on their dogs’ behalf in a more public way, especially online. These days, there are thousands of journals on the Internet purportedly written by dogs, many linked to dog-themed social networking sites like Dogster or Dogbook (if Walter Savage Landor were alive today, he might well have blogged as Giallo). Their voices are uncannily similar: playful, enthusiastic, and endearingly dim-witted—the voice of a loving but backward child. This is also the personality attributed to Clark Griswold, the German shepherd star of a viral YouTube video in which the dog is teased playfully by his owner about not getting his favorite treats. Clark’s reactions, dubbed by his owner, are absurdly disconsolate. His engaging credulity is shared by the unnamed bulldog of the website Text from Dog, whose messages to his owner swing from engagingly exuberant (“I have to tell you … You accidentally fed me TWICE this morning … I GOT TWO BREAKFASTS … THIS IS THE GREATEST DAY OF MY ENTIRE LIFE”), to coyly passive-aggressive (“Who’s MORE important: ME or your girlfriend?”). There seems to be some kind of unspoken agreement that, in terms of personality, dogs are adorably dense (as opposed, perhaps, to smart, snooty cats).
According to Stanley Coren, a dog behaviorist and psychologist at the University of British Columbia, dog blogging is “a sign of affection,” and “trying to adopt a dog’s point of view can be a healthy exercise” for pet owners. “If we love them dearly, we’re always trying to crawl inside their heads and figure out what’s going on,” suggests Coren. “And if we love them dearly enough, we want other people to share in the dog’s expertise.” This, to me, seems an oddly disingenuous response to a phenomenon that begs for deeper consideration. Surely it’s obvious—is it not?—that these dog blogs do not actually “adopt a dog’s point of view” or “share a dog’s expertise.” The fact is, dogs have very little to do with them. These daily chronicles, with their infantilized voices, present-tense observations, and phonetic spellings, are produced by and for adult Homo sapiens. There are no pets online, just projections and displacements, human fantasies, and a willful return to the affections and appetites of childhood.
In Pack of Two, Caroline Knapp quotes Susan Cohen, the director of counseling at New York’s Animal Medical Center, who is fascinated by the way people talk about (and on behalf of) their dogs. “When someone offers what sounds like a human interpretation of a dog’s behavior,” says Cohen, “it gives you something to explore. It might not tell you a lot about the dog, but it helps tell you what the person is thinking, what they’re hoping, fearing, or feeling.” When the dog is owned by a couple, for example, its voice can be used by the “parents” to accuse each other of neglect (“Mommy found my long-lost tennis ball—you know, the one that Daddy lost and didn’t bother to replace”) or to portray themselves as unconditionally lovable (“Oh, Daddy’s dirty socks smell so good!”). At the most basic level, the “dog” here may be the blogger’s infant self, beloved by Mother without reservation, no matter how odd he or she might look or smell. In the purported form of a dog, the infant self can express needs and feelings that the adult ego might, with good reason, want to distance itself from. On the Internet, no one knows you’re not a dog.
The same dynamic also applies to in-person interactions. Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders note how pet owners, when “deciphering” their animal’s symptoms for veterinarians, will “explain” their companion’s moods (“She’s upset that we have a new baby”), speak dyadically (“We aren’t feeling well today”), or speak for the animal itself (“Oh, Doctor, are you going to give me a shot?”). Whether online or face-to-face, to speak in the voice of your dog is to engage in an act of self-deceiving ventriloquism, allowing you to be at the same time both beloved child and adoring parent. In this voice, you can buffer complaints, elicit apologies, confess wrongdoings, and mediate outlawed or forbidden impulses.
I can’t help noticing that I’m writing about “your dog,” analyzing what “people” do. Writing in the second or third person is another way to create distance from things that feel uncomfortable for us—that is, for me—to confess. The truth is, I’m so used to articulating Grisby’s preferences that it’s difficult to admit they’re not far from my own: He loves coffee cake but dislikes asparagus, likes cartoons but gets bored by foreign films, likes white bread but not tortillas. Moreover, last Christmas, writing in my left hand, I added “Grisby’s” shaky signature to mine and David’s at the bottom of our Christmas cards, reversing the R as if he were still learning to write. I’ve projected onto Grisby, it seems, the stereotype of a child with Down syndrome: comical, captivating, and always up for a cuddle.
Such children are famously lovable, but adults with the same condition are often shunned, especially since weight gain is a common side effect of neurological medication. Similarly, precocious children can be delightful, but infantile adults are disturbing, their sexual maturity sitting uncomfortably beside the child’s lack of self-restraint. In the same way, dog owners who write or speak as their dogs can do so comfortably only when their dogs are “fixed”; a blog or video giving human voice to a dog’s sexuality would be not cute but unsettling. Chop off his balls, however, and he can be a fat child forever.
I can’t speak on behalf of other dog owners (or their dogs), but I suspect I’ve given Grisby this kind of personality as a way of connecting my adult and childhood selves. He is, in other words, a “transitional object”—a phrase coined by the child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott to mean a personal possession, like a teddy bear or security blanket, that helps the child feel safe away from home. Transitional objects are not limited to childhood. Adults, too, need things that remind them of their private worlds: personal photographs used as screen savers, lucky charms, religious icons, sports mascots—anything with a stable meaning that can avert loneliness, mediating between the familiar world of home and the impersonal workplace or public realm.
Dogs make very handy transitional objects because we can use them as outlets for all kinds of different emotions. In my case, Grisby forms a bridge between my inner life and the “real world” out there, toward which I’m increasingly ambivalent. On the one hand, I want to function successfully as an adult in the wider world; on the other hand, I want to stay at home, regress to infancy, and keep the outside world at bay. It’s always easier to make this difficult transition with a friendly bulldog by my side.
HIDESABURŌ UENO, A professor of agricultural science at Tokyo Imperial University, always took the four o’clock train home from work, and every day, his dog, Hachikō, would be waiting for him on the platform at Shibuya Station. When Professor Ueno died of a cerebral hemorrhage in May 1925, in the middle of a lecture, his gardener, who inherited his house in the Kobayashi district, also adopted Hachikō, and for the next ten years, this golden-brown Akita would return to Shibuya Station every day to meet the four o’clock train, hoping to see his beloved master again. In 1935, Hachikō’s body was found in a Tokyo street. His remains were stuffed, mounted, and put on display in Japan’s National Science Museum. A bronze statue of the famous dog stands outside Shibuya Station to this day, and he also has his own memorial by the side of his master’s grave in Aoyama cemetery.
Interestingly, Hachikō isn’t the only dog whose statue oversees a railway station. In 2007, a memorial was erected at the Mendeleyevskaya station on the Moscow Metro in honor of Malchik, a stray mutt who lived there for about three years, becoming popular with commuters and Metro workers. Malchik claimed the station as his territory, protecting travelers from drunks, the homeless, and other stray dogs. In 2001, after getting into an altercation with a bull terrier, Malchik was stabbed to death by the other dog’s owner, a psychiatric patient with a long history of cruelty to animals.
Heroic
