When Dogs Weep

From The Electronic Telegraph - Saturday, May 10th, 1997

What dogs feel

Does your dog love you, or just the food you give it? Do dogs have emotions or only instincts? For years, controversial scholar Jeffrey Masson has reflected on such questions; these are his conclusions

"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog."

Franz Kafka

Investigations of a Dog

A FEW years ago I wrote a book, with Susan McCarthy, about emotions in wild animals. In When Elephants Weep I avoided any prolonged discussion of domesticated animals because I thought that dogs, cats and even parrots were perhaps "contaminated" by their proximity to humans. It seemed to me that I would discover more about emotions in their pure state if I looked only at animals who had little or no contact with people. In truth, however, my ideas about animals leading complex inner lives, filled with deep feelings, originally came from my experiences with dogs.

Although I have had several dogs in my life, I did not have one at the time I began to consider writing a book about their feelings. I missed having a dog and it may be that writing about them was only an excuse to keep dogs once again. I set about acquiring three dogs. I wanted at least one pure-bred dog, and I chose Sasha, a lean short-haired German Shepherd with enormous ears, a very long tail and sad eyes. Sasha was two years old and had been trained as a guide dog but according to her trainers was "a bit soft" to work with blind people. She did not have to work for a living with me; all that I required of her was to feel.

A week later I went to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with Sasha and allowed her to choose the next dog. She was immediately attracted to a 12-week-old golden Labrador mixed with possibly pit-bull terrier and Rhodesian ridgeback. She was active, loveable and very easy-going. I called her Rat ki Rani, Queen of the Night, which is Hindi for the night-blooming jasmine.

A few weeks later I returned and saw a small caged puppy, whose leg was in a cast. She was part golden retriever, part Shetland sheepdog. I was told that she had a bad habit of biting. Evidently her previous owner had kicked her and broken her leg. The SPCA was thinking of "putting her to sleep" for that reason. I could not bear the thought and asked to take her home. I called her Sima.

Soon after the dogs joined the family, Sasha was sitting next to me as I worked on an early draft of my book. It was a quiet Friday evening. I had been alone all day, working. There were just the two of us in the living-room. I looked across at Sasha and noticed that she was looking at me. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the thought: there is another being in this room, another consciousness. What, though, was Sasha thinking?

Why did she suddenly glance up at me? Was she just checking to make sure I was still there? Or was it a more complicated thought, one imbued (as many thoughts are) with feelings - affection, for example, or perhaps anxiety? She looked so peaceful, lying there. Was she feeling something like tranquillity?

For certain Hindu philosophers, tranquillity is the master emotion, the one that underlies all others - it has been so fascinating to me that it was the subject of my PhD thesis at Harvard. Perhaps I was merely projecting my own feelings on to Sasha. It is hard to know.

Animal behaviourists have been notoriously resistant to the notion of animal consciousness. In university courses about animal behaviour, students are taught that it is unscientific to ask what an animal thinks or feels. When they pose such questions they are ridiculed and treated with hostility. Those who are curious about animals' emotions are often accused of anthropomorphism - ' ascribing human characteristics (thought, feeling, consciousness, motivation) to a non-human incapable of experiencing them. Yet to ascribe to a animal emotions such as joy or sorrow is an anthropomorphic error only if one knows for certain that animals cannot feel such emotions. Many scientists have made this decision, but not on the basis of evidence.

There is, after all, no royal road leading us directly to the inner feelings of other humans. People often do not themselves know what they are feeling, nor are they always able to express their feelings without difficulty. Anything we say about their inner world is, in a sense, pure speculation. That speculation, however, can be informed. We try to imagine what we would feel in a similar situation, or we watch the expression in their eyes, and notice the movements they make in their bodies. Why should we not be permitted to speculate similarly about dogs? We watch their eyes, their ears and their tails, we listen for sounds, we delve into ourselves and use empathy and imagination.

I wanted to pursue questions that had not been asked: for example, can dogs feel gratitude or compassion? I decided to try to get inside the mind and, more important, the heart of the dog. Few who have lived with dogs would deny that dogs have feelings. Joy, for example. Can anything be as joyous as a dog? Bounding ahead, crashing into the bushes while out on a walk, happy, happy, happy. Conversely, can anything be as disappointed as a dog when you say "No, we are not going for a walk"? Down it flops on to the floor, its ears fall, it looks up, showing the whites of its eyes, with a look of utter dejection. Pure joy, pure disappointment.

After a lifetime of affectionate regard for dogs, and many years of close observation and reflection, I have reached the conclusion that dogs feel more than I do (I am not prepared to speak for other people). They feel more, and they feel more purely and more intensely. By comparison, the human emotional landscape seems murky with subterfuge, ambivalence and emotional deception, intentional or not.

Freud remarked on the fact that "dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations". In other words, dogs are without the ambivalence with which humans seem cursed. We love, we hate, often the same person, on the same day, maybe even at the same time. This is unthinkable in dogs, whether because, as some people believe, they lack the complexity or, as I believe, they are less confused about what they feel. Sometimes the emotions of a dog are crystal-clear. I went to see some greyhounds that had been rescued by a woman who had turned her ranch into a sanctuary for them.

These animals had been in danger of being shot because they were not fast enough. Many people assume that because racing dogs make money for their owners, they are treated well. In fact, they are often confined in small cages, except during the race, and are never shown any affection on the grounds that they need to be aggressive to win. After brief careers, they are no longer profitable and are difficult to place as pets, so they are often simply destroyed.

What struck me about these dogs was their extraordinary forgiveness. They forgave all the terrible things that had been done to them. When you step on a dog's foot by mistake, somehow it knows that it was a mistake. The dog will immediately make up with you, lick your hand and let you know that it holds no grudge. The greyhound does this at an even more profound level. As the dogs were brought out of their cages to see me, I found the way that each greyhound gazed up at me with absolute trust and sweetness to be almost unbearable. How could their friendliness have survived their being neglected, abused and then discarded, like so much rubbish?

This almost supernatural capacity to forgive was recognised in the earliest writings about dogs. In 1842, in a strange book entitled Animal Biography, there is this heartbreaking story from a French newspaper: "A young man took a dog into a boat, rowed to the centre of the Seine, and threw the animal over, with intent to drown him. The poor dog often tried to climb up the side of the boat; his master as often pushed him back, till, overbalancing himself, he fell overboard. As soon as the faithful dog saw his master in the stream, he left the boat and held him above water till help arrived from the shore, and his life was saved."

Dogs do not lie to you about how they feel because they cannot lie about feelings. A dog can deceive another dog, but only about facts (pretending, for example, not to see a bone the other dog has temporarily left unattended), not about emotion. When a dog is sad or happy, that feeling occupies its whole being: the dog becomes pure happiness or pure sadness.

When a thought, memory or feeling becomes unbearable, we put it out of consciousness, we repress it; dogs lack this ability. I do not believe that dogs are capable of repression, that they can feel sad or happy and not know it. This provides much of the pleasure of being in the company of dogs. As Mike del Ross, of Guide Dogs for the Blind, says: "Dogs never lie about love."

Dogs live in the moment. They are never paralysed by the need to judge and to compare. When I was growing up, my family habitually judged one place in comparison with another from their memory. The present, of course, could never compete with the past. I too picked up this bad habit. A close companion would often have to admonish me. "Why do you compare one beach with another? You are here now; enjoy it for what it is." I learn the same lesson from watching my dogs. They are never gloomy at the thought that this walk was not as nice as yesterday's walk, this forest not nearly as interesting as last week's forest. Each walk is new, unique, and uniquely interesting, with its own set of smells and delights. I keep looking for my dogs' favourite walks, but the truth is, they have no favourite walks; only I do. They love all walks. They love walking. They love being wherever they are. The reason for this - and it is a great lesson - is that they are perfectly content to be who they are, without torturing themselves with alternatives. They love being dogs.

So often I will see Sasha or Rani or Sima roll about in thick green grass, with a look of sheer delight on their faces, and I will think they are doing exactly what a dog was meant to do. How much harder it is to say of ourselves that we are doing what a human was meant to do, especially as nobody knows what that is.

Dogs show no sign of feeling self-pity. While walking my dogs one day I saw a black Labrador-mix chasing a frisbee down a hill. He looked joyous and completely absorbed in what he was doing. When he ran down the hill I noticed with a shock that he was dragging his two hindlegs behind him. They were paralysed. His owner told me Cinder did not seem to notice he had a disability, in much the same way that children can seem oblivious.

A year earlier, when he was 10 months old, he had been struck with a mysterious virus which left his whole backside paralysed. He wears special boots that protect him from the abrasions he would receive from dragging his legs along the ground. In spite of these disadvantages, he was happy - and my dogs were delighted to play with him. They either did not notice his disability or thought nothing of it.

Dogs are not worried about how they will be perceived by other dogs. They do not have to hide their joie de vivre for fear of appearing naive, and they do not need to feign boredom for fear of appearing unsophisticated when they are, in fact, interested.

Learning to know somebody intimately is often the beginning of dislike, sometimes even contempt. Among humans, love often does not survive a growing acquaintance but, in a dog, love seems to grow with acquaintance, to become stronger and deeper.

Even when fully acquainted with all our weaknesses, our treachery, our unkindness, the dog seems to love strongly - and this love is returned by most dog-owning humans. We too seem to love our dogs more the more we get to know them. The bond grows between us and our dogs.

Where does it come from, the dog's love? Often it is assumed that providing food to puppies and dogs lies at the heart of a dog's attachment. (A similar theory has been posited for the emotional bond between an infant and its mother.) A series of experiments conducted by A J Brodbeck in 1954 showed this not to be the case, and feeding not to be a necessary part of the development of the social bond.

One group of puppies was automatically fed by a machine, the other group was fed by a person. The hand-fed puppies vocalised more at the sight of the experimenter, but this was the only important difference between the two groups of puppies. So love on the part of the dog does not seem conditioned merely by what we provide for the dog, nor simply a recognition that we are a source of food. A dog does not love a robot that gives it food, but it is capable of loving people who never feed it.

Humans and dogs seem to be the only two species capable of a great love which crosses the species barrier. No other animal mourns for a lost human friend in the way that a dog does.

It is possible too, that dogs - like humans - recognise this similarity between the two species, this ability both have to love a member of a different species.

A dog loves with its body, and its heart, but probably not its mind. Dogs have minds, of course, and they use them for many things, but they do not make calculations about the advantage they might obtain from loving (temporary flattery is another matter). Nor are they inhibited in their love by thinking about its possible disadvantages.

And so dogs do not make the mistakes about love that humans frequently do. The human brain is the primary sex organ, but this is not so for the dog. You cannot impress your dog with beauty, wealth, possessions, power or physical prowess. We might fall in love with somebody for any of these qualities. A dog does not fall in love, a dog merely loves.

I am continually amazed by the dog's ability to love so unconditionally and without ambivalence. Many people will have heard at one time or another of a cruel or neglecting owner whose dog loves regardless of how it is treated. It is as if once a dog loves you, it loves you always, no matter what you do, no matter what happens, no matter how much time goes by.

The capacity for love in the dog is so pronounced, so developed that it is almost like another sense or another organ. It might well be termed hyperlove, and it is bestowed upon all humans who live closely with a dog.

'Dogs Never Lie about Love: reflections on the emotional world of dogs' (Jonathan Cape) by Jeffrey Masson is available for �15.99 plus �2.50 p & p.
To order a copy, send a cheque for �18.49 to Telegraph Books Direct, PO 1992, Epping, Essex CM16 7JL or telephone 0541 557222 (8am to 8pm daily).

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson gained a PhD in Sanskrit from Harvard and then became Professor of Sanskrit at Toronto University. In 1970 he left to train as a psychoanalyst. But after a decade of intensive training at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute he turned on his chosen profession, publishing several books that attacked both the theory and practice of Freudian analysis. He was sacked from the prestigious post of projects director of the Freud archives in London and vilified by fellow psychoanalysts. His books became best-sellers.

Jeffrey Masson's publications include The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984), Against Therapy (1988), Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (1991) and When Elephants Weep (1994).
He lives in California with his wife, their son, three dogs and two cats.

(The dog in the watermark is a zoo exhibit in Fuzhou, China).