The Pleasure Dogs Bring

Maybe Cats Too

I haven’t lived with a cat since I was a child, so I don’t know them well. But I do know dogs and how much pleasure they bring.

I think one reason we love dogs has nothing to do with their usefulness, their beauty or their nobility but has to do with . . . their body temperature. At 100-102.5 F, their natural range is slightly higher than the human norm, so for much of the year in the temperate zones, dogs are a pleasure to hold. We hug them and they warm us up.

Their silky fur is another reason we like to have them around. Most dogs are soft to the touch; their fur strokes you back. So cuddling a dog pleases the hand, and the dog’s pleasure in the hand pleases its owner. When a human strokes a dog, both are calmed; blood pressure in each goes down. When I’ve gone to a shelter to adopt a new dog, the feel of its fur is one consideration, among many others.

The most important consideration is always a dog’s disposition. Dogs were bred to trust and work with human beings, and most will bond with their owners. Yet when one particular canine shows love to one particular human, that person feels happy and whole. The approbation of a pet is a validation and a joy because it is entirely natural; the pet will never feign a fondness; a dog is always utterly sincere.

It lies there on the beach watching you swim. It sleeps in your room, guarding your slumber. It will chase a ball or catch a Frisbee or lie down and play dead just to make you happy. It privileges you with its unabashed presence. It stretches all of its limbs and wriggles in the sun, tummy up, the way we used to do before we knew about skin cancer. And it eats and drinks with an infectious exuberance.

One of my favorite sounds in the world is a thirsty dog lapping water.

When a dog dies and its owners decline to get a new dog (“too much work,” “too expensive”) I worry about the people.  Are the walks becoming too much of a challenge? Do they worry about the dog outliving them? Are they trying to simplify their lives prematurely? Having lived with dogs for the last thirty years, it’s hard to imagine my days without one.

Part of the fun of having a dog is guessing what it’s feeling at any given time. As with babies, we give voice to our guesses but we don’t really know the truth. “Are you jealous of that other dog?” “Are you worried we’re going to leave without you?” “Are you glad to see us again?”   

It’s astonishing that for many years dogs (and other animals) were thought to have no feelings. To say a dog was angry or happy was to “anthropomorphize” the animal. B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviorism, believed animals (also people) worked by “operant conditioning”: behavior that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and behavior followed by unpleasant consequences is less likely to be repeated. Anodyne and scientific words like “behavior,” “consequences” and “less likely” mask the fact that this is a restatement of Freud’s “pleasure principle”: the tendency of people (also mammals, fish, insects) to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Perhaps we adore dogs because they are such obvious pleasure-seekers, which humans often mask in ourselves. If we are taught to hide our emotions, how wonderful to live with a pet who displays them, who wags his tail and wiggles his butt! We can project ourselves onto our pets and succumb to joy.

For decades toward the end of the twentieth century, no respectable scientist could impute emotion to animals—although anyone who owns a pet knows it can be anxious, angry, and afraid or engaged, excited, and enthralled. This misplaced confidence on the part of scientists reminds me of their certainty, just a few decades ago, that babies felt no pain because their nervous systems weren’t sufficiently developed. So infants endured operations without anesthesia. So, forty years ago, scientists considered animals to be automatons, acting only reflexively and without feeling.

A different approach reigns today, with experiments indicating that dogs (also ravens, elephants, chimps) have emotions similar to ours—and even a moral sense. Friedrike Range, at the Clever Dog Lab, has shown that dogs understand fairness and justice. The dog Guiness gives his paw to Friedrike time and again without reward: just because he likes to please. But when he observes another dog, Toddy, getting a tasty treat for the same behavior, Guiness goes on strike and refuses to give his paw. It’s as if he’s thinking: “Why should I do it for free if Toddy gets a treat? No fair!”

I observed something similar for myself last month when I was caring for a neighbor’s dog, a black lab who routinely gets only dry food. My dog always gets a little wet food buried underneath the kibble. So that first morning, I gave them each their bowls. But the lab wouldn’t eat. He just looked at me, brown eyes imploring. He only ate when he, too, got a wet dollop of food.

Anyone who has spent time with small children knows that “No fair!” is a common accusation. A sense of fairness is apparently baked into the human condition. It’s just one other reason to love dogs—that they share with us an innate sense of justice.