The Dog Who Couldn't Stop Loving: How Dogs Have Captured Our Hearts for Thousands of Years

THE DOG

WHO COULDN’T

STOP LOVING

HOW DOGS HAVE CAPTURED OUR HEARTS

FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS

JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON

For Benjy

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: BENJY, THE DOG WHO COULDN’T STOP LOVING

CHAPTER 1    GETTING BENJY

CHAPTER 2    HOW DOGS LOVE

CHAPTER 3    DOGS MADE US HUMAN

CHAPTER 4    ARE DOGS UNIQUE? COMPARING DOGS TO OTHER DOMESTICATED ANIMALS

CHAPTER 5    ARE ALL DOGS WOLF CUBS?

CHAPTER 6    THE FORTY-THOUSAND-YEAR ROMANCE BETWEEN HUMANS AND DOGS

CHAPTER 7    WHEN DOGS BITE

CHAPTER 8    WHAT THEY WON’T DO FOR US

CONCLUSION: IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE

POSTSCRIPT: A WALK ON THE BEACH WITH BENJY AND THE CATS

APPENDIX: BENJY’S OFFICIAL ASSESSMENT BY THE ROYAL NEW ZEALAND FOUNDATION OF THE BLIND, GUIDE DOG SERVICES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALSO BY JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

For the past twenty years, I have been striving to see the world from an animal’s point of view—sometimes I think I start to feel like one of them! Several books about the emotional lives of animals have resulted from this journey. Some have dealt with animal emotions in general (When Elephants Weep), others with the emotional life of a particular species (Dogs Never Lie About Love, The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats).

When I wrote about farm animals and the problems with domestication (The Pig Who Sang to the Moon), I was attempting to see if the insights I had gained about wild animals and companion animals could also be applied to domesticated animals we kept on farms. Did they too have emotional lives of some depth, I wondered? In The Emperor’s Embrace (retitled in paperback The Evolution of Fatherhood), I tried to tackle the issue of how evolution played out in fatherhood among animals, but began to feel there was something eluding me. I turned to domesticated companion animals (dogs, cats, rabbits, chickens, and rats) for my book Raising the Peaceable Kingdom, but again I felt something important was there just beyond my grasp.

Something lay at the heart of domestication that I could feel but could not yet put into words. I tried to look at the darker aspects of domestication in my most recent book, The Face on Your Plate, and I think I did succeed in understanding the unhappy lives of so-called food animals. In a scattered attempt to put my finger on the amazing diversity that characterizes the animal world, I wrote a book about my 100 favorite animals (little realizing how much work was involved), called Altruistic Armadillos, Zenlike Zebras. It was fun to write, and instructive, but still, something was missing. There had to be more; there had to be something that was different, that gave some evidence of the better impulses in the human species, something that explained our empathy, our sympathy, and even our compassion for members of a different species. I knew there had to be, because the feelings I had for some of the animals I lived with were unusually intense. When I thought back on these feelings, I saw that they almost always involved dogs.

Ever since I was a child, and continuing as an adult, I had puzzled over, and also marveled at, the relationship I (and others like me) had with dogs. Was there, in fact, something special about this, and only this, relationship? And if so, could it have a historical dimension? That is, could it be ancient, with roots reaching far back into human history? It seemed pure speculation, until a series of recent discoveries opened up the possibility that dogs and humans had a shared history of, at minimum, 15,000 years, and possibly far beyond. Many scientists had settled upon 40,000 years as the most likely compromise date for the beginning of relations between humans and wolves turning into dogs.

Whatever the date, it seemed something quite extraordinary happened to the human species, propelling us on a warp-speed evolutionary path that has taken us to the present. It struck me as remarkable, and highly suggestive, that at the very moment when humans were domesticating wolves into dogs, humans themselves were still in the throes of domestication, shedding their biological skins and being transformed by the culture they were building around them. This raised the striking possibility that it was partly through our association with dogs that we went from primitive humans to Homo sapiens.

The Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson has proposed what he calls the biophilia hypothesis: that we possess an inborn, species-typical tendency to affiliate with other animals. I agree that we do make these connections with other animals and derive great pleasure from so doing. We are unique in this respect. But are we wholly unique? As I thought about this question, I was finally able to put my finger on what had teased and eluded me for so long: that there was something different about one animal species, something they shared with us more than they did with their fellow nonhuman animals. That species was the dog, and what they shared with us so uniquely was their capacity for love. So yes, another book on the emotional lives of animals—a book that takes E. O. Wilson’s hypothesis and gives it a new twist. Not only have dogs and humans influenced each other for tens of thousands of years, they have done so in far more profound ways than any other two species on earth, and primarily in the direction of acting on the capacity for love in all its different manifestations, such as showing sympathy, feeling empathy, and expressing compassion.

What does it mean to say dogs make us human? It is a phrase that has been used on several occasions (for example, by Temple Grandin) in the last few years. I think it means something like: Through associating with dogs, we went from primitive humans to Homo sapiens. What would be a good analogy? That through association with humans, Canis lupus (wolf) became Canis lupus familiaris (dog). It worked both ways.

This is a hypothesis. It is the nature of this problem that it can never be proven. More evidence may make it more likely, but its value will need to be restricted to its evocative and explanatory power. Does it help us understand certain human and canine mysteries? Many people bond with dogs in more profound ways than with any other species. Why is this bond—and this bond only—unique among all the attachments humans are capable of forming, parallel only to the attachment we feel for our own children?

Why, of all animals, does the dog follow us, or rather accompany us, wherever we go on earth, from the tropical rainforests to the frozen icescape of the far Arctic? Why are there no tribes, no countries, no societies, not even villages, without dogs? Nowhere in the world are dogs absent.

Why is it that people have the capacity to befriend animals who are willing to take a chance and come into our intimate orbit, when no other animal on earth will do so—only dogs? Because a long time ago, in the words of Konrad Lorenz, man met dog. (Though it was probably more likely that long ago, 40,000 years ago or more, woman met dog. To this day, dogs by and large prefer women to men.)

The great Stanford anthropologist Richard Klein has long argued that something very significant happened to humans about 50,000 years ago. It has been called the dawn of human culture, or human revolution, a creative explosion, or a sociocultural big bang. He explains that the relationship between anatomical and behavioral change shifted abruptly about 50,000 years ago. Everything was suddenly put on fast-forward: language, culture, and the ability to innovate. Something, he thinks, changed at a neural level. What was new? Suddenly there are cave paintings where there had been none before, in France, in Spain, in Italy, but also in the Middle East and Australia. There was color—vivid, bright colors. There were rainbow serpents, for example, when before there were none. There were sculptures. Even human language, the way we know it today, sophisticated and capable of a million permutations, may have reached its apogee then. Weapons became more sophisticated. Beads that were hard to make were used as symbols. The very idea of a symbol belongs to this time. Suddenly humans buried their dead, and often did so elaborately. Put a suit on the man from 50,000 years ago and have him walk down Fifth Avenue. Nobody would stare. Let him speak and his ideas would not appear strange. He is us. Nor would he be surprised to see us accompanied by a dog. Walking with a dog would be entirely familiar to him. Is it possible that all of these innovations, these civilization-changing advances, had to do with our first encounters with wolves or wolves who were already slowly turning into dogs—that is, animals who share our lives?

It may sound unremarkable, but when you think about it, it is truly a phenomenal thing. No other animal behaves like a dog. I have always maintained that nothing in real life can compare to the vividness, the strangeness, the beauty, and the excitement of our dream life at night. Except dogs. Because everyone who lives with a dog is constantly in a dream to some extent. How is it possible that this creature, that looks so unlike us, is nevertheless asleep in our bed, up with us in the morning, walking with us in the afternoon? Watching us with love in his or her eyes? It is truly astonishing. And I believe it has this effect on us almost constantly. It forces us to think thoughts we would never otherwise think. Thoughts about sympathy, and empathy, and companionship, and friendship, but above all, thoughts about love. With dogs we have begun the long process—by no means assured, by no means nearly finished—of recognizing the basic sameness, the identity of all sentient beings. The Buddhists had it right. But it was not to come from Christ, Moses, or the Buddha, but rather from that little guy, walking so trustingly next to you, who would never abandon you for anything. From him and only from him did we learn that we could cross the species barrier and love other life-forms. It is no coincidence that of all the animals on this planet, only two consistently love other animals: humans and dogs.

How did it happen? What does it mean? This is the journey I set out upon. Read on.

INTRODUCTION

BENJY, THE DOG WHO COULDN’T STOP LOVING

Long before any other animal or plant was domesticated, we began our domestication of the wolf into the dog. This is well-known, and began sometime between 130,000 years ago, when humans first became Homo sapiens—wise people—and 15,000 years ago. What is less often considered is that this domestication may well have been a two-way street—a mutual and profound transformation for both species. Wolves were created into something new by humans, but as this unfolded, humans were changed in kind. This is, evidence suggests, the first and perhaps the only instance of what some are calling mutual domestication.

Could it be that dogs made us fully human? Without the wolf, would we have become a different species? I think it is very likely. We have been so intimately tied to dogs for so many thousands of years that we have come to resemble one another in crucial ways that are simply inapplicable to any other two species on earth, now or in the past. As a result, we are also the only two species who readily become friendly with other species. Dogs make friends across the species barrier, and so do we. Yes, it is true that some other animals do this as well from time to time. But dogs and humans do it as a default, reliably and consistently. There is hardly a human on earth who has not at some point in his or her life felt close to an animal from a different species—and not just a dog. And almost every dog has at some point felt friendly feelings not just for us or for other dogs, but for other animals as well. If you stop to think about it, this is no small achievement. It must be more than mere coincidence that of all the species on earth, only humans and dogs have attained it.

IN THE MARK Twain Papers at the University of California’s Bancroft Library, there is a copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, with Mark Twain’s penciled annotations. He marked a passage about the emotions of dogs: In the agony of death a dog has been known to caress his master, and every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man … unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life. Mark Twain was particularly touched when he read the autobiography The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, about England’s leading antivivisectionist, who died in 1904. Cobbe writes about a visit from her old friend, John Bright. Bright told her about a very poor woman, severely disabled, who was confined to her bed while her husband sought day labor. A neighbor sometimes brought her food. She was entirely helpless, but she had one comfort: a beautiful collie who lay by her side and licked her crippled hands and fingers.

One summer he came to the cottage, and the hapless cripple lay on her palette still, but the dog did not come out to him as usual, and his first question to the woman was: Where is your collie? The answer was that her husband had drowned the dog to save the expense of feeding it. Bright’s voice broke when he came to the end of this story, and we said very little more to each other that dinner.

These are only stories, but they are true stories, and there are thousands of them, recounted over and over by people who love dogs, precisely because of this ability to love without seeking reward. It strikes humans as almost uncanny. It’s easy to speculate that dogs evolved to love us like this because their survival depended upon it. But what did that evolutionary process do to us?

This is a book about dogs that questions what makes our relationships with them—and theirs with us—unique, and asks what these relationships have meant to us. Much has already been said on the subject in countless books and articles that pour out every year. Yet only recently have academics engaged in serious study of dog and human coevolution. Moreover, our intimacy with dogs is so profound that in certain respects we take it for granted. You have to step back to consider the full implications of the fact that it is quite unprecedented in the history of any species on our planet, over the last several millions of years, for such intimacy to have arisen. Our relationship with dogs predates all other domesticated species by tens of thousands of years. Dogs and humans coevolved for a significant portion of the total lifespan of our respective species. In crucial ways, dogs helped make us human.

Is it possible that humans owe our ability to empathize, and perhaps even love selflessly, to our long association with dogs? This may sound sentimental, but it is such only if it is not true. If it is true, it provides a clue to one of the most important questions about human nature ever asked. Where does our ability, our desire, our need to love come from?

There are times in life when we feel we are exactly where we want to be at that moment, and they often have to do with love. The moment seems frozen: not one that will be followed by another or will ever end. For me, that moment comes at around 6:30 nearly every morning, when both boys come to visit my wife, Leila, and me in bed for a morning cuddle. Within seconds, a dog named Benjy follows. It’s a lovefest. Wherever he is sleeping in the house, once he hears Manu and Ilan coming into our bedroom, Benjy comes along, too. He jumps up on the bed and begins a morning dance of recognition. He kisses all of us over and over and then rolls over onto his back and makes funny faces and strange guttural sounds of joy. He reaches his paws out to each one of us, so that four of us are holding his paws. (Sometimes one or two or even all three of our cats join us—but I must admit that they are a bit embarrassed by the sentimentality of it all, and usually leave in a huff before it gets too loveydovey.) Benjy smiles. He laughs. He is in ecstasy. So are we. It is contagious. There is no need to interpret what he feels, for we feel it too. It is unbridled love and happiness, sufficient for that moment. Whatever follows in the day for him or for us, those few moments every morning provide a reminder of what pure happiness can feel like, and how it seems like a moment in time that never really ends. We are so used to the cliché of dogs living in the moment, but in that morning moment we are, all five of us, living in it. It feels entirely natural, but it is also, when you come to think of it, something of a mystery. Benjy the dog, or Benjy the wolf, and four humans, all engaged in an identical bonding activity that plays itself out over and over in thousands of households, and probably has for thousands of years. What, exactly, is going on here? What is this strange relationship we have with dogs, yet not with any other animal?

I began to ask these questions when my family adopted the latest in a long line of four-footed companions: Benjy, a failed guide dog. Benjy obeyed only four commands: Leave it, down, sit, stay. He didn’t love walks. He seemed a bit dim. His favorite activity was for somebody to give him a rubber Kong (a hollow tube made of hard rubber) filled with treats and let him work on it for the next half hour. But when he is done and obviously ready for a refill, if told to Bring the Kong, Benjy looks perplexed and utterly lost. The average guide dog must learn some 70–80 commands, so it is no wonder that Benjy failed, even though his handlers dearly wanted him to succeed.

But there is one area where Benjy excels: He cannot stop loving. He loves all dogs, all humans, all cats, all rats, and all birds. He loves them all equally and intensely. He has yet to meet a species he is not fond of. He is not extraordinary: He is a lab, after all. He was socialized before we adopted him. He was never hit or yelled at as far as I know. He has never been in a fight with another dog, although my three cats sometimes slap him in the face just for the sheer pleasure of it, and he always looks completely mystified. He is a big (80-pound), strong dog with huge teeth and an awesome jaw, but I have never seen him lose his temper, get angry or even testy. At most, if pushed (as when I tell him he has to come up the hill—we live on the beach, and the path leading up to the street is steep and long), he will put on his sad face and begin a glacial walk up the hill. It is the same look he gets when I tell him there is no more food for the night: resignation and the dim hope that a mistake has been made.

Wherever I go during the day, Benjy goes too. When I do my errands in town, he comes along, perfectly happy to wait for me outside the bookstore or the post office or the bank. But over the last few months, he has taken to finding his way to the interiors of these destinations, because he knows he’s clearly welcome there. People like to see him. This is in part because he’s got love written all over him. But it’s also partly because he has a peculiar habit: He acts as if he has met many people before, even when he hasn’t; that they are close friends, even when they aren’t; that he spends time with them often, even when he doesn’t. I must confess that I encourage this. I often say, Benjy, look who’s here! He responds by frantically turning his head in every direction searching for the person he knows. Whoever happens to fall into his line of sight at that moment becomes the designated long-lost friend, and he rushes over. He looks up at the person with adoration, his whole body quivering with the excitement of seeing him or her again. The funny thing is that he has never seen the person before in his life, nor has the person ever seen him. Yet both parties welcome this subterfuge. They both know it is false. That is, false only to a point, because it is also true: Benjy is delighted to see whoever it is, even if for the first time. And the person is rarely displeased to see a large dog with such obvious friendly intentions. If the person is a child, well, then the greeting is even more effusive and the parents feel that the child has been privileged to experience dog love in its purest form. I make it up; Benjy makes it up; yet the feelings are genuine. It is as if in seeing any human being, Benjy is seeing our entire species. Every person stands in for his most intimate pack. Benjy has succeeded in making the entire human species into his personal pack. In this pack there are no alpha or omega dogs or people, only pure equality, the egalitarianism of pure affection.

I DON’T TAKE any credit for Benjy’s easygoing nature. Unlike a child, where parents can take a certain pride if their kid is friendly and gentle with other kids, Benjy didn’t inherit or learn to love from me. I just got lucky. But whatever the source, Benjy’s got it—the love bug, the love gene, the love need. Of course, breed and temperament are part of it. Much as we might like to believe that every dog has the potential to be as loving as Benjy, it would appear not to be true. As media stories of dog attacks remind us, they are sometimes seen as predatory wolves in a dog’s clothing. Some dogs are aggressive from a very early age. Benjy was the opposite from puppyhood, and has remained gentle beyond most other dogs I have known.

The other day he was in his favorite spot—at school with the second-graders surrounding him and jumping all over him—when the teacher worried that should one of the children inadvertently hurt him, Benjy might snap. Oh no, I explained. Never. Benjy would never snap at any living creature, of that you can be certain. I have wondered and wondered about the source of Benjy’s extraordinary gentleness. It feels like a gift. Everybody benefits from it. If Benjy recognizes somebody, he rushes up to that person and showers him or her with affection. He licks and his tail goes wild and he has a look of pure happiness on his face. Smile is not the right word; he is laughing with delight. But this behavior does not make Benjy an exception, for he is the poster child for the rule that dogs have a special capacity to love. He may be exceptional in the sheer intensity of his feelings, but in this he is merely a showcase of how and why dogs became a human’s best friend.

CHAPTER 1

GETTING BENJY

At the time when Benjy came onto our radar, we were not ready for another dog. We were already a large family: my lovely wife, Leila; our two boys, Ilan, now thirteen, and Manu, now eight; my ninety-one-year-old mother (God bless her); three domesticated rats; and three attention-seeking cats. We did not know how much longer we would be