Alexandra Horowitz - The Year of the Puppy : How Dogs Become Themselves

Inside of a Dog

On Looking

Being a Dog

Our Dogs, Ourselves

I peek in the rearview mirror and see her asleep in the back seat. Shes outgrown the little donut-shaped dog bed she first used and now she is more lying on it than in it: her head and shoulders are fully on my son, O.s, lap.

Its slowly changing with her. Its that she folds her ears back against her head as she greets me. Its her new, rabbit-legged sitting posture. Its her sitting beside me in the car en route to the city, just the two of us in wordless conversation. Its that she will now jump fully onto my lap, and then snuffle pig-like for a kiss. She chases her tail. She digs into the shoebox of toys and takes everything out, batting a ball around and flipping the long-legged and spindly Grinch around her head, banging herself on her sides. She has a way with each of us in the morning: aroooo! she calls, when we enter the room where shes sleeping. She has a way with each of the dogs. She and the cat are working it out, licking each other in turns. Its that even as she outgrows her dog bed she is fitting into the family.

I met her right after she was born.

Our family did not need a puppy. We are three humans, two dogs, and a cat; our days are rich with interactions, and our home is replete with animal fur. Sometimes, though, an idea grips me. It appears from thin air, as though I simply walked into it and breathed it in. And once Ive taken it in, it circulates in my mind, gradually and then relentlessly breaking through the hum of my brains background noise. This time, the idea was simple: puppy.

Its a popular idea, puppies. But it was as distant a notion to me as the prospect of hand-raising a snow leopard. As attracted as I am to puppies guileless manner, to their clumsy gait, and to the bigness of their excitement to see a person or their alarm at a bird taking flight, I was not attracted to the idea of living with one. For one thing, there are plenty of puppies about. I need only walk out of our apartment in New York City to see puppiesto see people with puppies, the people blearily standing in attendance with an over-long leash waiting for a puppy to remember to pee. For another, one of the satisfactions of adopting dogs from shelters, as our family has always done, is knowing we are taking home a dog who needs a home. Often, that dog is not a young puppy, but a dog who has already lived some life. I did not want to be implicated in making a dog who would need a home.

So a new puppy was off the tableor so I thought. Our last adoption, eight years earlier, was of three-and-a-half-year-old Upton, already eighty pounds of hound, candor, and goofiness when we met him. He arrived at our home needing ACL surgery for an injury long suffered and never addressed. And he arrived with a mysterious set of fearsof noises, of his shadowand with, it seemed, no experience at all of the things that were to become the substance of his life with us: walking on leash, sidewalks, elevators; people wanting to pet him, dogs wanting to sniff him. We met him at a shelter to which he had been returned as a three-year-old (Reason for return: have too many dogs) after having been adopted from the same place as a puppy. Thus, included in the paper trail of his life that was delivered to us was a photo of baby Upton, all ears and smile.

I think that is when I first breathed in the idea. Who was he as a puppy? I wanted to know. The only sorrow of coming to know Upton was the great mystery of his life before us: of where those fears came from; and of not being able to reach back in time and make it right. This sentiment is not uncommon. Few of us meet our dogs at Day One. The dog who will, eventually, become an integral part of our family, our constant companion and best friend, is born without us, into a family of her own. Her parents contribute genetically and, in the case of the mother, substantially after birth, to what kind of dog this young wiggly grub of a puppy will become. Her littermates, the world around her, the sounds and smells and sensations she is exposed to, all will influence her personality. By eight weeks of age, she is developmentally equivalent to a year-old human babywith all the walking, chattering, world-exploring milestones in her pastand she still wont be meeting her human family for weeks or months. When she first sniffs the human visitors who pack her into the car at the breeders, or whisk her off from a shelter and bring her home, she is already partly who she will be.

Years went by, and the puppy idea was displaced by louder and more urgent ideas. But it bubbled up again as our dogs passed their eleventh and twelfth birthdays, officially well into geriatric, in veterinary terms. We could not avoid the inevitable ending of their lives, but we might let them influence the next dog we got to know. Who better to teach a new dog about the worldabout our worldthan our crazy wonderful dogs? My son and husband made approving noises when I let the idea float out of my mouth and into the room.

I have no dearth of dogs in my life. Not only do I live in a city bursting with dogsmany of them so completely socialized to urban living that they will not even break stride if you reach down to tickle their head as they passbut I live with two already. In addition to Upton, our family includes Finnegan, a charming and endearing character who has endured the introduction of a child, another dog, and a cat with only the rare dagger-filled glare at us for so ruining his life. And I am a scientist of dogs: I study their behavior to try to understand their minds. I founded and run the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, where researchers and I observe dogs who come onto campus with their people to participate in our experiments, or who submit to our gaze at their homes or in the parks. As a scientist and author, I have surely typed the word dog tens of thousands of times.