“I am not a dog person,” I said, when my daughter, then five years old, began her campaign for a dog.
At various times in my life, I’ve been a horse person, a cat person, a donkey person and even a hermit-crab person. But amid a rotating cast of family pets, occasionally supplemented by wounded wildlife en route to the animal emergency clinic or the grave, it seemed clear I lacked some essential dog-person gene — a gene I’d somehow passed on to my daughter.
In my eyes, dogs seemed the most high-maintenance of animals — requiring walks and flea treatments, training and play dates, and more grooming than I even gave myself.
Undaunted, my daughter checked out books about dog breeds at the library and pored over them. She made lists of how the family would benefit from a dog. (We’d get more exercise! We’d spend more time outside!) She would take care of him all by herself, she said, and I believed this grand lie, just like every other parent who consents to get a dog for their kid.
Although I was not a dog person, I am very much a Katherine person, and so of course, the day eventually arrived when we went, as a family, to pick up Katherine’s dog.
It was a practical — certainly not an emotional — decision, I convinced myself.
It’s been widely reported that more American households have pets than children living at home, which is alarming, but also makes sense. Pets provide order to our days and, more often than not, infuse our lives with humor and joy. Some make us safer, serving as guardians of our household and other animals. (Donkeys and peacocks are famous protectors of livestock.) Nearly all Americans who have pets consider them to be part of their family, Pew Research Center has found, and just over half say they are just as much a part of the family as the humans are.
But while human beings are able to connect with a wide range of animals — some even keep boa constrictors as pets — some animals are easier to connect with than others. Namely, dogs.
Dogs benefit people — and yes, children, to Katherine’s point — in myriad ways. Studies have shown that living with a dog improves markers of physical and emotional health. As the authors of one study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science wrote: “We have seen that interacting with a dog can have stress reducing impacts in the biological realm such as decreased cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure, and increases in oxytocin. In the psychological realm, stress reduction can be a driver of immediate improvements in self-report measures of stress, mood, and anxiety, and more delayed improvements in overall mental health and quality of life.”
When it came to picking up my daughter’s new pet and imagining all the infernal walks to come, I didn’t feel these studied truths applied to me.
Jason readily accepted us as his new family, even though he’d had no say in the matter.
Katherine’s dog was a black-and-white border collie whose previous owner had named him Jason because his spots had reminded her of the murderer in the “Friday the 13th” horror movies, which I hadn’t seen, but knew enough of to know that this might not be a good sign. He was already a year old, though, so there was no sense in renaming him. Jason, he would remain.
I’d once bought a horse advertised as the “deal of the year,” which was most definitely not, but Jason was, in fact, a deal, because he was free. He had been the runt of his litter and his owner was happy to finally find him a home where he’d be lavished with love and attention by Katherine and her three siblings. But certainly not me.
In fact, I was so much not enthused about our new pet that a few months into this experiment I decided I’d had enough. This was the second, or maybe it was the seventh, time that Jason escaped the yard or leash and gone gallivanting through the tick-infested woods behind our house. We searched for a panicked half-hour before we caught him, matted and muddy.
The next day, I called the farm and asked if there was anyone else who might want this energetic dog — perhaps someone with sheep that needed herding. There was not. Which was a good thing, because the moment the question was out of my mouth, I was flooded with uncertainty and guilt, most of which had to do with Katherine, not Jason. But the truth was, for all the trouble he was, the dog had started to burrow into my heart, just a little.
He was accompanying me on runs, for one thing, and I found I kind of liked that. Unlike human companions, he didn’t want to chat and didn’t care about the pace. Faster, slower, an abrupt stop to inspect something by the side of the road … it was all wonderful to Jason. Everything was wonderful to Jason. Sticks. Naps. Puddles. Chipmunks. Hole digging. Ball chasing. Leaf raking. Dinner eating, even when it was the same boring brown kibble night after night.
But most of all, he liked being with his people, and he had readily accepted us as his new family, even though he’d had no say in the matter.
During the day, after the kids went to school, he’d lay down by my desk and quietly lie there while I worked. He would wait with me for the school bus, and his joy was palpable when Katherine disembarked. I’d never seen a horse or a cat look at a person that way: his brown eyes wet and shining, his fluffy tail ticking like a metronome. I will fight anyone who says it wasn’t love I saw in those eyes.
Later, I read that a key difference between wolves and dogs is that dogs look at people’s faces, which seems to explain a lot.
It appeared like all Jason needed in the world was Katherine’s attention.
In truth, people probably need dogs more than dogs need people, a subject that has been explored in the 2021 book “A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans” by Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff. Pierce, a bioethicist, says that, contrary to how most of us see dogs, about 80% of the world’s dogs already live unmoored from human support — free range, as it were.
Visiting Ecuador a few years ago, I was smitten with the homeless dogs that roamed beaches and streets. While many were unkept and a few clearly in need of veterinary care, they were surviving and some even appeared well fed. (One enjoyed half of my lunch at an open-air cafe.) It’s a fool’s errand to ascribe human emotions to animals, but more than one mutt that I saw trotting purposefully alongside a rural road, free of leashes and other human means of control, looked — dare I say it? — happy.
You can’t say the same about a dog person who, for whatever reason, finds themself without a dog.
At age 10, he knew something it takes many humans a half-century to learn: Being with the people you love is happiness enough.
In Jason’s later years, he had his own chair, a pale yellow, faux leather recliner we’d gotten from a yard sale. It sometimes took one or two tries to hoist himself onto it, but he’d sit in the recliner and watch us watching TV, like some sort of wizened, wolfish grandfather.
He never seemed to harbor any resentment that we never had sheep, that some essential purpose of his breed, herding, went unrealized. At the age of 10, he knew something it takes many humans a half-century or more to learn: that just being with the people you love, just sitting around on a secondhand recliner that’s seen better days, is happiness enough.
There were times that I yearned for our pre-Jason life — a time when I didn’t have to factor in a week’s stay at the kennel into the cost of a vacation, a time when I didn’t have guilt knowing how miserable Jason was without us, either in a kennel or at home. The guilt slayed me every time we went away, whether for a day or a week.
Which should have been a clue that I was becoming a dog person.
Yet, I was largely oblivious as the years passed, especially when the kids, one by one, went off to college and the dog chores were left to me during the school year.
I didn’t realize the transformation was complete until the morning we lost him.
He had been slowing down, those wide, sassy hips struggling to make it up the hill near our house on our walks. I’d attributed it to arthritis. But it was likely that the tumor that had been removed 14 months ago had come back, and stoic that he was, Jason had never complained.
On his last night, he slept on the floor outside of Katherine’s room, keeping watch one last time as I slept in her bed. I knew he was sick; he had not eaten the previous day and had not wanted to go on his evening walk. The vet didn’t open until 8:30 a.m. and I planned to take him first thing, but he passed quietly an hour before, a final heroic courtesy.
I laid on the floor beside his still body, my face in his fur, and sobbed until I had no tears left, a dog person at last.
Do not think, for one moment, that the decision to bring a dog into your family is a casual thing, that the dog will be part of your family’s life for only eight years, or 12, or however long that dog lives.
Matthew Scully, a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush and many other political stars, was a toddler when a dog named Lucky joined his household. Now old enough for senior discounts, Scully still writes tributes and dedicates books to “the memory of my friend Lucky.”
I am here to tell you that yes, one can become a dog person, and it is a violent transition and it will break you and heal you in so many ways, and you will never understand why you care so much about a dog — a dog! — and it will cost so much money and inconvenience you in ways you can’t even imagine, and you will probably lose your security deposit if you rent.
And yes, you should get your kid that dog, anyway..
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.