It happened right after one of those announcements that travelers dread: “Hello. For those here at the gate waiting for Delta Flight 1974 to Minneapolis, I’m sorry to say that we’re having an equipment issue, and your aircraft is still in Salt Lake City. Looks like a three-hour delay at least. We apologize for the inconvenience, especially right before the holidays, but we’ll wheel out our complimentary snack cart and get you something to eat while you wait, okay?”

Groans went up all around me. The frustration among the travelers was palpable. We traded angry opinions about the airlines and their miserable complimentary snacks. We bemoaned our bad luck and ruined plans. The world that day seemed a cruel and uncaring place—that is, until a brown-and-white spaniel with floppy ears and a big doggy grin trotted into view.

The spaniel was wearing a “Therapy Dog” vest, and we all watched as he accompanied his owner with bold assurance up to the gate agent. With every step, the dog seemed to be telegraphing an important message to everyone at Gate A32: It’s a good day, folks! Everything’s gonna be just fine.

I watched as, like reverse contagion, anger and frustration began to melt from people’s faces. Two children approached the dog and asked to say hi. The man consented, allowing the dog to shake their hands and show off some tricks. Within ten minutes, the dog was a celebrity in our corner of the airport. A small crowd huddled around the spaniel and its owner, talking and laughing, swapping stories. Something had happened among us. In a mysterious way, that little dog had defused a tense situation and replaced frustration with a spirit of kindness.

I wondered if Delta noticed. Sure, the free snacks had been a good idea, but what they really need for times like these is a Delta Dog. The Delta Dog could come to your gate, bestowing unconditional welcome and love; allowing calm, laughter, and playfulness to return to the crowd; reminding you with his doggy goodness that even though you are delayed, it’s still very good to be alive, you are still human and still, in his eyes, delightful! (Surely Delta will want to give me several hundred thousand bonus miles for this brilliant idea.)

I was already knee-deep in exploring Lorenz’s idea when that spaniel became a celebrity at Gate A32. As I watched him and pondered his impact on us, I was carrying in my backpack the eminent social theorist Robert Bellah’s most recent work, a brick of a book called Religion in Human Evolution, which he’d published just before he died. The book, about the evolutionary origins of religion, had nothing to do with dogs, but it did explore the experiences that Bellah believed to be foundational for spiritual encounters.

In the previous chapters, I propose what “spiritual” is. I describe it as a deeply relational awareness or encounter, one that can take us outside our material preoccupations and into a profound awareness of others and of God. We experience this spiritual reality most often in face-to-face encounters. There is something about us or within us that is moved by being seen, but what is this something? What is the character of these face-to-face encounters, and more specifically, why do we assume them to be spiritual?

I needed to find out. It is one thing to show how dogs attend to our faces, but it would be quite another if this attention triggered in us (and them!) emotions that moved toward love.

This is where that brick of a book in my backpack came in. In it, Bellah proposed that through our capacities for empathy, bonding, and play, humans come uniquely hardwired for the religious impulse. Bellah was saying, in a mere six hundred pages, that:

• Empathy is the deep experience of feeling the other, such as tearing up when someone else cries or smiling when another person laughs. You actually feel, at some level, what he or she is feeling.

• This leads to bonding, in which we feel our lives actually tethered together. Our most basic experience of bonding concerns a parent to a child, and shared experiences such as rituals, trauma, and other circumstances that write our lives together bond us to others.

• Play is the energy that moves us near to one another. When we take a break from the demands of everyday life, we enter a space in which we can see each other anew. For a mother with her child, playing is both the way into, and the witness of, a shared bond.

Standing there at the gate, I was struck by how dogs, too, seem unusually wired for all three capacities: empathy, bonding, and play. And if dogs are, not only would the corollary be amazing, it would more clearly justify our calling the relationship we have with our dogs “spiritual.”

I decided to look first at empathy.

What Does the Fox Say?

In 2013 a Norwegian comedy duo gave the world a song so ridiculous and therefore so catchy that it became an unexpected juggernaut on the Billboard charts, making what was intended to be a comedy song into a mainstream hit. “What Does the Fox Say?” was a song about the sounds animals make that culminated in a chorus based on a response to the title’s question. Naturally, the comedians were interviewed incessantly about the song. They explained that they wrote it because it was the stupidest idea they could think of, making it, of course, very funny. But with tongue firmly in cheek, they continued to assert that the song asks a deeply mysterious question: what, indeed, does a fox say?

This silly song became the anthem of our house not long after Kirby’s death. In a bizarre way, it served as a doorway out of the heaviness of our loss—and Maisy was patient zero. She’d heard the song in her first-grade gym class and sang it at what seemed like every waking moment, quickly spreading the contagion throughout the family. She’d shout, “What does the fox says? Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! / Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!” (If you somehow managed to avoid hearing the song, and I’ve just caused you to look it up online, I’m sorry.)

Silliness aside, it turns out that in the last few decades the fox has had much to say about the dog and the role of empathy in human-animal relationships. In the late 1950s, a Russian fur farmer began an experiment that has fascinated scientists for years. Dmitri Belyaev decided to begin breeding foxes, hoping to benefit financially from the great demand in Russia for their beautiful coats. Yet, Belyaev was also a gifted biologist, so while breeding these foxes for profit, he also began a simple test, one that revealed something surprising about dogs.

Before diving into that study, however, let’s take a quick look back at the history of the domestication of animals, and dogs in particular. Even though genetics tells us that dogs share 99.6 percent of their DNA with wolves, I can tell you it’s hard for the Root family to look at Fluffy, our neighbor’s Bichon poodle, and believe she shares even a smidgeon of DNA with a gray wolf on the Canadian tundra. Yet that very disconnect actually shows just how quickly and recently, relative to the evolution of most species, dogs have come to look and behave so differently from wolves.

Nearly all dog theorists and scientists believe that this change in the dog’s appearance and psyche is so radical (and late) that great alterations must have happened during the process of domestication. I’ll try to explain.

Domestication is typically understood as the process of an animal or plant being adapted for human use. Pigs or corn, for example, have been bred to serve our purposes. We have forced them to evolve in ways that make them useful to us, not to their own well-being as a species.

Some Jewish and Christian interpretations of Genesis 1:26–28, in which humans are blessed to “have dominion over” all living things, are used to support this form of domestication. Humans are mandated, according to this view, not to be in relationship with creation but to control it. Yet many theologians have argued that this interpretation of dominion is a misreading, and that humans, as bearers of the image of God, are to be stewards of creation, to befriend it and care for it as a mother does her child.1 This kind of befriending relationship describes more closely the way dogs became domesticated. Unlike pigs, who seem to have been domesticated outside their own will, most dog theorists believe that the wolves that became dogs domesticated themselves. They chose to live with human beings.

Here’s where this gets really interesting. It seems that for good or ill, when an animal gets close to human beings, it changes in mind and body. Often this is simply due to the will of humans and our desire to use animals for our own ends. For example, once domesticated, pigs and cows were unafraid of human contact and became larger than their wild counterparts, providing us more meat to eat.

The wolves that became dogs also greatly changed in connection to us. They now come in all shapes and sizes, like the proud pug, the water-loving Chesapeake, the lap-friendly teacup Pomeranian, the regal Great Dane, the sonorous beagle, and hundreds of other breeds. What’s interesting is that most dog theorists believed that, unlike pigs and cows, the initiative for domestication came not from us, but from wolves themselves. They approached us, hanging around our camps. We did some selecting, but not for functional reasons; for relational ones. We chased away the mean ones and took the kind ones further into our lives, and these kind wolves quickly became obsessed with us, wanting nothing more than to be with us.

This was all just speculation until the fox had its say.

The Friendly Fox

This takes us back to the Russian fox breeder Dmitri Belyaev. Foxes are notoriously frightened of humans, wanting almost nothing to do with us. Yet Belyaev noticed that a handful of the foxes he was breeding for their fur were actually less frightened than the others. So he separated these foxes, allowing them to breed with each other only, doing experientially with foxes what we believe happened at the beginning of domestication with dogs. Belyaev continued breeding for only one trait—not fur color, skill, or usefulness, but tameness toward human beings. The foxes that were kind and gentle to people continued to be bred with one another. Within just twenty generations, huge transformations occurred in both the bodies and minds of these foxes.

The foxes that were kind to people mysteriously lightened to a grayish silver, losing their black/silver coats. After a few more generations, their ears became floppy and their tails curled. It wasn’t the color or the floppy ears that led Belyaev to breed one fox with another. It continued to be only the one trait of tameness, but with every generation, this breeding pattern transformed their appearance. Their relationships with human beings were changing their very shape. Yet, if this wasn’t shocking enough, it was the transformation of the mind that further intrigued scientists.

As the generations of foxes were changing color and their ears were dropping, not only did their tentativeness fade, but these foxes became infatuated with people, acting more like puppies than wild animals. If a person walked near a normal fox, the fox would run in the other direction and hide in the corner of its cage to escape the gaze of a human gawker. The foxes bred for tameness, however, soon began not only to approach people, but to be enamored of them, exuberantly seeking to be near them and touched by them and wagging their curly tails at the sight or sound of people. This was very unfoxlike behavior. In just a few short generations of domestication, the fear of people was quickly replaced with an almost addictive yearning to be near them. These silver foxes lived for human touch.2

Belyaev had succeeded in domesticating a population of wild animals simply by breeding for friendliness toward people; all the other traits appeared as by-products. Soon some of the silver foxes even began to bark, leading scientists to believe that they had discovered the reason that dogs bark. Just as normal foxes don’t bark, neither do wolves.3 It appears that barking is an (annoying) trait of domestication, but one that serves the purpose of getting people’s attention, a kind of shout for connection.4 It is almost as if the dog barks in part as a responsive reflex to our presence, shouting, Look! A person! A wonderful, marvelous person! Or, in another context, Why am I alone? I need people near me!5

In just a few short generations, the mind of these foxes had changed to the point where they could even respond to human gestures—even though this was never an objective of the breeding program. As Hare writes, “The experimental foxes understood human gestures, even though the Russians had not bred them to be better at understanding human gestures. They were bred to be friendly toward humans, and like floppy ears or curly tails, they gained a better reading of human gestures by accident.”6

Scientists are infatuated with the silver fox experiment because it seems to demonstrate a missing link, showing not only how domestication happened with dogs but also how quickly domestication can impact a species. Interestingly, other approaches to domestication have not led to the radical and expedient transformation seen in the dog or the silver fox. It appears that domesticating for other traits, such as size or even usefulness, doesn’t deliver the kind of inner and outer changes that breeding for the simple trait of tameness does.

For our conversation here, I see an important connection: the quality of tameness, or relational comfort between animals and humans, opens the door to a more complex emotion, one that could hardly be further from a dog’s lust for bacon.

Kind Speaks to Kind

We discovered earlier that empathy is the ability to feel another’s experience. It is fundamental to spirituality because it takes us beyond ourselves into the encounter with otherness—never for the sake of gain, but out of a desire to be with and for the other.

Some theorists in the cognitive sciences believe that it was the tacit selection for kindness in our own evolution that allowed our ancestors to make the mammoth jump to Homo sapiens—which, as the species name sapiens indicates, means we are beings who are able to think about thinking. It is kindness that moves us to seek the minds of others, but even more, to allow others to connect meaningfully with us. Without kindness or empathy, there could be no collective mind, and without a collective mind, culture, religion, and art would be impossible.7

These scientists, then, believe that instead of seeking sexual partners that reinforced dominance, like other hominids and primates would, our ancestors favored partners who exhibited kindness. Selecting for kindness allowed the development of shared intentionality or empathy, which eventually lifted humans to an awareness of transcendent and spiritual realities. In kindness we find the seed of spiritual friendship, whether it is with our neighbor or with God.

John Cacioppo, in his book Loneliness, references a study that shows the power of kindness in making a happy marriage. Cacioppo says, “Sharing the joy in your partner’s promotion, it seems, actually can be more important than being attentive when she gets passed over. Similarly, another study showed that when it comes to problem solving within a marriage, remaining cheerful and pleasant in outlook—even when that cheerfulness is combined with less than perfect communication skills—was far more predictive of keeping your partner happy than was being a grump who somehow manages to do or say exactly the right thing.”8 Good listening skills, attentiveness, or problem solving in times of loss simply cannot measure up to the impact of cheerful sharing of each other’s joy on the measure of people’s happiness in marriage. We are wired to respond to kindness.

Here’s what that has to do with dogs.

If early Homo sapiens communities were selecting for the traits of kindness, it wouldn’t be surprising that they would be attracted to wolf-dogs that also showed kindness. Our ancestors took these kind wolf-dogs into their lives and chased away the unkind ones. Just as humans were choosing for kindness in their intimate partners, so they would also select the kindest puppies from the litters to sleep near and befriend their children. This echoed the spiritual reality of the shared life they were beginning to experience among themselves, and as the silver fox experiment shows, it would have taken a very short time for this selection of kindness to produce significant transformations in the wolves’ bodies and minds, changing wolf-dogs into dogs.

If all this talk of kindness and empathy in a dog feels somehow weak or off point to you, trust me, it’s not. The quality of kindness has the power to take the “wild” out of “wild animal” more than any other.

When we first brought Kirby home, Kara’s granddad told us we were playing Russian roulette. Why would we risk having a wild animal under our roof, he would say, one that could eat the faces off our children while they were sleeping? When Owen was born, as much as I loved Kirby, and as kind as I knew him to be, I heard Granddad’s words echo in my head. Any misgivings that might have lingered, though, evaporated one day when I saw kindness perfectly illustrated in the relationship between Kirby and my rowdy toddler. Owen had toddled over to Kirby and grabbed hold of his tail with both hands, like a sailor lining up to a rope. He gave a firm yank; Kirby gave a low warning growl. Owen pulled harder; Kirby growled louder. At this point, Kara leapt from the couch saying, “No, honey!” and tried to reach Owen before things went too far—but she was too late. In frustration, Kirby whipped his head around, with his teeth bared, and snapped his jaws closed around his own tail, yanking it out of Owen’s little hands. Instead of a gut reaction to attack and destroy, our domesticated Labrador protected his toddler by biting his own tail instead of his boy.

Of course, sometimes enough is enough and a dog snaps; and like some people, some dogs have a short fuse; but when we stop to recognize how many dogs are living among us, it is amazing how kind and patient they are with humans, and how few stories there are of dogs returning the favor for meanness.

A Feeling for Feelings

New York can be the unkindest of cities, which may be the reason that 1.5 million pet dogs live in a place where it is an enormous hassle to have one.9 Still, the hassle is worth the cost because humans need companionship like our lungs need air. In an urban environment, where many feel cut off from family and where social connections are hard to establish, we need the kindness of dogs all the more.

Yet, is what we experience as kindness and companionableness in a pet something close to genuine sympathy, even empathy?

Empathy is different from sympathy.10 Where sympathy can compel you to say, “Man, it must suck to be you!” empathy does the more spiritual act of compelling you actually to feel another’s need, joining his humanity and sharing in his experience.11

So can an animal without an extended consciousness, without the ability to think about thinking, truly have empathy for another dog, let alone a human? I base my answer mostly on personal experience, which shows me that there is a deep spiritual core in higher beings that operates outside of and beyond mere thought—and science is beginning to back that up.

In his book The Feeling of What Happens, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio tells the moving story of a patient named David who developed a severe brain condition that erased his memory. David could remember nothing from before his condition, nor anything that happened just hours earlier. When Damasio started meeting with David at his nursing home, it was clear that he particularly had no recall of the people he had known; everyone he encountered was a stranger to David. This was a heartbreaking condition, for the human being needs others in order to live.12

Yet, Damasio found something profound in his time with David. While David had no ability to remember anyone, he nevertheless, without mistake, was able to respond to those who were harsh or kind to him. If a nurse had been mean to David, though he couldn’t remember her or the incident, he would refuse to follow her and would protect himself, responding in a distant way toward her. And the opposite was also true; if a nurse had been kind to David, when encountering this nurse again, David would react with emotions of happiness and cooperation.

Damasio uses this story to show how feelings have a logic that goes beyond pure rationality, arguing that our minds are more than rational machines. For me, this story shows the spiritual depth of kindness—how it is hardwired deeply within us. The structure of David’s brain kept him from the recall necessary to move a person from stranger to friend, and yet David mysteriously wasn’t left without connection. Where his cognitive skills failed him, he could reach beyond cognition through a more primitive—or perhaps we should call it a more highly developed—intuitive capacity. Kindness seems so hardwired in us that even if our brains fail us, there is a backup system that can still send and receive it.13

In the same way, because our dogs have been formed from the time of early domestication by their capacity for kindness, they are able to feel us in a way that can rightly be called empathy.

Kara and I used to have a running joke that during every single episode of the show Parenthood, she would cry at least once. She would refer to it as the “Damn you, Parenthood!” moment. Whenever that moment came, Kirby would awaken from wherever he was napping, and come like a homing pigeon to place his front paws on her chair and press his nose toward her tears in concern. Kara would respond, “Kirby, I’m fine! It’s just a stupid, awesome TV show.” But Kirby couldn’t tell the difference; all he knew was that she was sad, and he longed to share in it and comfort her.

A friend of mine tells the story about the hellish six months during which she lost her mother and her marriage. She sat for hours in the living room, staring into the distance, her grief so heavy she couldn’t even make out how she actually felt. Yet, in a kind of pattern, every twenty minutes or so her dog would enter the room and sit next to her for a few minutes, as if feeling the tension and sadness within her. He’d lean in and look her in the eye, placing his chin on her arm. His touch would bring tears, and he would move his head to her breast. She would then pet him and feel better, feel understood. After a few minutes, seeming to be satisfied that he had achieved his purpose, he’d slide off the couch and leave the room—only to return twenty minutes later.

Popular dog writer Jeffrey Masson quotes Heini Hediger, the director of the Zoological Gardens of Zurich, who writes that “only the dog seems capable of reading our thoughts and ‘reacting to our faintest changes of expression or mood.’ German dog trainers use the term Gefühlsinn (a feeling for feelings) to talk about the fact that a dog can sense our moods.”14

On this score, they save us from our own “higher” selves. Think how often we override our empathy reflex so that we can succeed in other ways: get to work on time, save money, protect ourselves and our families, beat the competition in contexts where kindheartedness will only take us out of the running. We can quite easily suppress, and eventually forget, the very depth of feeling that defines us as children of God.

But a good dog won’t let us forget. I like to be near you, the dog will tell us in a hundred ways. I think you’re amazing.

Or, I can tell you’re hurting, but I won’t leave you.

Or, like that happy spaniel at Gate A32, they somehow telegraph just the right message of reassurance to a roomful of strangers.

Empathy Matters

Canine compassion has been known to heal emotional wounds suffered by at-risk youth, prisoners, people suffering from illness, children, and more. Anthropologist Darcy Morey points to the dog’s particular curative powers with the elderly. He says, “Based on interviews with over 900 elderly people in urban settings in southern California, [the researcher] Siegel reported…that the frequency of medical doctor contacts was lowest overall among those who owned dogs, as opposed to those with other pets. In reviewing some of the then-current information on this subject more than a decade ago, [another researcher] Beck found that ‘[w]hile animal ownership generally had value, the most remarkable benefits to health were for those who own dogs.’ ”15

Robert Bierer, a researcher at the University of New Mexico, makes a similar point, showing how deeply a dog impacts a child, covering the child with a blanket of kindness and empathy. Bierer studied kids ages ten to twelve, examining the impact of dog ownership on children’s social skills. “People have known for years that dogs are good medicine for children,” he says. “What I found, is that preadolescent children with pet dogs have significantly higher self-esteem and empathy than children without dogs. These higher ratings in self-esteem and empathy hold true whether the dog is ‘owned’ individually by the child or by the entire family. That means that just having a dog in the house makes a difference, regardless of whether the family is headed by a single parent, the mother works outside the home, or the child has siblings.”16

One day, shortly after Kirby’s death, I found myself sobbing in front of my computer at a YouTube video. In the frame sat a small boy, four or five years of age, with Down syndrome. Next to him, watching him adoringly, protecting and playing with him, was a large yellow Lab. The dog seemed completely attuned to the boy, wanting nothing more than to be fully with him. With every bounce and wag, it seemed to me, the dog was pleading with the boy to grasp a huge truth: No matter how this world might treat you, I think you’re amazing.

In the background of the video, against the sound of traffic and city noise, I could hear the voice of the person filming the video. He, too, was part of the moment—drawn in, laughing in sheer pleasure at the dog’s insistent attention to the boy, and the gentle yet absolutely tangible, kindness that held the two together. There I sat, a full-grown man, blubbering into the screen while a boy sat and a dog gave his kind, empathic attention.

It wasn’t only because I’d just lost my own dog. There was more. I was seeing playing out before me that same mystical connection, that same clear message from a higher place that Kirby shared with my kids pretty much every day. This boy was experiencing the thing we long for most as humans, and watching YouTube, I got the message again, too. I thought it went something like this: You are loved. You are mine. You are beautifully and wonderfully made.

I was experiencing a sacred moment.