An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs. Mikita Brottman

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СКАЧАТЬ taken for granted.” Our complicated bond with our dogs, argues Caroline Knapp in Pack of Two, is profoundly gratifying because “dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to others, our needs for boundaries and autonomy and distance.”

      Dogs know instinctively how to show their feelings for us, but it’s hard to know how to love them back. Some dog owners spend thousands of dollars on designer doghouses; some ruin their pets’ health with too many treats; some take their pals to sheepherding boot camps, or run them through agility trials every weekend. I do none of these things; I simply love to be with Grisby. I love to kiss and pet him, but while he seems to understand the point of my affection, he doesn’t always appreciate getting it as much as I enjoy giving it. This often makes me feel a little Humbert Humbert–ish, especially when Grisby’s sitting on my lap in the car and I have access to parts of his body that are normally inaccessible to me, like his soft piebald underbelly. Should I feel ashamed of myself?

      The question remains: Do dogs “fall in love” with us the way we do with them? According to John Bradshaw, the author of In Defense of Dogs, the experience isn’t exactly the same. When a dog licks your face, says Bradshaw, it’s gathering information about you from your breath and sweat glands, learning when you had your last meal and whether there might be any bits of it left over. This is a gesture it’s instinctively programmed to go through every time it comes close to another friendly mouth, whether human or canine. In other words, when Grisby nuzzles my face, he’s displaying not affection but the same kind of instinctive curiosity that leads him to sniff a drain or stick his nose into the trash, though—from his point of view at least—my face is rarely as rich or rewarding. “Dogs are obviously attached to their owners—in the sense of their behavior, in the sense that they follow them around,” Bradshaw concedes, finally getting to the crucial question: Does your dog actually love you? At last, he gives me the answer I’ve been dying to hear (“Of course it does!”), but it’s too glib for me to take seriously. It’s too easy, too ingratiating: a sop to Cerberus. Dog love is more complicated than that.

      After all, whatever word we might choose to describe them, our feelings for our dogs—and their feelings for us—may be gratifying, but they can also be painful and tormented, even more than our emotions for other human beings. In We Think the World of You, Frank is devoted to Evie, but his dedication is selfish, peevish, and sometimes even toxic. “I loved her; I wished her forever happy,” he admits, “but I could not bear to lose her. I could not bear even to share her. She was my true love and I wanted her all to myself.” As this novel testifies, love for dogs can be confusing, contrary, and full of terrible suffering.

      Like many dog books, Behind the Bathtub ends unhappily. While she’s still quite young, Douchka is bitten by an infected rat, grows sick, and one night crawls to the place where she always used to hide when she’d been reprimanded—behind the bathtub. It’s a heartbreaking scene. Audry describes it clearly and without sentiment, struggling to understand the unique nature of the wordless, cross-species relationship the two females have shared. Reading this part of the book, I found myself wondering whether, when Grisby dies, I’ll look on our relationship with sorrow and regret, or whether memories of him will fade away fast as I move on to my second dog. Perhaps I’ll look at my photographs of Grisby the way I look at pictures of former lovers, wondering, as I toss them into the trash, what I ever saw in him, and how I could have deluded myself for so long.

      The Prix Médicis is traditionally awarded to underrated authors with the aim of boosting their literary reputations and launching them to the next level of their careers (prizewinners have included such acclaimed writers as Monique Wittig, Elie Wiesel, Hélène Cixous, and Bernard-Henri Lévy). Yet the prize did little for Colette Audry, and some even ridiculed the committee for giving this important award to “a dog book.” Sadly, this brave and serious work of autobiography has long been out of print; its critical reception is illustrative of our uneasy cultural relationship not only with dogs but also with those who write about them. Many French reviewers were unable to take Behind the Bathtub seriously, dismissing it as a minor or negligible work.

      Despite England’s reputation as a nation of animal lovers, response to the British edition (Douchka—The Story of a Dog) was equally condescending. According to one Sister Mary William in Best Sellers: “The book is easy reading and, I suppose, pleasant reading for dog lovers.” Sister William added sneeringly: “It seems to me that five dollars is quite a price to pay for this sentimental journey into the past of dog and mistress even though it … is said to have been a best seller in France.” Naomi Lewis in the Observer called Douchka “an angry, tormented book,” and Robert Nye in the Guardian described it as “run-of-the-mill animal stuff, all right if you can stomach it but otherwise about as appetising as cat’s meat and dog’s biscuits.” Francis Wyndham, reviewing Douchka in the New Statesman in 1963, was of the opinion that Audry “presumably writes that aggressively colloquial prose often favoured by intellectual French women” and suggests that “books about animals often seem unduly egotistic” because “there isn’t that much that can be written about them.” Finally, in her 1990 obituary of Colette Audry, Maryvonne Grellier in the Guardian completely mischaracterized Behind the Bathtub as “based on a childhood episode when she found the family’s pet dog dead behind the bath.”

      We still make fun of women like Colette Audry who love their dogs “excessively.” (But who decides how much love is “too much”?) There seems to be an unstated assumption that this love is being “wasted” on an animal, that women who devote themselves to their dogs are slightly unhinged. For this reason, many women keep such feelings to themselves—but such emotions may be far more common than we think. The website Dogster includes a regular feature called “Doghouse Confessional,” where readers send in their secrets about their dogs. Past columns (all by women) have included “I Love My Dog More Than I Love My Husband,” “I Put My Dog’s Happiness First,” and “My Dog Has Outlasted All My Romantic Relationships.” If such feelings are widespread, moreover, it should be cause for celebration, not concern. You might love your dog more than you love your husband, but loving a dog doesn’t mean you stop loving people; in fact, evidence suggests that love for animals encourages a broader sense of general empathy.

      Even today, despite the increasing importance of dogs in our lives, books about them are invariably dismissed as sentimental and lighthearted, lucrative but simplistic, the lowest form of literature. Alice A. Kuzniar, the author of Melancholia’s Dog, opens her thoughtful book on human-canine kinships by remarking that the subject of dogs is presumed to be unfit for serious scholarly investigation; “it is held,” she writes, “to be sentimental, popular, and trivial … Whenever I had to explain and justify to what I was devoting years of research and writing, I felt embarrassed.” Why can’t we let ourselves take dog love seriously? Is it because, if we did, we’d have to think seriously about other nonhuman animals, including those on our dinner plates? One way to keep these anxieties at a distance is to make fun of people who’ve got their pets out of all proportion; this is how we can restore the balance, reassuring ourselves that of course, although some people take their feelings for dogs too far, we know dog love isn’t “real love” (if it were, what would stop us from choosing dogs over people?). This, at least, is the only way I can possibly make sense of one reviewer’s perplexing summary of Behind the Bathtub: “Beneath the story of Mme. Audry and Douchka lies, almost hidden, the terrible tragedy of a loveless life.”

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       EOS

      EOS, NAMED AFTER the Greek goddess of dawn, was a beloved female greyhound belonging to Prince Albert, СКАЧАТЬ