What Dogs See When They Look at Us
Key takeaways
- To be both courageous and clingy is the dog’s unique moral charm.Art work by George Stubbs; Photograph courtesy Sotheby’s Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story.
- Well, so do our parents, and when, after a long life, they die we mourn deeply, but on the whole we manage.
- Then, there’s the fact that the dog does not know death until it happens.
George Stubbs, “The Pointer,” 1760. To be both courageous and clingy is the dog’s unique moral charm.Art work by George Stubbs; Photograph courtesy Sotheby’s Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story. A dog’s death is like no other. Not worse than any other, of course. But unlike any other, inasmuch as the disparity between the loss and the profound grief it provokes is so bewildering to outsiders and even to those who feel it. When our family Havanese, Butterscotch, died a while ago, after thirteen years of a happy-go-lucky, charming, loving, and greedy existence, I could scarcely walk through Central Park without shutting my eyes, since tears flooded them when I saw other dogs running and playing freely, as she had done for so long. Dog grief somehow passes beyond “appropriate” sadness into unfathomable feeling.
Why is this so? Because our dogs love us unconditionally? Well, so do our parents, and when, after a long life, they die we mourn deeply, but on the whole we manage. Is it because, as some say, we see our dogs every day? We see the Amazon guy every day, too. Maybe part of the explanation has to do with the privacy of the loss. There are no wakes, no shivas, and so the feeling has nowhere organized to go. A family ritual around ashes feels faintly misplaced. The dog did not accomplish anything; it simply was, and its being filled the house.
Then, there’s the fact that the dog does not know death until it happens. We understand death as a part of life, and it is our knowledge of mortality that shapes our understanding and makes us human. They don’t. I’m still haunted by our ailing, elderly dog’s large, trusting, liquid eyes looking out at us in the moments before her death: Hey, this is all right, right? We’re just here at this crazy doctor place we go to like always, and then we’re going home? That was what broke my heart. Butterscotch trusted us absolutely, and we were about to kill her. For her own good, because she was suffering so, because her once rich and bounding life had been reduced to a painful daily struggle, all of that. But she was alive and then she wasn’t, and she didn’t understand it and we had done it to her.