At first, I blamed myself. As I walked out of the movie theater into the bright skies of midday, I was silently fuming. I’d just seen the Wes Anderson movie Isle of Dogs, an animated tale of a dystopian Japan in which dogs are exiled to an island of trash, in seat-vibrating Dolby sound. I flinched at the high sun, and quickly surmised what caused my ire: I should never see a movie during the day. Emerging from two hours of the dark embrace of a fictional world into the middle of an ordinary day always sets me on edge.
After walking a few blocks, my pique adjusted a notch. It wasn’t the daylight furrowing my brow; it was the dogs. The dogs in the movie I’d just seen: stop-motion creations, expertly figured, who were the backbone of the film.
I sit down to films featuring dogs with a mixture of trepidation and thrill. While there is much that I hope to know about what dogs experience, understand, sense, and feel, the science of dog cognition is in its infancy. We don’t know more than we do know: and I always hope that a fictionalized account of dogs will give me a novel glimpse of dogs as they are—even see something that we scientists don’t.
Alas, that was not to be in this movie. The dogs were recognizable figments of our imagination: with human voices and human concerns, they served mostly as vessels for a human storyline. This is certainly not the first time that the dogs’ role in films has been as furry, button-cute human-replacements. As with all animals, they find ample employment in animated movies—as everything from genius professor (Mr. Peabody in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle) to loveable dolt (Scooby-Doo) to conscientious and loyal partner (Gromit in Wallace and Gromit). Through a misuse of film technology, dogs’ mouths are seen to move in live-action movies like Beethoven and Marmaduke and Beverly Hills Chihuahua, to eliminate any concerns that a dog might actually be . . . simply a dog. Even having a dog wandering through a scene in a movie—accompanying a child, walking through a town, or waiting by the Christmas tree—is well known for lending a sense of reality to a scene. Reality is not only effected but improved upon by writing a dog into your film. Alas, many directors overdo this, displacing reality with dogs. Fictive dogs become the motif and the subjects. And it is apparently crowd-pleasing to see, say, a well-groomed Scarlett Johansson–voiced purebred flirt with a scruffy Bryan Cranston–toned mutt. The audience around me laughed heartily at the foibles of these Isle of Dog characters: so recognizable! Because they were human foibles, transplanted onto dogs.
As I squinted in the sun and silently stewed, I realized with a start that I have become humorless about dogs. About the Hilarious YouTube videos and Must-See photos of ridiculous getups (hats, small tuxedos, pantyhose) that owners put their dogs in. About the GIFs of grimacing, stoic dogs forced to wear a crown of balloons; the memes that represent dogs as clueless, unable to control their bowels, or responsible for their overeating.
On reflection, I think that I’ve actually been humorless for quite a while. In the decade since I performed a study on what prompted the “guilty look” of dogs, the sharing of “dog-shaming” photos has mushroomed into a massive fungal accretion. The apparent hilarity of writing a note representing what your dog definitely does not feel or say (“I’m sorry I ate the chicken wings”; “I humped the pillow”; “I eat panties”), pinning it around their neck, and sharing it online, is completely lost on me.
Humans have long known the power of public humiliation of violators of the norms of a culture. One has only to turn the clock back a few hundred years to find criminal punishment meted out by shaving heads, branding foreheads, confessional-sign-wearing, and public pillories. She with a scarlet A sewn on her dress was a disgrace to her sex and a social outcast. Or keep the clock where it is: the twenty-first-century American judiciary still convicts a man, guilty of mail theft, to “stand outside of a post office with a sandwich board sign containing the following message: ‘I stole mail. This is my punishment’ ” for one hundred hours.
Humiliation’s effectiveness as a punishment depends both on being seen and on knowing that one is being seen. While dogs might be exempt from a feeling of shame that their alleged transgression is being broadcast across the world, the “guilty look” is in evidence on the faces and body postures of innumerable “shamed” dogs. In my research, what looked to people like their dogs’ guilt turned out to be the dogs’ deferential, pleading reaction to owners’ scolding and punishment: more “please don’t hurt me” than “I did a bad thing.” That doesn’t look so hilarious to me.
See? Humorless. Similarly, my hardline stance against Halloween costumes for dogs (Don’t)—even if they are dressed as Darth Vader, the Pope, or one of a quartet of a McDonald’s Happy Meal—is mirthless. And hey, if I haven’t told you, making your dog balance a treat on her nose while you prepare the camera kinda sucks, too.
My colleagues in veterinary behavior are all similarly dour. Their unsmiling assessments of your Dog Loves Baby! video—wherein an impressively stoic dog’s eyes widen and body freezes as a toddler grabs his fur (until they begin to try to lick/nibble the child off); their condemnation of your “sweet” photo of your child pulling your dog’s head into a clumsy embrace—are merciless.
What is wrong with us? Can’t we see the love that the humans perpetuating this inanity feel?
I am surprised at my humorlessness because I feel reliable and plentiful joy in being with and thinking about dogs. I’m always laughing around dogs. When I walk into a room with my dogs in it, I can feel the wrinkles of my brow unfurl, my shoulders unhunch, the muscles of my jaw unclench. Seeing a dog approaching me up ahead on a path makes me smile involuntarily and broadly.
There is terrific humor in a life with dogs. It is simply not of the humiliation variety. That kind of humor robs dogs of their dignity. “[A] fair measure of a civilized society is how its institutions behave in the space between what it may have the power to do and what it should do,” a dissenting justice in the mail-theft case wrote. We can dress the dog as Yoda, or Frodo, or a basting turkey, but we shouldn’t. The philosopher Lori Gruen characterizes dignity-robbing acts as those in which “animals are forced to be something other than what they are” and “when they are made to be ridiculous, presented as laughable spectacles.” She was almost certainly not smiling when she wrote that. But I have seen her smiling in describing the antics of the dogs she knows, and I am smiling now, thinking of this morning’s outing along the sidewalks of the city with one of my dogs, in which he gently but firmly guided me to the doorways of all the pet-food stores on our route.
The joy of dogs is that they free us of our own undignified existence—our self-consciousness and inhibitions; our self-imposed hindrances to pleasure; our unwillingness to be embarrassed, exposed, or vulnerable. I laugh as a dog greets me with fervent licks to my face, in celebration of the level of enthusiasm dogs can feel. What have I felt so enthusiastic about in my life? We cover up and mock the smells of our bodies, but a dog’s nose will boldly aim right between my legs, and will sit up with seeming surprise at the air noisily and smellily escaping from their own rumps. I am gleeful at the dog who is excited into zoomy running;I at the small dog cautiously or boldly aiming her nose upward into a large dog; at my dogs’ keen attention to words rhyming with “walk,” “treat,” “nosework,” “okay,” and “cat”; at dog tails wagging in synch; at reluctant tolerance of an overfriendly puppy’s approach; at rolling in snow; at dogs searching, chasing, finding, retrieving, discovering, digging, gnawing things.
The joy is prompted by their being who they are—perfect instances of “dogs,” sometimes; and precise instances of who that individual dog is, alltimes.
Though we now can draw a highly intelligible picture of who the dog is, there is still much about our way of dealing with them that ignores or subverts that picture. We have inherited our habits with dogs, and it’s high time that we re-examine them.
Look at places where dogs aren’t—in zoos, for instance. It would feel outrageous to find a dog in a zoo. This is not because dogs are not sufficiently exotic: there are plenty of non-exotic animals in zoos, especially ubiquitous animals (cockroaches, ants, snakes) there to be admired from behind the safety of glass. Instead, the outrage of the idea is rooted in its simple inapplicability: dogs are among us; they are our family, our friends. They are on the sofa next to me right now. And, moreover, they belong among us, there on the sofa—not isolated from people and in cages.II
But where is your friend right now, as I write this and you read it? Perhaps near you, on your own sofa. But the lifestyle of most owners makes another prediction: alone. Contemporary ownership enforces isolation of dogs. In writing about the condition of zoo animals, biologist Heini Hediger expressed concern for the animals’ “isolation through captivity.” Dog owners risk the inverse: creating captivity through isolation. Dogs are left alone for the greatest portion of their lives; given their dependency on us, their interactions with other dogs and people is highly regulated—and entirely outside their control. Left alone in a crate,III the dog is further restricted in their sensory and physical experience until that magic moment when you walk in the door. They are becoming captive to being ours.
It’s unbecoming of the species: dogs are, certainly, more than appendages to us. Like Lori Gruen, philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes the claim that animals have intrinsic dignity. Should we find ourselves in interaction with an animal, she suggests, we should act to enable that animal to flourish—at whatever “sort of thing” it is—dog, elephant, cow, rabbit, horse, slug. Derailing an animal’s life, through acts of cruelty, negligence, or death, is clearly wrong. But more interestingly, so are those acts that thwart their capabilities—a dog’s capacity to “be a dog.”
Even more than acts of dog shaming or dog costume-donning, a person’s unwillingness to attend to, and be curious about, who dogs really are, denies them dignity.
As a scientist in search of orderliness and process, my heart leapt at the list of elements that Nussbaum enumerates as necessary for a dignified existence. They are all things we can do for dogs. Enabling their life, bodily health and integrity, and general pursuits for mental and emotional well-being, she begins. Easy: we all feed our dogs, care for them when they are ill, try to treat them nicely, and give them toys. But also, she says: stimulation of the senses, free movement, exposure to varieties of things—“a rich plurality of life activities.” Translated for dogs, I read that as: daily sights and sniffs; ability to run around, to meet new things or a variety of well-loved old things; chances to try something new and challenging. She continues: the possibility of being attached to others; to play. For dogs: a social life of people and of other dogs; not just time with you, but time on the floor with you, playing or wrestling or touching. Nussbaum: to be in the natural world; to have some control over one’s environment. For dogs: to regularly be able to go outside, to smell the grass, to roll in dirt, to splash in water; and to be given choices—as the simple fact of being able to choose improves well-being.
Perhaps not coincidentally, these are the things—the sniffing, licking, running, bonding, playing—that I already find joyful about dogs. When, in two minutes, I rise from this chair, and my dog lifts his head, licks his nose, and dismounts from the sofa in a great stretch of his body toward me, his eyes alert to see what we’re about to be doing together, he is completely dignified. And I am lent a measure of dignity by him. Hilarious!
I. The highly enjoyable “zoomies” has been described by dog experts as a frenetic, careening run in which hindquarters sometimes get ahead of the frontquarters, that “may cause first-time dog owners to suspect that their dog has momentarily lost its [sic] mind.”
II. Nineteenth-century zoos did contain dogs: among the monkeys and large cats in the Bristol Zoological Garden were “exotic” dogs—Saint Bernards, Labradors, and Esquimaux (husky or Malamute). Up until 1950, two decades after the breed’s recognition by the AKC, you could still find huskies at a zoo. And dogs have snuck into zoos in other roles: as surrogate family (1841: a chimpanzee was given a puppy after having lost his mate; 1843: a female pointer was deployed to suckle a motherless leopard cub) and therapy animals (a spaniel paired with a panther; a Border collie to keep a lion company). Today in the San Diego Zoo, dogs hang out with cheetahs to model friendly behavior for the cats.
III. Crating is currently popular as part of a training regime (done with the best intentions, recommended by trainers I respect and admire) to keep dogs comfortable and also non-misbehaving during their hours of solitude. It’s still a confinement that limits what the dog can experience, however good those intentions are.