Good Dog

It's 6 a.m. The six dogs in our house have been outside, come back in to eat breakfast, gone outside again and returned to take, after a bit of status-positioning and rank-pulling, their post-breakfast naps. Nothing is so profoundly silent yet as vibrantly alive as a house filled with sleeping dogs. They throw themselves into sleep as if oblivion were a form of helpless satiation, yet if a chipmunk yawns in the darkness a hundred yards away, every dog will instantly be at the door.

And we call them domesticated.

Archeological evidence indicates that the domestication of dogs occurred from 14,000 to 17,000 years ago. That's about the time that wolves and dogs parted ways: "Bye, we're going to stay in the forest." "Bye, we're going to stay by the fire." Each thinking: "Man, what a knucklehead!" It's the issue of freedom versus security, the conundrum that permeates the consciousness of dogs to this day. The process of domestication must have taken millennia, as dogs and human beings figured out what would benefit each species in relationship to the other. This happens in our house every day.

Dogs are rarely depicted in prehistoric cave paintings -- though we have a dog to thank for the discovery of the glorious caves at Lascaux – but soon after dogs and humans beings came to some rapport, dogs began appearing in legend, art and literature. From Argos in the Odyssey to Asta in The Thin Man, dogs are portrayed as intelligent, adaptable, resilient, companionable, sometimes hard-working (depending on what is asked of them), and, above all, loyal. A Mesolithic cave burial in the Middle East, dated to between 8,000 to 10,000 B.C., revealed the remains of a man whose hand rested on the remains of a puppy, an indication of friendship and dependence, if not love. Not found in the tomb were the chewed slippers and the mangled remote control.

We think we know dogs. We provide food and shelter, laps ready to be lain across. We teach them to sit and lie down, to stay, perhaps to "shake hands" and roll over. Or we divorce them from their original duties; Border collies still herd sheep in some parts of the world, but how many terriers (professionally) dig for badgers in the earth? Or we require them only to be cute, a factor probably unfamiliar to ancient hunter-gatherers, who kept dogs around for reasons other than aesthetic and ego-boosting.

Despite some 15,000 years of domestication and training, dogs, given the option, would be happy to spend their time barking like maniacs, digging holes from one end of the yard to the other, humping the furniture and stealing food from the table, not to mention, in packs where two dogs hate each other, taking turns sending each other to the vet to be patched up. Or maybe that's just our dogs.

The point is, that the tail-wagging dog who greets you joyfully upon your return home, as if like Odysseus you had been gone for 20 years though you only took 20 minutes to drive to the grocery store, remains remarkably true to his ancient origins. Even the fact that the words dog and hound and their many cognates derive from Proto-Indo-European roots lost in the deep backward of history testify to the fact that in admitting dogs into our homes we allow the presence of wildness and anarchy as well as loyalty and love. Unconditional love, as the sentimentalists assert? No, with dogs there is always a condition. What, I ask, could keep us more honest?

Dogs contribute more to our lives by what we do not know about them than what we do, and what we do not know is who, really, they are. People are fond of saying that to dogs we human beings are like gods, but isn't the opposite also true? There is, sometimes, a look of distance in their eyes, a gaze unfathomable, neither of the here nor of the now, that seems to pierce the veil of the mundane and turn some cozy living room or den into an outpost of prehistory; one feels the blast of wind from the tundra. Of course the next minute the dog in question is rolling on the floor tearing to pieces a dish-towel stolen from the kitchen. Dogs are – let's say it – sort of stupid that way.

One of our dogs, Grace Slick, the pack-leader, is a gorgeous, coal black Labrador-pointer mix. She is a creature of rare beauty and charisma, lithe and muscular and noble. She is also high-strung, nervous and demanding, a bully to her subjects, a coward when it comes to thunder and lightning, an inveterate food-thief. Once, when we had guests, she scarfed down an entire paté from the sideboard in less time than it takes to write this sentence, to no ill effect.

Grace has lived with us for five years, and she was probably three when we found her. Being, then, we thought, completely familiar with all her virtues and defects, we were surprised to find, when we started fostering puppies last year, that she instantly took over as the mother dog. She began to employ a repertoire of barks and growls we had never heard and which she uses only for puppies. She inducts them into the intricacies of the pack. She supervises their play, and when they get too rough, she interferes and metes out discipline. In her hauteur and elegance, w never suspected Grace of possessing a deeply ingrained maternal instinct.

I have a point, one that I assume applies, perhaps in greater and lesser degree, to all dogs. We know them as much and as little as the people we live with and relate to every day, and further, that there is a level of dogness that will remain forever intriguing, enigmatic, even unknown to us.

The greatest respect and honor we can pay to a dog is to ask Who are you? and then listen carefully, perhaps for their whole lives, to the answer.

Fredric Koeppel