other relatives. These interpersonal relationships are frequently charged with ambivalence and negative emotional states," argues Friedmann. "Human love and attention may be earned only with difficulty and sacrifice, or it may be entirely unavailable." The comfort dogs give their owners, on the other hand, can be scheduled anytime. And it's available, she adds, "in almost any quantity, without bargaining or supplication."
This willingness to go along with pretty much anything we say or do suggests yet another particular benefit dogs offer men: They not only allow but also actively encourage us to assume the top position in the social hierarchy - something most of us so rarely get to enjoy.
"Your dog, unlike your boss, friends, or wife," says Beck, "actually recognizes your leadership." Or as the great English novelist Aldous Huxley once put it, "To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."
Besides enjoying the perks of leadership, Napoleon had his Josephine. If you're hoping to meet and attract your own true love, a tail-wagging wingman may be your best shot at success. In a series of studies at the University of Pennsylvania, volunteers were asked to rate photographs of the same people shown with or without a dog. Those given the "with dog" scenes consistently rated the human subjects as happier, safer, and more relaxed. The reviewers also reported wanting to be in those pictures much more often than they did the dogless ones.
Peter Messent, M.A., D.Phil., an animal behaviorist, actually put such scenarios to a test. He asked volunteers to go on walks either solo or with a dog. He then systematically counted the social interactions each volunteer had on the walk. The results: Men who walked alone tended to stay that way. Those accompanied by a friendly dog significantly increased their social encounters.
Given dogs' femme-fetching skills, it was probably only a matter of time before they were marketed for this purpose. In Tokyo today, more than 100 "rent-a-puppy" shops now allow customers to take dogs on walks at a rate of about $15 per hour. Though most such customers are simply seeking a pleasant dog experience in a city where dog ownership can be prohibitively expensive, more than a few male clients specifically ask for cute breeds to help them attract women.
If anything, it's a man's ability to form close and intimate bonds with dogs, not the dogs themselves, that women find attractive. "When a dog is showing trust in and companionship with a man," says Alexander (the Michigan evolutionary biologist), "a woman knows that the man likely has whatever it takes to establish an affectionate relationship and keep it going."
Among his sundry gifts to my younger life, Harvey helped me establish several such affectionate relationships with women. The fact that I - a spotty wage earner at the best of times - could not always keep these going was surely no fault of his.
It was almost 2 in the morning, and my son Ben - then age 8 - couldn't go back to sleep. I tried to reason with him, calm him down, help him nod off. He was having none of it.
Ben had never seen any of the Child's Play movies, but a pal at school had - and recently relayed the entire gorefest that is Bride of Chucky. When Ben later saw a Chucky poster at the video store, that was all it took. The creepy little demon became an obsession and focal point for all the anxieties of third-grade life. I stayed with Ben till he was too exhausted to remain awake.
The next day, I ran into a psychiatrist friend at the supermarket and desperately opened the whole anxiety worm can in the checkout line. He smiled at me in that shrinky, your-hour's-up kind of way I've come to associate with an imminent brush-off.
But he caught me off guard by asking a question. "You guys have a dog?"
"Yeah," I said. "Two pugs: Lefty and Biscuit."
"Do you ever let them sleep with your son?"
When I answered no, he suggested giving this a try before moving on to more-expensive therapeutic options.
That night when Ben was heading for bed, I let Lefty and Biscuit into his room. The pugs were used to sleeping in a doghouse outside. The two of them were so excited by the new inside arrangement that they scampered around in tight circles on the hardwood floor. Ben was beaming with reciprocal joy.
"Lefty and Biscuit are going to sleep in here tonight," I said. "I almost hope that little beast comes tonight, because these dogs, I swear, will tear... his... throat... out!"
Ben actually laughed. "You think so, Dad?"
"Remember that raccoon last summer?" I asked, recalling a shrieking hellion the dogs had attacked.
At breakfast the next morning, Ben told me he had woken up twice in the night, noticed the pugs awake and keeping watch, and considered waking me up for reinforcement. Instead he'd decided to try falling asleep on his own.
Within 2 months, all vestiges of Chucky had been banished - objective proof, to Ben and me at least, that no bogeyman alive dares face a dog. As Harvey, Diablo, Lefty, Biscuit, and so many other wonderful canines have taught me, the flip side to this is also true: No man seeking a full life should have to face his fate without a dog.
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