The United States of Dogs

The woman behind the desk was friendly. Wanted to know if I’d had a nice drive. I said I had, even though that wasn’t the word I’d have chosen. She ran the card. I signed. She handed over the key.

“Just one more thing,” I said, trying for nonchalance.

“Yes,” she said.

“I, er, have a dog. He’s small and well—”

“Honey,” she said, cutting me off. “He’s welcome here. Most dogs are cleaner and behave better than a lot of the humans we get.”

That was several years ago. And back then, if you were traveling with a dog, it took some work finding a place where both of you could spend the night. Well, the other day, doing some planning for a long driving trip, I decided to check for pet-friendly lodging along the way. Times clearly have changed.

These days, some big chain motels promote themselves as “pet friendly.” That’s not all. There are upscale and luxury hotels, right in the heart of the big cities, that aggressively market themselves as places where guests can bring their pets and expect them to be pampered. There is, for instance, a hotel in Manhattan that invite[s] you to bring your furry, feathery or scaly family member—no matter their size, weight, or breed, all at no extra charge. If your pet fits through the door, we’ll welcome them in. .  .  . Plus .  .  . our Directors of Pet Relations are on hand (or paw, as it were) to give you and your buddy a tail-wagging welcome.

The hotel offers “plush pet-bed loaners in your guest room, food, water bowls and mats.” Not to mention “courtesy bags for walking your dog,” and, of course, the “nightly wine reception—pets are welcome to join the party!”

New York, I thought, is challenging enough without bringing a dog along. Not any dog I have ever owned, anyway, and I have owned a number of them. To my mind, you travel with a dog out of necessity. On that trip to Nebraska, my dog was along for some bird hunting. The dog was a pointer—a “working dog”—so it was a business trip for him. I would not have taken him on one of my business trips to Manhattan, for love or money.

Still, other people do. People take their dogs with them to spas that offer packages for guests and their “special friends.” These would qualify as stress relievers, perhaps. And who knew that dogs needed those? But we think differently about dogs these days. That shows up in many ways and, as usual in America, often goes to excess.

There is, for instance, the business of dog food. There was a time when most dogs were fed table scraps and whatever they could cadge from sympathetic owners. Dogs being the great con artists of the animal kingdom, this was usually enough to get by on. You didn’t see a lot of fat dogs back then. And of course a lot of dogs never saw the inside of a house. They slept in the garage, if they were lucky, or just chained to a tree if they were not.

There came a time, though, when dogs infiltrated the house, and people began buying them food, first as dry biscuits and then in cans, a development that dates to the 1920s. The stuff was made, most likely, from slaughterhouse sweepings that couldn’t be sold for humans to eat. And as the country grew more prosperous, there were advertising appeals to status and pride. Who would deny a pet the best in terms of nutrition?

Well, things have now evolved to the point where there are specialty products such as Relaxin’ Rover: Salmon Sushi, which is marketed as a “dog anxiety treatment.” The pitch goes like this:

Canine anxiety causes stress on the whole family, but Relaxin’ Rover can rescue even the most skittish of scooters. .  .  . Relaxin’ Rover is formulated with a proprietary blend of probiotics and natural calming ingredients that help promote digestion and immune function.

An order includes 30 servings at a price of $24.99, which is cheap when you consider that the ingredients include “kale, barley grass and flax seed, as well as soothing ingredients such as valerian root, L-tryptophan, chamomile flower and ginger root. .  .  . With fish and shrimp flavoring, Fido can enjoy his own version of a salmon sushi roll.” (Fido? Does anyone still name a dog Fido?)

And then there are dog owners for whom no commercial product will do, no matter how “natural” or “organic.” So there are cookbooks and gourmet recipes for, among others listed on one website, “Brown Rice and Chicken in a Crockpot,” “Scrambled Eggy Spinach and Salmon,” and “Yoghurt Treats.”

It can be irresistible to mock all this. Particularly if you imagine, say, a refugee from Somalia, plunked down in an upscale supermarket and surveying the aisle given over to “pet nutrition.” But we are not dealing strictly with issues of status here. Deep love and affection are part of the mix, too, as well as anxiety, the owner’s and the dog’s.

If salmon sushi doesn’t calm a high-strung dog, there is always therapy. A friend of mine uses an on-call professional. Her dog is a very well-behaved and much-coddled labradoodle, and she can be a bore on the matter of its all-around excellence. But then, talking with her about her dog is better than talking to most people about their kids and how they are doing at school (if not that different).

Anyway, we were going on about her wonderful dog and somehow the business of therapy came up.

“Well, we use a therapist,” she said. “And she is just amazing. Absolutely the best.”

“And, ah .  .  . is this a regular thing? I mean, like twice a week or something?”

“No,” she said a little stiffly, perhaps resenting the implication that her dog might have issues. “It’s not like that. We just call her if there has been a traumatic event of some sort.”

“What kind of thing would that be?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical or, God knows, prosecutorial. In part, because I did not want to be rude and also because of some fellow feeling. I’ve gone above and beyond for dogs of mine, even if I’ve never taken one to a therapist.

“Well, when we go out, we hire a sitter but that doesn’t always work out. If we’re away too long, it can be stressful.” When this happened, she went on, they would make a call and a professional would come over to the house to “work with” the dog until those issues were resolved and everything was jake.

I nodded as she told me this and found it more interesting than amusing. Not simply because this sort of thing is too easy to sneer at, but also because you run into so much of it. Sooner or later, the person doing the talking will be either someone you respect or, well, you.

This thought occurred to me shortly after the fifth or sixth conversation, over a very short period of time, in which people I know, or am related to, revealed themselves to be at least slightly stupid about their dogs. I emphatically include myself in that grouping.

I heard about people

• turning down a really desirable and career-enhancing overseas assignment, because it would mean being separated, perhaps permanently, from a pair of faithful Labs;
• leaving a Cardigan corgi at a “doggy day care” where the dog is followed on a webcam so you can check in all day to see how the dog is doing.
• throwing an elaborate (and expensive) birthday party for a dog and inviting its playgroup friends, all of whom brought presents.
• taking a dog to a celebrated university veterinary school for emergency surgery that wound up costing more than $5,000. During the operation and recovery, the owners stayed in a motel where units had been set aside for people in their situation. They were there for several days.

The couple who owned the dog faced a choice between putting the dog down and getting the operation. The price represented serious money for them but the alternative was insupportable. When we talked, it had been several years since the operation, and the dog was still with them.

“It was worth it,” one of them said. “Worth every penny. But we did get insurance after that, in case it happens again.” When I went home that night, I went to the website of the company that had issued the policy and insured my own dog.

As the old saying goes, “If you want a friend, get a dog.” And it’s true, although more people these days don’t just want a dog, they want one that is special, a pedigreed dog. The various breeds each have their distinctive characteristics, which were lovingly described last week at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden, televised in prime time, which is, itself, a measure of our craze for dogs.

There are exotic breeds at the Westminster show. For instance the pharaoh hound, which has, according to the literature, been around for 5,000 years and was bred to course gazelles for the amusement of Egyptian rulers (hence the name). They are handsome indeed, but you wonder just how practical one would be.

This year, three new breeds made their debuts. These would be the pumi, the sloughi, and the American hairless terrier. Cats also made an appearance at the show for the first time. As a kennel club spokesman told NPR, “they’re really just there to have the animals interact with the public.” So it sounds as though the Westminster is making an effort to be nondiscriminatory. After all, a dog show banning cats? That would be rank speciesism.

Not counting the token felines, there were 202 breeds at this year’s show. These included the exceedingly popular breeds such as Labrador retrievers and less popular but noteworthy breeds like the Portuguese water dog—elevated to fame when the Obamas chose two for the White House. These dogs are, ah, excitable, which became embarrassingly evident when just before the president left office last month, one of his dogs bit a girl in the face, leaving a wound that required stitches.

No wonder Labs are more popular. They will make all the water retrieves anyone could ask for, and they don’t bite. They are, in the minds of many dog lovers, simply the best, most companionable dog of all. Yet for some reason, despite their predominance in America, no Lab has ever won the Westminster. For the record, this year’s best in show was a German shepherd with a kind of dutiful intensity and a wonderful name, Rumor.

There are a lot of mistakes made by people who get purebred dogs for what are usually cosmetic reasons. If you settle on a heeler, for instance, and it behaves badly in your apartment, this is likely because the dog wants to be out doing what it was bred to do; namely, herd sheep. The question of which breed is “right” for someone is fraught with emotion, and people get downright intemperate when dealing with it.

When Jon Katz wrote The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, his account of moving from the suburbs to the country and buying a farm with some sheep so his border collie could do what it was genetically programmed to do, he could not have anticipated the success that would follow and that he would only partially enjoy. He eventually had a dog put down after it had bitten several people. This made him a marked man in the digital world after he wrote about it. He Googled “Hating Jon Katz” one day and got over 300,000 hits. (Lest he get a swelled head, he saw that “Hating Justin Bieber” got over 8 million hits.)

I met Katz one evening when he was doing a reading from one of his books. We talked a little, and you couldn’t miss his feeling for the subject of dogs. But among a certain set of dog lovers, he is Torquemada, which says, I think, more about them than him. More, too, about the tendency in America to go to red alert on just about any matter over which there might be honest disagreement. Even on a seemingly neutral question such as which breed is right for you. Or, for that matter, the even more loaded question of whether one should go with a purebred dog in the first place. What, in other words, about getting a mutt?

This is a minefield. (Is there any aspect of American life, these days, that is not?) There are sound arguments for the desirability of mixed-breed dogs. They tend, by definition, to be less susceptible to genetic maladies, like hip dysplasia, which are most commonly found in large purebred dogs, including Labs. But when you consider mixed-breeds, you are often dealing with rescue dogs. And there can be problems if a dog has spent too much time in a shelter. Puppies, it is widely believed, should be socialized to humans beginning around eight weeks of age.

It must be admitted that there is something deeply appealing in taking on a “rescue” dog. We all know exactly what the dog is being rescued from, so it is easy to fall into the belief that the dog knows, too, and will therefore be especially loyal and faithful to the person who saved it from certain death.

Silly, perhaps, but only the sternest among us are able to resist a certain amount (or even a lot) of anthropomorphizing. It takes a hardhearted dog owner to believe that his pet is only in it for the homemade dog food prepared with organic ingredients, that it isn’t true love.

And when you see the photographs of the Lab lying next to the flag-draped coffin of his master, a SEAL who was killed in action .  .  . well, what could it be but real love and real grief? So when someone takes a dog from a shelter, then the dog must know it has been rescued. From that cage if from nothing else.

Maybe this accounts for a sort of trend toward rescuing mutts. You can find, of course, pages on the web devoted to celebrities and their rescue dogs.

So what is it about dogs, one wonders. What is it about dogs, now? Why do people by the millions tune in to watch a famous dog show on television? Why do celebrities announce that they own rescue dogs? Why do people prepare organic treats for their dogs? Why do they take them along when they are on business in the city and staying at a hotel?

What gives?

Perhaps it comes back to the old advice about wanting a friend. It is a hard world and getting harder. The digital revolution that was supposed to break down barriers and bring us all together, etc., etc., has, as Jon Katz learned, enabled us to hate one another more efficiently. You can’t go on Twitter without finding you have battalions of enemies, most of whom you have never met. That Facebook is based upon connections with your friends is laughable. It can be some of the least friendly terrain in the world: cold, inauthentic, insincere, and often downright hostile.

Between checking your Facebook page and playing with your dog, which prospect brings you more pleasure?

And then there is the social warfare that goes on in so many forms. The gender wars. The p.c. wars. All the nasty little hostilities that have diminished ordinary life and its civilities. Dogs don’t play those games. You don’t have to watch what you say around your dog.

Dogs provide the kind of unconditional, uncomplicated friendship and affection that is awfully hard to find these days. And, besides that, they don’t talk.

I remember interviewing E. O. Wilson several years ago when I was working on a magazine story about him and his magisterial work, Sociobiology. We became friendly, in part I suppose, because we had wandered the same swamps and woods of south Alabama as boys. He had been there before me and was interested to learn that not much had changed. Not, anyway, the snapping turtles, water moccasins, and alligators.

Ed (as he insisted I call him) wanted to tell me about a new book he was working on. The subject was something he was calling “biophilia,” the tendency of humans to need connections with other forms of life. He used, as an example, the experience of people in old-age facilities when they are visited by dogs. “There is, inevitably, an improvement in their outlook and morale,” he said.

I told him that I knew this firsthand from having taken my young daughter and her Lab to the local assisted-living facility and seeing the looks on those old, tired faces. The dog seemed, almost, to bring them back to life. I didn’t have a name for it, then.

Perhaps that is all it comes down to. Dogs make us feel better and, for reasons we don’t quite understand, we have never been quite so in need of that. Then again, maybe the American thing for dogs is just another case of our thinking we have reinvented the wheel because it needed to be reinvented. Dogs have been around a long time. We sort of evolved together.

And the feeling for dogs runs through the purest record of humanity’s long trek, namely, its literature, going all the way back to Homer, who recounts Argos waiting faithfully 20 years for the return of his master, Odysseus. And when that is done, the dog dies.

Which is, of course, what often happens to dogs in literature. Old Yeller must be put down for rabies. Lion, in Faulkner’s story “The Bear,” cannot survive his wounds. And then, there is the dog that doesn’t die—Buck, in Jack London’s Call of the Wild. After his master dies, he returns to his natural state, as part of a wolf pack.

The literary dog dies so often because that is the way it happens in life. As Rudyard Kipling rhymed it,

Maybe we just can’t help ourselves. Because we need a friend.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.