Stanley Coren, a psychologist and dog trainer, is haunted by a primal scene. He pictures a distant ancestor, clothed in skins, huddled by a tiny fire. Next to the ancestor sits a dog, its pointed ears pricked for sounds of danger—sounds too faint for the man to hear. “What do you hear, my dog?” the ancestor says. “You will tell me if I should worry?” Then, Coren writes, “his rough hand reached out and stroked the dog's fur, and that touch made them both feel content.”
Coren is the author of several books about dogs—”The Intelligence of Dogs,” “What Do Dogs Know?,” “Why We Love the Dogs We Do,” and “How to Speak Dog.” He is the host of “Good Dog!,” a Canadian television show. But his most recent book, “The Pawprints of History” (Free Press; $26), is his first attempt to do justice to the primal scene—to come to grips with the fourteen thousand years that man and dog have lived together. It is Coren's mission to set the record straight: he is indignant that conventional historians had ignored the canine contribution, as though, all these years, dogs had just been standing around, wagging their tails. “Pawprints of History” is not just a story; it is an homage. Historians must look carefully, in the crannies of the past, to find the dogs of yore. “The pawprints of many dogs are there,” Coren writes, “but they are faint, and the winds of time erase them if they are not found and preserved.” Dogs, like women before them, have been confined, illiterate and voiceless, to the domestic sphere, and so dog history, like women's history, must be found in private places.
But do dogs really have history? Of course, things have happened to dogs, and dogs have caused things to happen, and dog breeds have changed over time. But has dogginess itself changed? Dogs have been treated well and treated badly, thrown into battle and laid on sofas and bred into unnatural shapes, and yet each new birth produces a litter of Edenic puppies that develop entirely unaffected by their ancestors' ambiguous past. Can there be history without resentment? Without, at the very least, some sign of evolving irritation or pride at the way dog life has, in the course of things, turned out? One wonders what a modern dog would think, for instance, about the reign of the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, born in the Year of the Dog, 1646. Tsunayoshi felt so strongly about the welfare of dogs that he instituted the Laws of Compassion to protect them. Under these laws, not only injuring or killing but even ignoring a dog might be punished by death, and many people were forced to commit ritual suicide as a consequence. In one particularly rigorous month in 1687, more than three hundred people were put to death for violating the Laws of Compassion, and, in the course of Tsunayoshi's thirty-year reign, somewhere between sixty thousand and two hundred thousand people were either put to death or exiled for animal-welfare violations. Was this good for the dogs or bad for the dogs? There is no debate. Dogs have no ideas on the subject.
Still, whether or not dogs have their own history, there is no question that they have left their pawprints on ours. Had it not been for timely canine intervention, Coren shows, Columbus might never have made inroads into the New World, Henry VIII might never have founded the Church of England, and the American Revolution might never have happened. Take Columbus, for example. Columbus believed that for fighting Indians one dog was worth fifty soldiers, so when he advanced into America he took a pack of two-hundred-and-fifty-pound mastiffs with him. In one industrious battle in 1495, these mastiffs leaped upon and disembowelled more than a hundred Indians apiece. (This figure was reported by an observer of the fight, Bartolomé de las Casas, who, realizing that it was difficult to credit, went on to explain that the dogs were used to disembowelling deer and boars, and so found the soft and hairless skin of Indians quite easy to bite into.)
Or take the Church of England. Henry VIII wanted the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so he sent Cardinal Wolsey to the Vatican to negotiate. Everything was going fine, the story goes, and Wolsey kneeled to kiss the Pope's toe, but, just then, Wolsey's greyhound, Urian (whom Wolsey had, oddly, brought with him), charged forward and bit down hard on the papal foot. This injury put an end to the negotiations, Henry was not granted his divorce, and the English Reformation followed shortly afterward. Coren's case for the canine origins of the American Revolution is, admittedly, somewhat more inventive, having to do with the fact that, in the fourteenth century, Robert the Bruce, of Scotland, was saved from death by one of his Talbots. Had Robert not been saved, Coren reasons, the Scottish Stuarts would not have taken over the English throne, and porphyria, the hereditary disease that afflicted mad King George III, would not have entered the English royal line. Thus, with English monarchs behaving more rationally, things might have been worked out in a friendly way with the rebellious colonials.
For all the human lives that dogs have saved—and among those rescued from certain death are Lewis and Clark (charging buffalo, Newfoundland), Alexander the Great (charging elephant, greyhound), Napoleon (stormy sea, Newfoundland), Abraham Lincoln (dark cave, mutt)—the history of the species has been a history of oppression. In the nineteenth century, dogs were used in restaurant kitchens to run in large wheels that turned the spits for roasting meat over a fire. One story has it that, during a church service in Bath, the Bishop of Gloucester, who was giving the sermon, uttered the line “It was then that Ezekiel saw the wheel,” and at the mention of the word “wheel” several turnspit dogs, who had been brought to church as foot warmers, ran for the door.
Dogs have had their defenders—most notably, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. “The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny,” Bentham wrote in 1789, the year that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights were drafted. He went on:
The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come some day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. . . .The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Eventually, dogs acquired rights. Henry Bergh, a wealthy American dilettante, took up the canine cause and in 1866 founded the A.S.P.C.A. One of his chief concerns was preventing the use of dogs to turn spits (although twice when he showed up at restaurants to make sure they were no longer using dogs for this purpose he discovered that they had started using black children instead). Dogs acquired rights, but they still had a respect problem. The notion of dogs thinking was considered ridiculous. Part of the problem was Clever Hans. Clever Hans was a notorious horse who lived a hundred years ago in Germany, and acquired his name because he could solve simple mathematical problems and had a working knowledge of German. His owner would pose a question, and Clever Hans would answer by tapping with his hoof. The horse caused a sensation, and many took his prowess as proof that the intelligence of animals had been woefully underestimated. But then a little-known psychologist named Oskar Pfungst conducted a series of experiments showing that, by observing his questioners and picking up tiny signs of relaxation in their posture, Clever Hans had detected when it was time to stop tapping; when given a problem by someone who didn't know the answer, he was stumped. Ever since, many psychologists and animal behaviorists, reluctant to be twice fooled, have followed Descartes in his refusal to attribute to animals any conscious intelligence whatever. Only recently have animal behaviorists realized that science, in heeding Cartesian dogma more than the demonstrable ingenuity of animals such as Clever Hans, had got its logic backward: it had put Descartes before the horse.
But do we want dogs to be clever? Intelligence seems like a good thing in a pet, the way that more power in a computer or extra controls on a camera seem like good things. But Coren points out that, just as extra controls on a camera can be confusing, and, in the hands of the amateur, a humble Instamatic might yield better pictures, so sometimes an owner may be better off with a dog that is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
It can, for instance, be more difficult to train clever dogs, since clever dogs respond more precisely to words. Consider the case of Shadow, a golden retriever of unusual acuity. One day in obedience class, he was commanded by an inexperienced boy, “Come on, Shadow, sit down!” Shadow looked uncertain for a moment; then he lowered his rear end to the ground and his chest nearly as far down, and began with his front paws to drag himself in that position toward the boy, whimpering as he went. The obedience instructor was puzzled by this strange behavior, until he realized that Shadow—brilliantly, tragically—was trying to come, sit, and lie down all at once. But, more than ease of training, there is the question of stimulation. The old eat-walk-sleep routine may be fine for a King Charles spaniel that doesn't mind confining its horizons to a block or two, but a Border collie or a German shepherd in the same position might become restless. And not only is it a nuisance to have a dog that addresses its determination and intelligence to techniques of escape; it's also depressing. Who wants to share a house with a creature whose only thought is to leave? One that is not satisfied with scraps of time and food but dreams perpetually of forests and lampposts?
In “How to Speak Dog,” Coren discusses, with diagrams, ear talk, eye talk, scent talk, and tail talk, and he appends a “visual glossary and doggish phrasebook.” He parses the subtleties of tail-wagging, explaining the shades of meaning that distinguish the slight tail wag (“I see you looking at me. You like me, don't you?”) from the broad tail wag (“I like you”) and the slow tail wag, with tail at half-mast (“I want to know what you mean, but I just can't quite figure it out”). He explains that the tail, even when not wagging, can be verbose. What is a dog saying when it holds its tail almost horizontal, pointing away from its body but not stiff? “Something interesting may be happening here.” Up and slightly curved over the back? “I'm top dog.” Down, near hind legs, but with the legs bent slightly inward? “I'm feeling a bit insecure.” Coren also elucidates common human-canine misunderstandings. He observes, for instance, that licking often isn't kissing but, rather, a gesture of respect or a sign that the licker is experiencing stress. Yawning, likewise, does not, in a dog, indicate boredom but may be a gesture on the part of a dominant dog to a lesser one that it does not intend him harm. (Coren himself has yawned at a threatened, hostile dog in a successful attempt to get it to stop growling at him.)
Once, Coren was telephoned by a woman named Josephine, who was having trouble with her Rottweiler, Bluto. The problem was that Bluto was too affectionate. When Josephine's husband, Vincent, was around, he would behave, but when Vincent went to work Bluto wouldn't leave Josephine alone. He would put a paw on her knee; he would gaze into her eyes; he would sit very close on the sofa and lean against her, and if she moved away to make room for him he would follow and lean on her again. Josephine would stroke him on his head, but it seemed that nothing she could do satisfied his longing for love. When Coren arrived at her house to assess the situation for himself, however, he realized that Bluto was not demonstrating affection at all. The paw on the knee, the staring down, the leaning—all these were gestures designed to convey to Josephine that Bluto was of a higher status in the household than she was. And, alas, Josephine's response—the stroke on the head—was, in dog language, classically submissive, akin to the humble lick that a low-status dog or a puppy would give a dominant dog to show that it knew its place. Coren told Josephine that she had to force Bluto into submission.
Motivating “How to Speak Dog” is the Franciscan fantasy of talking to animals. But would talking to dogs be a good thing? If dogs could talk, the question of obedience in a case like Bluto's might become politically awkward, and even Coren is no weak sentimentalist about obedience. “Never give the dog anything for free,” he commands darkly. “Before you feed the dog, make it sit; before you pet it, make it sit; before the dog gets to go out the door, make it sit. . . . Random repetition is important, not simply as practice for the commands but also as reinforcement for the idea that the dog must pay attention to you and follow instructions without question.” Dogs may have their history, but they must not be allowed to cherish ideas above their station. When Coren encountered an insubordinate Labrador named Bradley while teaching an obedience class, he instructed Bradley's owners to topple him over and prevent him from getting up, even if that required sitting on him, for a minimum of five minutes, twice a day. If Bradley failed to respond to a command, they were to roll him onto his side and stare him in the eye for fifteen seconds. Within weeks, Bradley was a new dog.
If dogs could talk, what would they say? They might be dull. Or brutal. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of the dog, “His silence has won for him a higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies.” But, as long as animals don't talk, it doesn't matter if they're brutal. When it comes to animals, we are all multiculturalists. Even the most devout vegan doesn't lose sleep over the carnage taking place in nature—doesn't lift a finger to try to stop lions or tigers shredding their prey in the most gruesome and painful fashion. Would we like dogs more if we could talk to them? Some of the best writing about animals consists of expressions of bafflement. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” in which he pointed out the difference between the difficulty of imagining what it would be like for him to be a bat (how it would feel to hang upside down in the dark, or to fly about and steer by sound, and so on) and the utter impossibility of imagining what it is like for a bat to be a bat. This is one of the appealing things about dogs. Alien creatures around the house produce a kind of domestic sublime, a shiver of mental wilderness. We are often told that trouble between people is the product of poor communication, and if only we knew how to talk to each other harmony would result. But dog love suggests the opposite. Dog love is perfect because there is no talking at all.
In the early years of the last century, Hachiko, an Akita with a well-developed sense of time, got into the habit of meeting his master, Professor Eisaburo Ueno, of Tokyo University, every day when he arrived from work at the Shibuya subway station. Ueno died in 1925, but Hachiko continued to meet his train every day for nine years, until he himself died, in 1934. The world's most famous Skye terrier, Greyfriars Bobby, remained by his master's grave in Edinburgh for fourteen years, until his own death, in 1872. There are dogs who have committed voluntary suttee. It goes without saying that a human being who attempted to behave in any of these ways would be urged to stop and, with some hand-wringing, be hospitalized. But dogs are permitted to love unrequited and to excess. Dogs who love too much, codependent dogs, or clingy, pathetic dogs are not reproved. Love and altruism are never pathological in a dog.
Witness this testimonial by the novelist J. R. Ackerley to his German shepherd, Queenie. “I don't believe there was anything special about her, except that she was rather a beauty,” Ackerley wrote. “She offered me what I had never found in my sexual life, constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion. . . . She placed herself entirely under my control. From the moment she established herself in my heart and home, my obsession with sex fell wholly away from me. . . . I never prowled the London streets again, nor had the slightest inclination to do so. On the contrary, whenever I thought of it, I was positively thankful to be rid of it all, the anxieties, the frustrations, the wastage of time and spirit. . . . I was just under fifty when this animal came into my hands, and the fifteen years she lived with me were the happiest of my life.”
Queenie didn't talk, and Ackerley didn't want her to. Sometimes pawprints are enough. ♦
