A Small Furry Prayer (15 page)

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Ever since Otis had died, Joy had been pining for another bull terrier. I had been holding her off. We were still broke, and big dogs are never a minor expense, and this was perhaps the truth—at least some of it. The rest was that I knew that as long as we continued doing dog rescue, by din of nothing more than the limits of life span, dogs would continue to die. I wasn't sure that was something I wanted to go through again and I wasn't sure how to solve this problem. Until I figured it out, I didn't want to add more animals to our pack. But then I came home from Truchas Peak feeling grateful and hopeful, and one thing led to another, and by another I mean Igor.

Igor was a bull terrier puppy with epilepsy. He'd been born in a puppy mill and shipped to a pet store. Then the economy faltered and the pet store went out of business. The breeder didn't want him back, so Igor ended up living with the pet store's now jobless groomer. But the groomer couldn't pay her mortgage and lost her house, and Igor got trucked to Southern California Bull Terrier Rescue, where things didn't go much better. Under normal conditions, Southern California Bull Terrier Rescue handles about five dogs at any one time. Most find homes within a few months. But over the summer of 2008, with the housing crisis in full swing, they had more than fifty. And few takers—especially for one with epilepsy. For three months no one so much as looked at Igor, but the rescue community is small and tight and news of his plight had spread. Elise heard about him and told Joy and she told me, and that was how it began.

The plan was for Elise to hop on a plane and bring Igor with her. Theoretically, she was supposed to arrive sometime the next afternoon, but ended up missing that flight. On the way to the airport, Elise had been driving by an industrial park in West LA when she spotted a cardboard box sitting beneath an old cargo container. The container was jacked up on blocks and the box was tucked deep beneath. She only saw it for a second, “but, you know,” said Elise, “being me, I was worried that there were puppies inside.”

Some rescuers are magnets. Elise cannot go to the store for milk without finding a stray. Joy often points out that a lot of rescuers have abandonment issues and overcompensate by developing a sixth sense for the abandoned. But even if you don't go in for the paranormal explanations, there's plenty of old-fashioned paranoia to be found—Elise once discovered a box of puppies stuffed inside a dumpster, which is also why she made it two blocks past that warehouse before turning around.

Every animal rescuer I've met considers their mission a sacred task. I once asked Joy about this and to her it wasn't much of a question. “Dog rescue is speaking for those who have no voices. Defending the meek. According to Jesus, that is
the
sacred task.” And like many other people involved in holy work, rescuers answer to a higher authority—which is to say, when Elise found a six-foot-high fence surrounding that industrial park, she just scaled it.

Of course, she found kittens in that box, a couple of them, well on their way to starving to death. But this presented something of a bigger problem: how do you scale a six-foot fence with a box of kittens? Well, if you're trespassing on private property and short on time, never mind that you're on a busy street, you take off your shirt and roll one of the cats inside of it, tie the sleeves around your shoulders like a sling, climb the fence, deposit it in your car, and go back for the second. Which is right about the time the security guards found her—standing in her bra, covered in grime, with a kitten in her arms.

“Clearly,” said Elise, “I'm not having the best day.”

It turned around pretty quick. The security guards didn't arrest her. Instead, they helped her get dressed and helped her get the other cat in the car. After a blizzard of phone calls and a lot of drive time, both animals got lucky and both got homes. Elise and Igor got back on the road.

Which is about when her troubles ended—and ours began.

Mostly, a bull terrier puppy is an exercise in collateral damage. They're a lot like a steam shovel on PCP. With the jaws and the teeth and the disposition, they can draw and quarter a new pair of jeans in twenty seconds. Table legs survive about five minutes. Couches can last a half hour; most don't. Making matters more complicated, Igor didn't like small dogs. This wasn't a prey drive issue—he knew they were his own species and not supposed to be dinner—but the Chihuahuas just bugged him. It's not that uncommon a reaction, but when housing a dozen of them it can be cause for alarm.

The only way to ensure peace was to exhaust Igor. In the beginning, because he wasn't used to the altitude, a good walk did the trick. Pretty soon the walks weren't working. Runs were required. And not just for Igor. On the Fourth of July some shithead wrapped a dog in firecrackers and lit the fuse. They found him screaming down the highway with a skunk stripe of singed fur and melted flesh. We got the call because the burns were going to take a while to heal and in dog rescue time requires space and the Española Humane Society didn't have any. We didn't have any either, but our friends at the Humane Society knew exactly what kind of sucker my wife was for injured Chihuahuas, so that's how they described him to her.

He is not a Chihuahua. He is maybe part pit bull and maybe part hellhound and shaped like a blacksmith's anvil, with a face that's unmistakable Calvin Coolidge. I don't remember what his name was originally, but he had to wear a cone until the burns healed and, being a puppy, quickly destroyed six of those. We next cut a hole in the bottom of an old bucket, and Bucket was the name that stuck. And if Igor was an eight on the Richter scale, Bucket was a ten. By the middle of summer, exhausting these two went from crisis management to the only prayer we had left.

Thus began what soon became the Five-Dog Workout, but this isn't entirely accurate. Sometimes there were five dogs, sometimes there were ten. At the start, the workout was a trail run up a fire road. The local fire roads are perched atop high berms and come with better views. Sometimes the dogs were game for the run; other times they got lost or tired or hot or bored, and that's when the better view came in handy. That said, on the days Igor preferred chasing rabbits to following the pack, even the view didn't help much. He was too fast and too dumb, and this was canyon country, after all. Those days, the only thing that got any real exercise was my temper.

After one particularly long disappearance, I decided to switch from running fire roads to running canyon bottoms. The sides of these were steep enough to keep the dogs penned in. Since the heavy rains tend to pile up debris at various points, running the arroyos required stopping to climb over tree limbs, rusted car parts, and everything else that washes downstream. Or it did until about a month into this experiment, down near one of those debris piles, when Igor spotted a jackrabbit and bolted. Rather than climb over the pile, he shot up the canyon wall, took a half dozen steps forward, and came down on the other side. He looked like a skater on a ramp or a snowboarder in a half-pipe. And before I had time to think about it, I went right up after him.

The dirt was soft and my feet stuck firm and momentum did the rest. I tore up the wall, banked a turn, came back down, tore up the other side and so on down the arroyo. It did, in fact, feel like being a skater on a ramp. Or a snowboarder in a half-pipe. It felt like I was eight years old. It was so ridiculously fun that I forgot what I was doing and just kept going. There were seven other dogs with me that day, and it was about three hundred yards later that I caught sight of them. They were right behind us, running up and down the walls of the arroyo, looking like a bobsled team on a course, except this team seemed to be laughing.

This was another surprising discovery. For a long time laughter was considered impossible for dogs because laughter requires a level of conscious awareness no one believed dogs actually had. But in the early 1970s, a neuroscientist named Jaak Panksepp became interested in the foundations of human behavior. This was around the same time that Georgetown University molecular biologist Candace Pert discovered the opiate receptor. The most common endogenous endorphin has a potency a hundred times as powerful as morphine. When scientists figured this out they started wondering how much of what we call human behavior is actually a direct response to addictive neurochemistry. Panksepp realized that if he really wanted to know why humans did the things they did, he would have to understand these addictive roots. And the easiest way to understand those was to start looking for them in animals.

In the beginning, Panksepp gave rats opiates and recorded the impact they had on basic emotions such as fear and rage. There was plenty to observe, but pretty soon he got curious about more complicated emotions. He decided to study the separation response, a subset of attachment theory, which was the end result of British psychiatrist John Bowlby spending his career trying to understand patterns of familial interaction. Bowlby realized that attachment, defined as the feeling of devotion that binds one living creature to another, is the direct result of an infant's reaction to alarming situations. Essentially, early bonds form when a newborn encounters distress for the first time. The nearest “identified attachment figure” to respond to the crisis becomes the primary caregiver. Over time, this primary caregiver becomes what's called a “secure base” from which the newborn learns to explore the world. University of Virginia developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth soon extended the idea of the secure base, adding in the notions of “stranger wariness” and “reunion behaviors” and developing the now ubiquitous strange situation procedure for classifying different attachment styles.

Out of this emerged the realization that in mammals, attachment to a secure base—usually the mother—is the foundation upon which most emotion rests. For this reason, when Panksepp took five-week-old puppies away from their mothers, they went into puppy hysterics. Then he gave them opiates and the crying ceased. Opiates, he discovered, turns the separation response on or off like a switch. He soon found that just about all of the social emotions—from the need for interaction with others to a mother's love—worked the same way. And since the same is true for humans, Panksepp started to wonder about a different question: could it be that animals had the same range of emotions as humans?

There was only one way to find out. Relying on the same neurochemicals that humans depended upon for emotions wasn't enough, what Panksepp had to figure out was where in their brains these emotions were taking place. If humans and animals shared the same neurochemistry and the same neuronal architecture, then he had a pretty strong argument they also shared the same emotions. This led to a multidecade adventure in electrical stimulation. Panksepp literally worked his way through the brains of animals, stimulating different parts with mild electrical currents and recording the resultant behaviors. After years of this, he found that these emotional signals emerge from the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a near-ancient portion of the midbrain present in all mammals. And he didn't just find fear, rage, lust, and separation anxiety in there; he found the need for nurturance, the desire to care for another, and the urge to play.

The urge to play caught his attention, so Panksepp began observing it in rats. He figured out that what's called rough-and-tumble play emerges at seventeen days of age, regardless of whether or not newborns have been exposed to other rats at play. Fear and hunger can inhibit the full expression of this response, and a strong, secure base can boost it. He also noticed that certain neurochemical combinations (acetylcholine, glutamate, and opioids) enhance the behavior and certain combinations (serotonin, norepinephrine, and GABA) reduce it. And, contrary to popular wisdom, the rough-and-tumble impulse is just as strong in females as males. Which is when he began to wonder about laughter.

“The hallmark of PLAY circuitry in action for humans is laughter,” wrote Panksepp in his
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
, “a projectile respiratory movement with no apparent function, except perhaps to signal to others one's social mood and sense of carefree camaraderie. Some believe laughter is uniquely human, but we would doubt this proposition.” Panksepp doubts this because he discovered that rats make a chirping sound while playing. Because the noise occurs at fifty kilohertz, the same ultrasonic frequency rats use to communicate and one that requires special equipment to hear, he didn't notice for a while. But after he did, he noticed these chirps showed up every time the animals played.

Was this chirping really laughter? It seemed a stretch, so Panksepp decided to probe further. In human children, tickling is the easiest way to provoke laughter, so he started tickling rats. He found that tickling the neck, which is normally how rats solicit play, produced more chirping then tickling their rumps. He found full-body tickling more effective than neck petting. And when he stimulated a portion of the PAG with electricity or just flat out administered dopamine to the rats, he got the same response. And the rats liked it too. They started seeking out their human caretakers for more tickling.

When news of this spread, other researchers discovered similar behavior in other species. Chimpanzees, for example, have a “play pant” that resembles laughter and shows up as a response to tickling. Cognitive ethologist Patricia Simonet recently recorded the sounds of dogs wrestling and discovered a pant she also believes is laughter. When Simonet played the sound over loudspeakers in an animal shelter near her home in Seattle, the dogs inside stopped barking within a minute—which is something that rarely happens. And this result has been duplicated by other researchers in other shelters across America. You can hear a tape on the Internet. I did. That's how I figured out what I heard was actually laughter.