Three days after Kirby was put down, we went on a family vacation. None of us felt like going, but the cabin was already booked. It was our summer routine: every August, we loaded up our car with suitcases, water toys, and fishing poles and headed to the lakes in the Wisconsin Northwoods for a vacation with Kara’s extended family. A major element of the fun had always been watching Kirby. He loved to swim, and there was all the space and time his tennis ball addiction needed for a real bender of a week. Plus, there was free food.

We loved Kirby, but he was a particular kind of villain to Kara’s sisters. At least a few times over our week together, the whole crowd would pull out the grill, set up chairs, and cook out, eating down by the lake. Parents would load plates full of chips and hot dogs for the two-, three-, and four-year-olds who made up the family reunion. The adults would settle the kids in, food on their laps, leaving them happily taking first bites. Then, as soon as the big people’s attention turned to their own food, Kirby would sneak up on the children like a silent ninja. Down the line of little laps he’d go, one by one, gobbling quickly off each kid’s plate, inhaling Doritos and swallowing hot dogs whole. By the time the parents spotted him, Kirby would be a few children down the line, serenaded by a chorus of wails and tears, and Kara’s sisters yelling, “Kirby! No!” This would only speed him up, though. Faster and faster he’d go, ketchup smearing, children screaming, chip crumbs sticking to his whiskers—until someone finally reached and yanked him away. Then he’d trot off looking pleased.

That wouldn’t happen this year. This year, my kids cried for most of the three-hour drive, pleading that it wasn’t right even to go there without Kirby. Once we arrived, we did our best to enjoy ourselves, but it often felt impossible. We saw Labradors everywhere: on sidewalk jaunts, at gas stations, on billboard advertising. We kept saying how much we wished we’d had one more summer trip with Kirby.

We noticed Kirby’s absence most when we visited Kara’s uncle Brent. Brent is a classic Northwoods brute. As ingenious as he is tough, he has made a very nice living for himself off many acres of woods he bought back in the late 1980s. He’s used his land for real estate, farming, and raising deer (and even, at one point, emus). What Brent enjoys most, though, is hunting, and his land offers ample opportunity. At least part of each of his days is spent driving his acreage in his four-wheeler, doing odd jobs and preparing his tree stands for hunting.

Yet, Brent never does these jobs alone. Before he can even get himself to the four-wheeler for his daily drive, his black Lab, Bear, is already sitting in the passenger seat. Bear lives to join Brent in his work. Every day, the tough woodsman and his black Lab cuddle chin to shoulder, like two 1950s teenagers in an old couch-bench Chevy, as they race over hills and across trails. They have quite a bond, and watching it made me miss Kirby. More than that, it gave me a name for what I missed: I’d lost a bond; a deep connection had been severed.

Robert Bellah has told us that there are three hardwired experiences within us that lead to the spiritual. In the last chapter we say how dogs draw out empathy in us (and experience it themselves), but how does our relationship with dogs meet our need for bonding? And what does bonding have to do with spirituality?

Clumsy Childhoods

Our need for bonding has its roots in the fact that humans have a much longer and therefore more dependent childhood than any other species. Donald Winnicott, one of the great psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, was famous for saying that there really is no such thing as a baby—only a baby and someone. For most of human history, our much shorter life spans meant that nearly all our lives were spent as either a child or a parent, and our close-knit communities meant that even if we were in the unusual period of not being parented or directly parenting, there were always children underfoot.

The bonding that has its origins in parenting is not optional. As parents, we may think we can opt out of parenting our child (which, tragically, happens all too often), but the child has no such choice. For the child to be at all, to follow Winnicott, she needs a long-term, primal attachment to another human. All of us have been, and remain, someone’s child, and therefore we cannot escape the deep mark of attachment (or, in some cases, a lack of attachment) left on our being.

You could think of this dependence as the fatal weakness of our species—after all, it makes us needy, immobile, vulnerable, and clumsy during our formative years. Actually, though, it’s our genius. The utter vulnerability of the human baby creates a deep spiritual reality of connection between the parent and child. Our own nurturing experience of attachment, of learning within days to share the mind of our mothers, prepares us to be in meaningful relationship with others, beaconing into the face-to-face encounters that deliver the spiritual. Our vulnerability is what leads us to select first and foremost for kindness.

You and I need bonding like we need air and water, and that’s hardly an exaggeration. As psychologist John Bowlby says, “The young child’s hunger for his mother’s love and presence is as great as his hunger for food, [and her absence produces] a powerful sense of loss and anger.”1 This hunger lessens as we grow to maturity, but it never entirely goes away. Human beings have a kind of spiritual heartbeat, spending the rest of our lives looking for things to attach to and bond with.

For other animals, it’s a different story. As newborns, they imprint on caregivers, who help move them from utter dependence to the ability to meet their own needs for food and sex. For example, the bond between a mother ape and her grown offspring fades once the young ape can independently seek its own needs. That’s because once the maturing process begins, bonding is not only useless but also a detriment to the offspring’s survival. Once other mammals are able to feed themselves, the pull of attachment ends, broken like a fever, until the fever returns again when the animal must care for its own offspring.

Humans need attachment not only to get started but also throughout our lives. However independent you and I might think we are, the truth is we can live and flourish only inside the gravitational pull of meaningful bonds with other persons.2

Yet how, you may be wondering, does all this apply to our canine housemates or, more specifically, to the spiritual connections between us?

Without Humans, There Would Be No Dogs

Drawing from Winnicott, we could say that there is no such thing as a dog, only a dog and someone. If there were no human beings, there would, in all possibility, continue to be wolves, but without human beings there would be no dogs. The dog, like the human being, must be understood always in relationship to humans. It survives because it is bonded to us; by definition, it exists because of us. Though we can imagine a lone wolf, and there are other animals that spend the greater part of their life alone, there is no such thing as, and could not be, a lone dog. Bradshaw explains:

The dog’s sociability is even more remarkable when compared to that of its ancestors. Wolves from different packs try to avoid one another; if they do meet, they almost always fight, sometimes to the death. This is not unusual. Modern biologists view all cooperative behavior as exceptional, because the default behavior of every animal should be to defend itself and its essential resources—its food, its access to mates, its territory—against all others.3

Dogs, however, like humans, feel the need for attachment their whole lives. Their “default behavior” is to stick close to their people, choosing to bond with us, a different species, even over other canines.

In the late 1990s, when scientists Adam Miklosi and Josef Topal wanted to test relational bonding in dogs, they copied an attachment experiment done on babies in the 1970s. In the original experiment, called the “strange situation test,” a one-year-old child was placed with his or her primary caregiver (Mom) in a roomful of toys and invited to play with them. Right away, the researchers noticed that children with strong attachment kept returning to their mothers as a kind of home base as they explored and played.

After a time, the caregiver would depart and either a stranger would enter or the child would be left alone. The research team recorded how the child behaved in these new situations. What gave them the clearest picture of attachment, however, was how the child responded when the primary caregiver returned. Those with secure attachment celebrated their mom’s reappearance with kisses and hugs. Those with poor attachment ignored Mom, or hit her in anger for having left.

How would dogs fare in their strange situation? Miklosi and Topal wondered.

To find out, they set up parallel scenarios. As its primary caregiver watched, the dog was invited to play and explore in a roomful of toys. After a period, the dog owner would leave and a stranger would enter. What happened then?

To Miklosi and Topal’s astonishment, the dogs responded much like the children with secure attachments, playing and exploring confidently, and checking in with “Mom” regularly. When the caregiver left, the dogs became more cautious, playing and exploring less, until their owners returned. During their owners’ absence, some dogs ignored the strangers and even the toys and sat down to wait. Others began to bark or scratch at the door.

If you own a dog, you know how the dogs in the strange situation test responded when “Mom” returned. Like well-loved kids everywhere, the dogs with strong attachment exuberantly welcomed their returning owners.4

All this leads me to believe that my dog skeptic theologian friend hadn’t noticed an important dimension in his relationship to his dog. Yes, dogs want food from us, but all things being equal, they don’t want it from just anyone. They want it from their person.5 Those big baby eyes communicate and invite a real sense of attachment that’s targeted toward a particular person. Masson says it poignantly: “Love on the part of the dog does not seem conditioned merely by what we provide the dog, nor simply a recognition that we are a source of food. A dog does not love a robot that gives it food, but is capable of loving people who never feed it.”6

Hare adds another interesting layer: “Not only do dogs prefer to spend time with a human than with one of their own species, but they are so focused on us that sometimes it can work to their disadvantage. For example, we know how much dogs love their food, and if they have to choose between a small pile of food and a large pile, usually they choose the larger pile. But if your dog sees you repeatedly choose the small amount of food, they are more likely to choose the small amount.”7 It is a remarkable creature that does this! Our dogs are so deeply shaped by their bonds to us that they are willing to follow our lead, even if it costs them personally.

This was illustrated to me recently when a friend told me about his experience of putting to sleep Edmund, the family’s beloved Chihuahua-terrier mix. The rapid spread of cancer throughout his small body had taken everyone by surprise. In the vets’ office, my friend and his wife were saying their good-byes.

“We were in shock, honestly,” the friend told me. “In just days, it seemed, Eddie had gone from the high-energy light of our lives to a frail shadow of his former self. Everything about what had happened, and what was about to happen, seemed terribly wrong.”

As his weeping wife held their dog, Edmund was still determined to give back. Even in his pain and weakness, he struggled with single-minded purpose to stand in her lap, and then he reached up to gently, patiently lick the tears from her face.

The New Work of Dogs

Before we had children, when Kirby was just a puppy and still able to be carried in our arms like a baby, we took him on a Saturday afternoon adventure to PetSmart. A nice young salesclerk was doing a Kong demonstration, showing us how you could fill the beehive-shaped rubber toy with almost any food, and how much dogs loved it. She shoved a Kong filled with peanut butter into Kirby’s face, and he took his first excited licks of peanut butter. To my surprise, Kara was livid. I could see, for the first time in our marriage, the intense protective emotions of motherhood seeping from her every pore. When we walked away, she fumed, “How could she do that? Kirby has never tasted peanut butter before, and she didn’t even ask if he could have any! She didn’t even ask me if it was okay to give him some! I wanted to be the first one to give him peanut butter, not some stupid girl at PetSmart!”

We chuckle about it now, but Kara was in her late twenties at the time, an age at which, even a hundred years ago, she would likely have already had multiple children. She was projecting her parental bonding onto Kirby, and even she was surprised by the power of this feeling. After Owen was born, her bond with Kirby seemed to lessen, but as Owen began to grow, he began to exercise his own needs for attachment beyond Kara (and me) by bonding intensely with Kirby. Kirby came to represent safety, assurance, a sense of home. Owen missed Kirby when we were gone, and sought him out the moment we neared home.

In a world that so often divides us more than bringing us together, that keeps us moving more than keeping us deeply rooted, this need for attachment suggests what is becoming the “new work of dogs,” to borrow a phrase from the journalist Jon Katz.8 Katz believes that dogs, in both beautiful and peculiar ways, have shifted from partners in work to something more emotional and familial.9

Because our cultural realities often prevent us from experiencing family and parenting for long stretches of time, our dogs have become more like our children.10 We project our need to parent onto our dogs. We call ourselves “Mommy” and “Daddy,” bundling our dogs into sweaters and booties, talking to them in that incessant baby talk that so annoys our friends. In later years, we find that having a dog can help make up for the absence of our children after they grow up and move away. We no longer buy dogs; we adopt or foster them. Yet these terms say less about the dog’s experience, I believe, than about what we want our dogs to give back, which is to provide for our own needs for family, intimacy, companionship, and commitment. Dogs come to embody a sense of family and home, and our attachment to them can transform how we feel about a place or time in our lives.

Interestingly, we live in a culture that often refuses to believe there’s something ingrained in our being that yearns to parent. We’re willing to admit that other animals go through times of being in heat, driven by the biological need to mate, birth, and parent. But not us! And yet we carry our dogs in purses on planes, dress them in raincoats, and say things to them like “Do you want Daddy to take you on a walk? Do you, my sweet baby?”

Fortunately, our dogs happily play along.

More and more, the new work of the dog may be to give what our frantic, fast-paced, uprooted lives have taken away. Still, I see its role as being in deep continuity with what the dog has always done for our species. It helps us be and become more fully human by reminding us that what we are made for, and long for, and have to give, is connection. Through caring for and being cared for by a dog, we encounter a recurring spiritual experience of bonding, a beckoning to come out from the shell of our self-interest and see another, to respond to its need, and to experience the joy of our being together. Our bonding to our dogs and their bonding to us show a deep relational connection that sends a current across our hardwired spirituality.

And, what’s so fun, is that often, dogs do this through the simple, and surprisingly spiritual, act of playing.