A Small Furry Prayer (7 page)

15

I called Joy from the Petco parking lot and told her to drive over to the shelter and adopt Salty. She started cheering. I started laughing. But when I hung up the phone, Joe's question, or a version of it, popped back into my mind. What I wanted to know wasn't why I was doing this to myself; it was why Joy was doing this to herself.

Every time we get a new dog, Joy disappears down a drain of concern. If there are emotional or physiological problems—and everyone in our pack has these problems—she can't rest until the dog's on the road to recovery. Her focus is unbreakable, the toll on her well-being considerable. Usually this period lasts a month, occasionally two. But Salty needed a year's worth of vigilance just to keep him alive, and nothing about that year would be easy on her. What I realized in the parking lot is that Joy knew all this and was still cheering about a chance to save him.

I'm inquisitive by nature and a journalist by trade, and my willingness to spend five hundred dollars on dog food coupled with Joy's eagerness to spend a year on Salty had my attention. So I did what many reporters do when faced by ideas they can't quite understand: ludicrous amounts of research. What I was trying to wrap my head around was altruism. Joy gave all of herself to her cause, and why did that happen? Where does this urge toward altruism come from? Is it biological, psychological, or cultural? All of the above? What about spiritual? The Hebrew word
mitzvah
means both “good deed” and “sacred commandment,” while the early Christians made Leviticus's Holiness Code—love thy neighbor as thyself—a central component of their faith. Does this extend to animals? Even more fundamental, were these religious rules written down to promote an urge that genetically existed or to create a moral good where one was desperately needed?

I quickly discovered a lot of people with similar concerns. The first philosophers to consider altruism were the Greeks, and they considered it unlikely. In
The Republic
, Plato wrote, “One loves something most when one believes that what is good for it is good for oneself,” and everyone from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius agreed. Epictetus took an even stronger stance: “Did you never see little dogs caressing and playing with one another, so that you might say, there is nothing more friendly? But that you may know what friendship is, throw a bit of flesh among them, and you will learn.”

This bit of back-and-forth between early egoist philosophers and early altruist theosophists became the opening blows in a battle that's been raging ever since. In the eleventh century, Thomas Aquinas tried to win a round by arguing that man's selfish impulses must always bow before divine law. In the nineteenth, John Stuart Mill thought the difference was not duty to deity; rather, triumph of good schooling: “Why am I bound to promote general happiness? If my own happiness lies in something else, why may I not give it preference?” he asked in
Utilitarianism
, later answered: “By the improvement of education, the feeling of unity with our fellow-creatures shall be … deeply rooted in our character.” By the turn of the twentieth, in
Ecce Homo
, Nietzsche called all such talk rot: “Morality … has falsified everything psychological, from the beginning to the end; it has demoralized everything, even to the terrible nonsense of making love ‘altruistic.' ”

Nietzsche was the last to ponder the question without the aid of biology, as Charles Darwin had already joined the discussion. In his
The Descent of Man,
Darwin moved beyond morality and examined altruism through the lens of evolution. He considered it a question of where in the biological hierarchy natural selection exerts pressure. Was selection a multitiered effect, or did one tier have prominence? Were individuals favored over groups or vice versa? Could it work at the level of whole ecosystems? If selection acts exclusively at the individual level, Darwin reasoned, then altruism can't evolve: “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.” But altruism makes sense at the group level: “Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe … an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. … [A tribe] always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”

This was the invention of an idea called
group selection
and for the next hundred years it held fast. It fell fast in the 1960s when mathematical models were introduced to evolutionary biology. Once scientists started modeling altruism, free riders became the problem. “Even if altruism is advantageous at the group level,” says the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
,

within any group altruists are liable to be exploited by selfish “free-riders” who refrain from behaving altruistically. These free-riders will have an obvious fitness advantage: they benefit from the altruism of others, but do not incur any of the costs. So even if a group is composed exclusively of altruists, all behaving nicely towards each other, it only takes a single selfish mutant to bring an end to this happy idyll. By virtue of its relative fitness advantage within the group, the selfish mutant will out-reproduce the altruists, hence selfishness will eventually swamp altruism. Since the generation time of individual organisms is likely to be much shorter than that of groups, the probability that a selfish mutant will arise and spread is very high, according to this line of argument.

In 1976, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins reduced things further, arguing in
The Selfish Gene
that it didn't really matter on what level evolution occurred: genes were the “fundamental unit of selection,” and since a gene's only function is the inherently selfish self-replication, any selection pressure applied at the group level would be completely negated at the individual level. Altruism became
kin selection
—we help those who are closely related to us—or
reciprocal altruism
—we help those who help us—and the world became a crueler place.

While Dawkins's ideas still dominate today, dog rescue—or what's technically known as cross-species altruism—isn't easily explained by selfish genetics. Since dogs are not our species, kin selection immediately falls apart. Meanwhile, reciprocal altruism runs into an entirely different wall. Because genes are the fundamental unit of selection, the cornerstone of reciprocal altruism isn't just that we help those who help us—it's that we help those who help us pass on our genes. But no matter what rescuers do for animals, none of it is going to help them pass along their genes.

To get around this, the few researchers who have considered cross-species altruism argue for “reputation models”: the idea that being kind to animals enhances one's reputation in the community and that enhancement is beneficial to survival. Unfortunately, no one I knew thought allocating a considerable chunk of my income to dogs was a particularly good idea. Plus, because of animal zoning laws and pets-per-household limits, most rescuers live in places with a sparse human population, so you can enhance their reputations all you want, but there's still no one around to notice.

And that's it. The end of the scientific line. The extent of our best thinking on the matter. Perhaps this wouldn't all be so perplexing if animal rescue was just a tiny movement, but a 2002 and 2003 survey conducted by the Humane Society of the United States identified ten thousand animal protection groups, a number that, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), has since risen above twelve thousand. Some are mom-and-pop shops similar to what Joy and I had started; many are significantly larger. More than three thousand have freestanding buildings for their animals. One hundred and fifty private shelters and three hundred public ones have operating budgets in excess of one million dollars. In total, Americans spend about two and a half billion dollars on animal advocacy and sheltering each year—and what all this research is saying is that no one has yet to figure out why.

16

It's late June and late afternoon. Outside, it's monsoon season: dark skies, thumping thunder, curtains of rain. Inside, I'm cozy on the couch, buried beneath a pile of dogs. My body is stretched out lengthwise. Ahab is asleep between my legs, his head resting on my belt buckle. Farrah lays on my chest, Hugo on my feet, while Dagmar and Squirt perch on pillows behind my head, Dagmar draping down my right shoulder, Squirt hugging my left. Leo, meanwhile, is wedged between my side and the back of the couch, his hind legs lying over mine. From above, we look like a stack of fur-covered pickup sticks. From below, I can barely move.

Then there's Otis. Our resident alpha is both a bastard of a boss and now snoring on a pillow beside the couch. It doesn't take much to wake him. Sneezing, coughing, even strolling through his field of vision while he's trying to nap will rouse his ire. What bugs him most is being touched by another dog. When he's wide awake, the only one allowed any contact is Hugo, and all he's allowed to do is lick Otis's ass. But when he's asleep, even brushing against him can be a capital crime.

All this concerns me slightly. We added too many dogs too quickly and the new pack has yet to gel. Dagmar and Squirt have been fighting for weeks, and the fact that they are now inches apart and straddling my face is both an answered prayer and slightly unnerving. Meanwhile, Ahab is jealous of the attention I've been paying Leo, and Farrah is terrified of both of them. As long as Leo stays put, things should be okay, but the thunder scares him. With every boom, he jerks and Farrah jumps, and sooner or later she's going to land on Ahab and tip onto Otis and, well, I've already spent too much on vet bills this month.

That was because of Gidget. She's never been very healthy, but in early May she lost control of her limbs and started having seizures. Most were ten to twenty seconds in length, minorly terrifying, but over quickly enough. Occasionally they lasted longer. The worst it got was about twenty minutes: her body a cacophony of spasm, eyes rolled back in her head, yellow froth pouring out of her mouth. We took her to see Doc a half dozen times, but epilepsy often accompanies mange and there wasn't much she could do. Instead, Joy started carrying Gidget around kangaroo-style, in a pouch strapped across her chest. Some of this was because dogs find the sound of a heartbeat soothing; most of it was that Joy didn't want Gidget to die alone.

Either way, the pouch worked wonders. By the first week of June, Gidget could stumble about. By the second week, she was running—at least wobbling fast. Unfortunately, despite the physical recovery, Gidget came to us fairly fried, and those long seizures torched her brain even more. With her wobbling about for the first time, we quickly discovered she had almost no ability to recognize social cues, and a complete block when it came to pack order. That order is also pretty confusing right now, and with this much tension in the air and her being barely two pounds, all it's going to take to get her in trouble is not much at all.

There's another thunderclap. Leo jerks, Farrah jumps, and something scurries across the corner of my vision. From my position pinned to the couch it's hard to say for sure—maybe it's Gidget sprinting toward Otis, but no dog can be that dumb. I crank my neck for a second look. Turns out Gidget is exactly that dumb. Not only did she sprint toward Otis, now she's stepping onto his thigh. This doesn't make any sense, and then it does. Gidget doesn't like thunder either. She usually spends storms inside her pouch, safe against Joy's breast. When Joy's not available—and she's currently in town running errands—then Gidget goes for the middle of my chest. Since Farrah currently occupies that spot, her addled mind somehow decided Otis was where to go for comfort.

“Gidget,” I hiss, trying to keep my voice quiet. She ignores me, climbing from thigh to hip. I call her again, a little louder, but that was the wrong decision. Otis's eyes slam open. Anger in all mammals tends to contract the pupils, and his are now dark points. I hear a low growl and see fur rise. Any other dog would be long gone, but Gidget isn't any other dog. Either she doesn't notice the signals or they don't compute. She puts one paw in front of the other, climbs to the middle of Otis's back, and then—as if it were the most normal thing in the world—spins a tight circle and lies down for a nap.

I think it's the shock that keeps Gidget alive. Otis goes from growling to gobsmacked in no time flat. Gobsmacked is something to see, like a cartoon—Goofy the moment after being broadsided by a two-by-four: brow ridiculously raised, ears at wild angles, eyes popping out of his head. Then those brows pull together, as if an idea is forming in his head and just a moment while he thinks it through. I've never seen this sort of deductive logic in a dog before, but Otis connects the dots: Gidget has to be crazy to be on his back, and if she's crazy, then the normal rules don't apply. Instead of attacking, Otis shakes his head once, snorts loudly, and goes back to sleep.

Over the next few weeks, the entire pack began to follow Otis's lead. Gidget was now allowed to sleep on anyone. One day it was Leo, the next it was Squirt. Because Ahab's coat was so thick and he overheated quickly, it was only in the dead of winter that he allowed me—and only ever me—to sleep near him. But a week after Gidget climbed onto Otis, in the middle of a very hot summer, I walked into the living room and found her perched atop Ahab as well.

Somehow a collective decision had been reached: Gidget was crazy, thus to be treated with compassion. It spread through the pack and united the pack. Until then, many of our animals were strangers to one another. They all had bad pasts and trust issues and found themselves thrown into a novel setting with uncertain rules. And we didn't impose many rules. Joy believed the secret to dog rescue was to let the dogs be dogs and love them for it. I believed Joy. Our method was allowing them to decide for themselves. That summer they made some pretty interesting decisions.

Our bed is the most coveted real estate in our house. The dogs treat it as their den, and dogs in dens always follow one commandment: never walk on anyone. This is a basic safety concern—dogs can get crushed—so it's deeply ingrained. Gidget has a favorite spot in the bed: she either nestles in the crook of Joy's neck or gets very frustrated. But being so little, it takes her a moment to climb up there. Usually, by the time she arrives, most of the other dogs have staked a claim. This means that clambering to her favorite spot requires clambering over others' backs. The usual reaction was a small riot. Gidget gets bashed and bitten and flung to the floor. But after Otis made his decision, Gidget was allowed to walk across anyone, and no one so much as groaned.

A bigger change came during meals. With fifteen dogs, feeding time at the zoo had always required a complicated geometry. To avoid fights, the bigger ones had to be separated out: Otis in the bathroom, Ahab in the front fields, Leo in the back fields. Dagmar and Damien also liked to scrap for snacks, so she'd go in Joy's office, while he got the bedroom. The rest of the Chihuahuas got split between the kitchen and the living room, but even then, keeping the peace required constant patrols. Yet a few weeks after Gidget climbed up on Otis, Joy saw her snatch a bone from between his paws, a truly unbelievable feat of daring; even zanier was that he let her have it. A few days later, I watched Gidget pluck food out of Dagmar's mouth—and she too permitted it. This led us to a risky experiment: we decided to alter our feeding strategy and see how far this goodwill had really spread. With me standing guard, Joy scattered dog food across the back porch like chicken feed. The first time it hit the floor there was a moment of profound befuddlement—dogs are not known for their desire to share—but once that wore off, sharing is what went on. Everyone just got down to dinner. No growling, no fighting, no problem.

And all this empathetic behavior had a ripple effect. From that point on, whenever we added dogs to the pack who were ill or old or just plain nuts, they were treated with courtesy similar to what was being extended to Gidget. During meals, with newcomers, we also started seeing our bigger dogs put their bodies between the others and the recent arrivals—who are usually stunned the first few times they get fed via the scattershot method—to ensure that the newbies get enough to eat. Even on something as simple as a walk through the woods, when the pack spreads out along the trail and the older dogs lag at the rear, after Otis's change of heart we began to notice the younger dogs routinely doubling back to check up on their aged friends.

Caring for the sick, protecting the meek, defending the elderly—these are all examples of altruistic behavior. After I'd spent a month researching the roots of this behavior in human beings and not finding many answers, seeing it turn up in my dogs was perplexing. Until very recently, scientists believed altruism the sole province of human beings. In his 1997 book
Good-Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
, legendary primatologist Frans de Waal goes even further, arguing that cognitive empathy—which is the ability to put oneself in another's place and the mental precursor to altruistic behavior—“may be absent in other animals” except for people and, perhaps, the great apes.

This opinion has since begun to change, but only slightly and only in the past few years. As University of Colorado cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff and author Jessica Pierce explain in their 2003
Wild Justice
, what facilitated the shift was an outpouring of data that didn't fit with established dogma:

Eleven elephants rescue a group of captive antelope in KwaZulu-Natal; the matriarch undoes all the latches on the gates of the enclosure with her trunk and lets the gate swing open so the antelope can escape. A rat in a cage refuses to push a lever for food when it sees that another rat receives an electric shock as a result. A male Diana monkey who has learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food helps a female who can't get the hang of the trick, inserting the token for her and allowing her to eat the food reward. A female fruit-eating bat helps an unrelated female give birth by showing her how to hang in the proper way. A cat named Libby leads her elderly, deaf, blind dog friend, Cashew, away from obstacles and to food.

The scientific reception to this new information has been cautious. While many researchers now suspect that animals engage in ethical behaviors more frequently than was once assumed, others have pointed out that these examples are primarily anomalous incidents, not widespread patterns. But Joy and I weren't just seeing anomalous incidents. We were seeing a complete shift in moral behavior, and, at least according to common consensus, that's not something you see every day.

At the time, just six months into my adventure in dog rescue, I was still surprised by this. Back then, I still held fast to a common misconception: that humans actually understood animals, or mostly understood animals; even if we didn't quite yet understand all animals, we certainly understood dogs. But somehow we have managed to live with dogs, to entirely intertwine our lives with them, without noticing something as straightforward as their capacity for moral behavior? This struck me as troubling. So much of modern life is built on the backs of animals—our convenient food supply, our basic clothing materials, our entire habitat (which was clearly once their habitat)—and all of this, we feel, is permissible because humans are a special species. We have long lists of reasons supporting our specialness, with “humans are the only species to exhibit real moral behavior” topping most of those lists, and altruism is widely considered the pinnacle of all moral behavior. But if we have no solid understanding of altruistic behavior in humans and have been almost completely blind to altruistic behaviors in other animals, then how can we be so sure of anything?

Oh yeah, this definitely struck me as troubling.