Four Reasons a Dog is Smarter than a Teenager

Chaser the border collie has recently gained fame for her vast vocabulary. Her owner, retired psychology professor John W. Pilley, purchased the pup in order to take on Rico, a German pooch that worked from a lexicon of two hundred terms. In reading of Chaser's prowess I was struck by the idea that this mutt had it all over human beings, at least at certain stages of their lives. As proof of my thesis, I offer the following head-to-head comparison:

1. Chaser knows 1,022 words, all nouns. Your teenager knows about 60K, a rich mixture of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and particles. This would seem to give the adolescent the edge but there are mitigating factors: For instance, Chaser is always eager to learn more words, whereas the teenager must be frog-marched through Shakespeare at the point of a rapier. Also, while the teen has access to all those words, he uses the terms "like" and "cool" more than the remaining 59,998 combined. Chaser does not know either of these words. Advantage Chaser.

2. When asked to retrieve any of the vast array of objects of which she knows the name, Chaser will do so obediently, immediately, and cheerfully. Advantage Chaser.

3. Chaser is satisfied with cast-off toys from the local Salvation Army, which Dr. Pilley plundered in order to keep his pet supplied with vocabulary lessons. She does not require an ever-expanding inventory of expensive electronic gadgets. Advantage Chaser.

4. While Chaser can understand lots of words, she can communicate only in barks, grunts, whines and howls. She and the teenager break even.

Final score: Chaser - 3, Teenager - 0 with one draw. So why not go to your local shelter and adopt a dog today? A journey of a thousand words begins with "sit" and "stay."

A Dog's Guide to Advent

Dogs can be pessimists. This is what the scientists say. I don’t believe them.

Evidently Michael Mendl, a veterinary scientist at the University of Bristol, studied twenty-four shelter dogs in Britain. He would place them in a room containing a bowl that, as the dog knew from previous training, might be empty or might be full of food. Optimistic dogs raced to the bowl like a shark on a seal pod. Pessimistic pooches didn’t bother searching. Mendi also noted that the downer-dogs showed more separation anxiety, trashing furniture and floors when left alone.

Well, I’m no scientist but I do hang out with a lot of shelter dogs on a regular basis and I have my doubts. You stroll that concrete walkway between kennels crammed with canines and see what happens, especially when they notice you toting a leash. They go bonkers! Some hurl themselves at the bars like holiday shoppers on the last of the Squinkies at the local Walmart. Some start jumping; my shelter has one pitbull with a vertical leap of at least six feet and he can maintain that height over repeated jumps. Some go for the solar plexus, staring up at you with soulful eyes like Gavroche dying at the barricade in Les Miserables. And these are animals I do not walk and have never walked. I’ve strolled past them any number of times on my way to the particular mutt who is my usual companion. They have no reason to expect me to let them out, but there they are, addled with anticipation all the same.

It reminds me of something Dave Barry once wrote about dogs. Barry maintained that if you let a dog in the car, “usually the dog will sit in the driver’s seat, in case (You never know!) the dog is called upon to steer.” My dog Joey was a living demonstration of this theorem. When I opened the pickup door and waved him in, he invariably parked himself in front of the steering wheel and stared avidly forward. More impressive, when I told him to move over, he never seemed put out.

I consider it an open question whether pets go to Heaven. i’ve blogged about it elsewhere () and I come down on the side of Charles Wesley, George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis by answering in the affirmative. What I do know is this: If dogs go to Heaven, they will have no trouble obeying Christ’s many injunctions to watch and be alert for His return. A kennel full of canines who celebrate the appearance of a random human even after hundreds - thousands? - of disappointments, of not being walked, not being adopted, not being chosen will not be worn down by a couple of paltry millennia between Our Lord’s promise to return and the fulfillment of that promise.

Since Advent begins tomorrow, I want to encourage us to listen for a moment to this doggy homily. In Job, after the title character has spent the better part of thirty chapters giving God lots of good advice on running the world, the Almighty shows up in person. In Job 40.15 the Lord offers a rather strange apologetic for dealing with the problem of evil: “Check out the hippo!” (Or brontosaurus if you’re into creationism.) Well, for those of us Christians who have grown pessimistic, have stopped charging into each new day hot on the trail of experiences which may (although they may not) be brim-full with God’s blessings, I think my pals at the shelter have a sermon to preach. For those of us who have let any real anticipation of Our Lord’s Advent sink into a dull, scarcely-perceived ache at the base of our souls, I think my mutt-mentors have a message. Let’s hit the church doors like dogs who have sniffed the leash. Let’s make barking, drooling fools of ourselves. Let’s leap before the Lord on the off-chance that he might meet us halfway. And if all of that is too Charismatic for you (as, I admit, it is for me), let’s at least fix our gaze on the throne and express yearning for our redemption.

“A DOG,” to return to Dave Barry, “IS ALWAYS READY. It doesn’t matter for what: Dogs are just ready.” It’s Advent. Let’s be ready!

A Truly Honorary Title

"Want to know the ultimate training tip? Your dog thinks you're a dog. Your family and friends - all dogs. Children are little dogs, other puppies perhaps, but they are factored into the equation, too. The coolest thing, if you sit down and think about it, is that dogs are the only species on the planet that will trust another species as their own. You should be honored." - Sarah Hodgson, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Choosing, Training, and Raising a Dog

But should we really? After all, they're just dogs - furry masses of instinct jumped up a little by specific breeding in some cases. They bark and shed and relieve themselves at inconvenient times and reproduce without regard for polite society. And they can't abstract. "You will have noticed," writes C. S. Lewis in his essay "Transposition," "that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning." All of the dog-traning books I read emphasize that, since the dog cannot think like a human, humans must be willing to think like dogs if there is to be any communication. Thus, by definition, our mental state is "higher" and we must "lower" it to get our canine on.

So is it that big a deal that when I walk into the breezeway between kennels at the Gulf Coast Humane Society, leash in hand, all the doggy denizens down either side rush to the bars and see only another of their own kind?

Well, I think so, yes.

There is a nobility in the common canine that we humans share only by the animal's kindness, or perhaps by years of submitting ourself to his discipline. There is peace, for instance. Steve Brown writes, “Did you know that studies have shown it is almost impossible to give a dog an ulcer? Do you know why? Because dogs hardly ever try to be anything but a dog.” The dog doesn't worry about going to its thirtieth high school reunion and having everyone find out that it's still just a mongrel, not yet a purebred or, for that matter, still a Great Dane and not yet a primate. What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount about being content with the clothing and food that daily pursuits provide finds itself fleshed out in the dog. Paul's advice to the Corinthians (a distinctly feline lot in my opinion) about contenting oneself with a limited suite of spiritual gifts and a reciprocal part in the overall body - a congregation of dogs wouldn't have needed to be told in the first place.

Then there's loyalty. "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous," says Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, "he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." Of course, dogs sometimes do bite the hand that feeds them, but this is because they've gone mad. When human beings do it, we call it being realistic, or growing up. In other words, disloyalty, for a dog, is a disease; for human beings, it is often an achievement.

I read just recently that new official maps of Antarctica will include place names honoring eleven of the sled dogs that mushed Roald Amundsen on his winning venture to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912. Uroa, Myllius, Helge and Per, along with seven others, will provide Air Force pilots with navigational points as they zoom across the underside of the world. Eleven is the number of dogs who completed the trek, out of an original fifty-two. Some succumbed to diseases while some, according to plan, came along as self-moving meat which, at set intervals, the explorers fed to the rest of the dogs, and to each other. They never got famous, but they got the job done.

On February 21, 1925, Gunnar Kassen mushed his dog team out of the village of Bluff, Alaska, headed for Gnome bearing a load of anti-toxin to stem a diphtheria outbreak that threatened to devastate the snow-bound population. His lead dog, a two-year old Siberian husky named Balto, pointed the way through fifty-three miles of a blizzard so thick that it obliterated the trail and buried any guiding scent. Yet as unerringly as a King James Bible, this former scrub-dog piloted his master's precious cargo straight into the middle of town. The story goes that Kassen stepped from the sled and staggered to the exhausted animal, to whom he said merely, "Damn fine dog. Damn fine dog."

So do I consider myself honored that any random member of this ancient race would unconditionally enroll me in its records?

J. R. Ackerly, in his book My Dog Tulip, a memoir of life with his German shepherd, tells how he noticed that Tulip, happening upon another dog's excrement in the woods, would always urinate over it. One day, after relieving himself during a forest tramp, he noticed her do the same thing with her master's offal. "So I feel that if there ever were differences between us," he writes, "they are washed out now. I feel a proper dog."

To feel a proper dog - seems a great gift indeed.

Of the Perpetual Childhood of Actual Dogs and Fictional Monks

“But even supposing he did remain a little more like a child than the rest of us. Is there anything particularly horrible about being a child? Do you shudder when you think of your dog, merely because he’s happy and fond of you and yet can’t do the forty-eighth proposition of Euclid? Being a dog is not a disease. Being a child is not a disease. Even remaining a child is not a disease.” - G. K. Chesterton, Four Faultless Felons

The photo above is of a German shepherd mix whom I have been walking regularly for several weeks now. We know one another. If he is out in the dog-runs when I arrive (meaning that I cannot walk him that day), he recognizes me (I have my wife for independent confirmation of this) and begins prancing in front of the cyclone fence as if to say, "You gonna come get me? Why aren't you gonna come get me?" It has been over a week since our schedules coincided so when I walked up to his kennel yesterday morning with a leash in my hand, he went slightly berserk, leaping off of all four paws at once and clearing the concrete floor by a good three feet.

But our recent walk has me pondering Chesterton's observation about perpetual childishness, or childlikeness.

Readers of this blog (both of you) might know that I am in the habit of re-christening the canines I pal around with at the shelter. The Gulf Coast Humane Society names each dog they take in, and I have been impressed that all of the people who work there seem to know them by name. I have often strolled by one of the paid employees and had them call to "my" dog by name without a moment's hesitation. I think that shows admirable care and indicates why adopting from this shelter is the way to go for anyone looking for a dog.

But I can't help myself: I have this sort of lit-nerd's fetish for playing with names, trying to get them right. When I read on the card that this animal went by the title "Buddy" I rejected it at once. "Buddy"? How about "Pal" or "Sport" or even "Fido"? Looking at his big, squarish head and taking in his enthusiastic demeanor, I dubbed him Falstaff, after the riotous companion of Shakespeare's Prince Hal in Henry IV. And the name seemed to work, seemed to have its merits. After all, it is Fat Jack who keeps the young prince sane, in touch with joy. When Prince Hal becomes King Henry V and banishes Falstaff he turns into a grim warrior who tears about Europe conquering places and negotiating political marriages in very bad French. I sort of look at dogs as doing the same work for us: keeping us from getting so serious that we may be very efficient conquering machines but we're no fun anymore.

But the name ultimately didn't fit. Falstaff is huge, both physically and psychically. a "horse-back breaker," a "huge hill of flesh." But this dog is medium-sized, sub-Labrador in bulk and height, and his demeanor is calm and obedient. Falstaff might work for an exuberant St. Bernard or an English mastiff, but not for this fellow.

So I have changed his name to "Francis." No, not the Little Holy Man of Assisi, though I could make a case there. Instead, I refer to Brother Francis Gerard of Utah, a scribe in the Order of St. Leibowitz who lived several centuries from now in the high desert country lf what is now northern Arizona or perhaps New Mexico. As you may have guessed from the chronological confusion, he is a character in one of my favorite novels, a post-apocalyptic romp called A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. In the first part of the book we follow the career of this physically diminutive, emotionally fragile, yet somehow incredibly tough young monk from his extended stint as a novice through . . . well, I won't tell you through what because I don't want to spoil the story. Enough now to say that he lives a life of obscure obedience and tenacious weakness and does good for everyone around him and ultimately for the world at large without their ever knowing it, and indeed without suspecting it himself. This dog strikes me as that kind of animal, the kind of whom Dean Koontz wrote that "A good dog is one of the best of all things to be."

Which brings us back to Chesterton.

Jesus (who, according to Dallas Willard, could easily have done the forty-eighth proposition in Euclid but forebore because he'd've had to do it in Roman numerals,) recommended a perpetual nurturing of the child-nature in us. "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted , and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." (Mt 18.3) Once we get away from the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven as a place we go when we die and understand it (as Jesus evidently did) to be a spiritual state with practical realities in which we can live at any moment, the whole thing makes more sense. It isn't that Jesus stands outside some massive set of pearl-hewn gates like the bouncer at a trendy nightclub and cards applicants to make sure they're young enough. It is this kind of thinking that leads to reams of sermons (I've preached several myself) aimed at helping serious-minded Christians manufacture fake ID's to fool God into thinking we're younger in soul than is in fact the case.

No. I think the Master simply means that Kingdom life involves a certain freedom to embrace our dependent position, our contingent existence. Of course we take orders because, like a good dog, we sense that there are people around us who know better than we do, at least about a given situation. Of course we respond to any kindness with the equivalent of a lick and a tail-wag, not because we think that settles the account (dogs don't think in those terms and neither do kids), but because we feel genuine gratitude. And if we find a way we can contribute - bringing in the newspaper or chasing off an attacker or something - we do so gladly, not, once again, to earn our keep, but out of the sheer fun of the thing. We obey and celebrate while paying little attention to whether we're ahead or behind in some sort of competition, and one day we die and people around us act like we were a big deal. Which can't hurt us or spoil our joy, because we aren't around to see it.

Nor does this make a person (or a dog) servile. The White House announced yesterday that U. S. Army Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta has become the first non-posthumous Medal of Honor winner since the Viet Nam war. In October 2007 Giunta rushed under enemy fire to rescue a wounded comrade who was being taken captive. I think Sergeant Giunta's attitude is downright doglike. The proud member of Company B, Second Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry Regiment had this to say about the award: "This respect that people are giving to me? This was one moment. In my battalion, I am mediocre at best. This shows how great the rest of them are.”

Isn't that one reason we love dogs? Isn't that what they all seem to say about us? "Look how great she is! Wow! And him, too! Oh, and look at that guy!" They gaze at all of life like Miranda at the end of "The Tempest" as she exclaims,

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

And they never reach a level of sophistication that leads to the next line by the jaded magician Prospero, "'Tis new to thee."

So my sincerest thanks to my buddy Francis. And if you have a dog, be sure to thank her today. And if you don't, come on down to the GCHC and walk a few.

Teaching A Really, Really Old Dog New Tricks

Swiss archaeologists have unearthed bone fragments of a domestic dog that lived at least fourteen thousand years ago. The skull and jawbone shards actually came to light in 1873 but nobody paid them much mind until recently, when careful examination identified them as belonging to Canis Lupus Familiaris.

I point this out merely to say that evidently we do something deeply human when we care for dogs.

Robert Fulghum of "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" fame, has an essay about how he dislikes dogs yet is still a good person. He concludes by citing the case of the Akah tribe of Thailand, who raise canines for food and relate to them roughly as American farmers do to pigs. "There are," he concludes, "other ways to look at dogs."

Looking at dogs - that may be just the point. For fourteen millennia, it seems, we have been looking at dogs and they have been looking back. And somewhere along the way it came about that we raise each other's endorphin levels when we exchange this gaze, lower one another's blood pressure, make one another feel better.

"Why," Fulghum asks, "do we have all these dogs and treat them so well? Because we need protection from one another? Because we need some kind of love that humans can't give each other? Because we're bored or lonely or sentimental hunter/gatherers at heart, or what?" I think the answer is actually, "all of the above."

What to Give the Dog-Lover Who Has Everything Except a Dog which You Can't Give Him Anyway

The photo above shows my back-to-school present: a paperback copy of Kin Platt's YA (the industry term for "young adult fiction") novel Sinbad and Me. For some bizarre reason this gem of a book is out of print so Becky purchased it for me online at enormous expense (enormous enough that she still refuses to tell me how much) as a back-to-school present because she has often heard me speak of how much I love it.

I love this book for many reasons. For openers, of course, it's a good book - an engaging and funny mystery that involves the mob, ghosts, pirates, long-dead sea captains and buried treasure, all of which converge on a small town in New York in the 1960's. Then there's the nostalgia: I came across a copy in the library at Royal Palms Elementary School in Phoenix during the spring of my seventh grade year and re-reading it always invokes that ethos. But perhaps best of all - or at least most pertinent to this blog - it was Sinbad and Me that gave birth to my lifelong (and as yet unrealized) ambition to own an English bulldog.

You see, I read a lot of mysteries - Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Peter Wimsey, Rumpole of the Bailey - but not in order to match wits with the author in sleuthing out a who-dunnit. I pay minimal attention to the clues - all those dropped handkerchiefs and left-handed men and varieties of cigar ash. The attraction for me is the characters. So, for me, Platt's book is less a mystery than the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his faithful canine companion. Sinbad and Steve sleep together, have regular nose-to-nose conferences on the living room floor, and generally hang out together. Reading the novel made me want a bulldog of my own, that's true; it also made me enjoy my own dog - a black-and-white mutt named Pal - more. I started taking him with me as I threw my paper route, for instance, and discovered his remarkable ability to memorize the various turns. (Well, when I say "memorize," I mean "pee on a succession of landmarks." Still. . . .) In fact, when I think of the dogs I have owned since - Macho the German shepherd, for instance, and Joey, about whom I have written elsewhere in this blog - I realize that a good deal of my enjoyment of them has come from the inspiration I first discovered in Sinbad and Me.

In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis describes a beatified woman whose large heart automatically mothered everyone she encountered.

"Every young man or boy that she met," the narrator's heavenly cicerone, George MacDonald, explains,

became her son - even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter."

"Isn't that a bit hard on her own parents?"

"No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives."

I think that's how I feel about Platt's book: his lovely descriptions of the specific quirks and characteristics of one breed did not make me scorn my own mongrel by comparison, but made me prize him more because I could not begin to appreciate his special breeding and personality.

The next step in Lewis' story is that the narrator notices dozens of cats, dogs, and other animals following in the sainted woman's train. He asks if she kept a zoo, to which MacDonald replies that "every beast or bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ form the Father flows over into them."

Kin Platt gave me, at a young age, my first whiff of this sort of animal-mysticism and started me on the lifelong gift of getting to know dogs. If you do not have the good fortune to be married to an incredibly sensitive and generous wife, I suggest a visit to your local library. If they don't have the book, try inter-library loan. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who reads the novel as a result of this blog, or who has read it already (though the latter should beware of plot spoilers).

Dog-Walking and Spiritual Dyslexia

"'Yes,' said Father Brown, 'I always like a dog, so long as he isn't spelt backwards.'" - "The Oracle of the Dog" by G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton's Jesuit super-sleuth got it, I believe, exactly right: we do well to make much of dogs but we do better not to make too much of them. This is on my mind as I near the end of my second month as a volunteer dog-walker at the Gulf Coast Humane Society here in Corpus Christi (http://www.petfinder.com/shelters/TX476.html). They are wonderful folks here, but a bit . . . I don't know, "earnest," perhaps in the same sense that the defenders of Masada were "earnest." I don't mean this as a knock. Zealots make me nervous, but without zealots nothing ever gets done. The monomaniac's fixation on his chosen cause creates a sufficient slip-stream to drag smaller souls along in his wake. Twice-a-week dilettantes like me would have no opportunity to put in our time if someone else didn't discern eschatological (and apocalyptic!) elements in the care of stray canines.

No, it is only for myself that I offer this meditation, this word of caution not to over-estimate how much it matters to God that I log my time.

And I do think it matters. After all, there is some (minimal) Scriptural precedent for this sort of thing. "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel," Proverbs 12.10 runs. God even tells his curmudgeonly prophet Jonah that if the notion of one hundred and twenty thousand dead Ninevites doesn't tug at his heartstrings, he might at least consider the animals. (Jon 4.11). Of course, this is the same God who mandates hamstringing enemy horses (Jos 11.6) but that's a hermeneutical problem for another time and blog.

But maybe Jonah is a good case in point. The Lord is arguing here from the lesser to the greater, something Jesus will later do using the same referents (Lk 13.15-16, 14.1-5). Beasts have value as God's creation, but not on a level with human beings created in God's image. At my training for this pooch patrol, I heard the instructor say more than once that by signing up for the gig I was "saving lives." Indeed, the speaker insisted, "That's what we do here every day: We save lives." True, in a sense. Canines left penned up, even with adequate food and water, develop something called "kennelosis," a real (though unscientific) term used by vets to describe the disorientation and aggression that result from isolation. It can, in extreme cases, be incurable and require that the dog be killed.

Still, "save lives"? I read about the flooding in Pakistan and I wonder if I dare employ such a phrase. And if I was hip-deep in mud in the Punjab I imagine I'd read about Haiti and ask a similar question. That being so, can I ever feel good about anything? Will I run in the red for the rest of my life . . . and forever?

William Willimon tells the story of a church meeting at the end of a three-day push to assist various causes. One speaker took the microphone to decry the fact that one additional tragedy (left-over land mines, I think it was) had received no attention. "An already deflated meeting," Willimon recalls, "rolled over and died."

Look at us. We were so busy eradicating killer diseases, curing malaria, raising $3 million to solve AIDS, funding the pensions of suffering African pastors and sending water purification systems to Haiti that we missed the one good work that could have certified us as a church that really, really cares.

"Certified" - that's an important word, and one that may help me understand my own angst. Charitable actions (and I use that word in the King-James-translation-of-1-Corinthians-13-sense) hold only frustration or self-righteousness when undertaken as an attempt to avoid the need for grace. I think this could be why I often have a negative reaction to people who are doing such very good things. They give me the feeling that (this may not be their real motivation; how could I know?) in fighting against abortion or feeding the homeless or demonstrating against nuclear power plants or fill-in-the-blank, they have discovered THE one activity that squares them with God's books and obviates the need for grace. It reminds me of a great poem by John Betjeman:

Not my vegetarian dinner
Nor my lime juice minus gin
Quite can drown a faint conviction
That we may be born in sin.

Eat less and give the excess to the poor? Not good enough! What about sweatshop eggs laid by battery hens and hormone-stuffed cows in slaughterhouses and the veal that definitely does not come from contented cows and pate de foie gras manufactured from force-fed geese? Go vegetarian? Still not good enough! What about butter from steroid-amped udders and honey from slaving bees? Vegan? Still not good enough! How many food-miles does your tomato have on the odometer? The carbon footprint on that cucumber would shame a Sasquatch. Turn locavore? Ah, but migrant laborers still pick the local produce, and then there's the whole business of nitrogen in the fertilizer washing into the estuary and killing the salmon.

The point is that we all live in a constant state of mutual dependency. Those who scorn the Christian doctrine of redemption because it makes no sense that one person's death could satisfy another's penalty simply haven't put any thought into that Big Mac they munched a couple of days ago. Animal, vegetable and mineral all told, my existence for twenty-four hours deals enough death to make perfect sense of Calvary.

So where do I wind up? I can keep walking dogs, mostly because I like to do it and I'm semi-hooked on the oxytocin rush. I can offer my activities to the God who (as C. S. Lewis' Screwtape keeps complaining) is prepared to take the clumsiest attempt at goodness and morph it into an acceptable sacrifice. I can see the average stray dog as God's creature and, therefore, God present to me in even a Matthew 25-ish sense. What I can't do is opt out of Calvary or regard the Lord's Supper as an even trade where I pay my own tab.

And I think I prefer it that way.