A Small Furry Prayer (9 page)

Friedmann's work was so startling that hundreds of similar studies have since been done for corroboration purposes. It turns out that dogs not only improve heart attack survival rates but also aid in prevention. Furthermore, canine companionship lowers blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, and incidence of sleeping disorders; significantly increases survival rates after any serious illness; assists in childhood development; and enhances overall family life. A 2002 State University of New York at Buffalo study found that spending a few minutes alone with a dog can do more to reduce stress than talking with a spouse or best friend, while in 2006, in a St. Louis University School of Medicine study, nursing home residents reported that spending time alone with a dog was a far greater cure for loneliness than spending time with other people. A 2007 meta-analysis published in
Anthrozoos
summed up this work succinctly: “The company of animals provides considerable immunity from depression.”

Many of the researchers involved in these studies found their own results so bewildering they tried to hedge their bets while presenting their data. “While the idea of pet as social support may appear to some as a peculiar notion,” wrote lead researcher Karen Allen in the journal
Psychosomatic Medicine
, “our participants' responses … suggest to us that social support can indeed cross species.” Despite Allen's hesitancy, with the new start date for human-dog cohabitation pushed back a hundred thousand years, what would be actually surprising is if these kinds of health benefits didn't show up. Humans evolved to share their lives with dogs, and our brains are no longer cut out to do this work alone. Scientists have been presenting this health data as if canine companionship were an evolutionary rarity rather than a near constant. Invert the equation and then there's nothing surprising about these finding. We have evolved to cohabit with dogs. Their presence is part of what makes us feel safe in the world. Remove them from our lives and—as I found out in LA—there's bound to be consequences.

There is a famous koan first uttered by the Zen master Chao-Chou Ts'ung-shen in the seventh century. Zen koans are stories, dialogues, questions, and the like wherein understanding requires not just intellectual prowess but an intuitive leap that often has little to do with the familiar. Chao-Chou's koan is known as “Mu,” which was his answer to the question: “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” While “Mu” can be roughly translated as “none” or “without,” Robert Pirsig, in his 1974
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, defines it as “no thing,” saying that it actually means “to unask the question.”

What all of this Buddhist koan work is trying to root out is a myriad of formidable human assumptions, foremost among those a belief in the moral superiority of our species. This superiority, known philosophically as “human specialness” and biblically as our “dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” is often based on the purported highly evolved state of human nature. Among the many of things gleaned from all this recent research into human-canid coevolution is the straightforward realization that asking the question “Does a dog have Buddha nature” may, in fact, be no different from asking its inverse: “Does a human have Buddha nature?”

Then again, the answer is still
mu
.

PART  FOUR

I don't do drugs. I am drugs.

—Salvador Dalí

18

By the end of July, our late afternoons were mayhem. Joy had taken to calling the mayhem “Chihuahua play hour.” I had taken to calling the play-by-play: “There's Ahab sweeping across the left side of the lawn and Otis barreling up from the back fields. Leo barks twice, and—wow did you see that takedown? A pile of fur for sure. Otis is having a great season. He's just built for this game: low to the ground, good hips, great leverage. He smashes Ahab onto his back, which is all the opening Wookie needs—he dives in low for the neck grab. You've got to love his heart, but he's too small to play with the big dogs and has no defense for Ahab's spin move. So Wookie gets upended and goes sailing into Otis, and this clears a lane toward Leo—who's in a contract year and has great speed but no real lateral movement—and Ahab takes advantage.” And that's about ten seconds of the fun; the games go on much longer.

Besides the wrestling matches on the lawn there's usually a marathon back on the porch. It's a charge that Dagmar likes to lead, her favorite route being two laps around the house followed by a dash to the fields and back again. Most days Bella, Farrah, Squirt, Lux, Damien, and Hugo run behind her and outside of a Disney movie very few people actually get to see five Chihuahuas chase a pit bull chase a dachshund, and—I can now say with some authority—it's a shame.

Occasionally Vinnie will join this parade, but at his age all he can usually do is totter, though lately he has begun to totter with some gusto. And he isn't the only one who has found country living supremely restorative. Dagmar is something like a hundred in human years but can now outrun the puppies. Farrah's mange has cleared up, Damien's arthritis as well. Gidget hasn't had a seizure in a month, and that's triple the last record. The real miracle might be Chow, though it didn't start out that way.

Chow started out without a backstory—the word rescuers use to describe an animal's past. Was she beaten? Ignored? Kept chained in a yard? A street dog used to roaming free? Without a backstory, all we got was a veterinary update and everybody's best guess. Rehabilitation is the difficult puzzle to solve. Some cases are easier than others. Dogs that have been abandoned need attention and affection. Dogs that have been abused need to know it won't happen again, which means they need to initiate all physical contact. When dogs have been both abused and abandoned, these treatments work at cross-purposes and how to fix that?

Or dogs that are afraid of doors—not their slamming, but their general presence—are often dogs that have never been allowed inside a house before. Sometimes this means picking them up and carrying them inside; sometimes they've been previously punished for similar transgressions and the sight of four walls is enough to set them trembling. This dilemna knots up quickly, since dogs never allowed inside are also dogs who have not been allowed to sleep near humans. Because dogs live in dens, they never willingly sleep alone. Since most people only have one dog, sleeping outside means sleeping alone, and learning to do so requires a difficult psychological adjustment on the dog's part that frequently leads to later difficulties in pack integration. Since dogs learn much faster by watching other dogs, the great advantage to doing rescue with a pack rather than a pet is that the pack does most of the work. This advantage disintegrates when dogs purposely keeps themselves apart. In those cases, different methods are required.

Chow was one of those cases. She was a white terrier with a host of problems: abused, abandoned, blind, deaf, gloriously fat, comically ugly, disliked humans, disliked other dogs, bit all species equally and with little provocation. Her heart was failing, most of her other organs not far behind. She took seven different medications daily but was a longshot to last the summer. Joy wanted for her dogs what she wanted for herself: for their last memories to be of love. How to pull this off with a dog like Chow is among the reasons rescuers dislike hospice care. Personally, I wanted a way to remember that she hated my guts. Most people pet their pets, hence the name, but the adjustment was taking some time. I was always forgetting and reaching for Chow, and she had a mouth like a piranha. Pretty soon I had sore need of a better plan.

Rescue can be a very intuitive process, and by intuitive I mean that one afternoon, possibly because some tequila was involved, my better plan was “Fuck it.” I just reached down and picked Chow up. It was like trying to cuddle a tornado: spinning, shaking, snarling, biting, barking. I kept her at arm's length with my elbows locked and fingers firm until that first wave of panic subsided. In those moments of exhausted reprieve before the next round, I sat down in a chair and locked her waist between my legs. This was perhaps not the best maneuver. I had inadvertently exposed my genitals to her claws and my eyes to her teeth. Chow was already availing herself of the first target and working her way toward the second. I was all set to hurl her across the porch when intuition struck again and I shoved my perfectly healthy hand into her vigorously snapping maw.

I guess that's why they call it intuition. Chow's mouth turned out to be small enough that with my fist wedged inside she couldn't apply nearly as much pressure. She chomped and chomped and after about ten minutes the feeding frenzy vanished, suddenly replaced by profound befuddlement. Chow had finally noticed that my other hand had been stroking her back the whole while. This may have been the first time in her life that she'd felt affection, and where was it coming from? She glanced over her right shoulder, then looked left. Pretty soon she was whipping her head back and forth like a speed freak at a tennis match. It was fear of neck snapping that finally made me let her go. Then she leaped off my lap and shot across the porch, but froze at the edge, one paw lifted, the other legs bent. Whatever that next move, Chow never made it. Instead, she waddled back over, plopped down at my feet, and began licking my toes.

And in dog rescue, this is what a good day looks like.

Chow's good days began to add up. She became another of our backward-aging Benjamin Button cases. After that day on the porch, her fur stopped falling out, she dropped weight, and even her eyes cleared up. No longer blind, Chow discovered running. Her favorite gait a transverse gallop—a gallop without synchronized limbs—that's usually found in large ungulates and, well, dogs as chubby as Chow. She further augmented this traditional motion with a front paw hop that showed up every few feet and was usually accompanied by saucer-big eyes, a wide smile, and—not being the most coordinated of hoppers—a head-over-heels tumble that looked like an explosion at a marshmallow factory.

The only thing missing from her recovery was canine companionship. Chow had come to like the humans, but not other dogs. Even after three months in our care, she still fought any who came close. Most stayed away, or did until an afternoon in late July. I had been sitting in the rocking chair on the porch watching Chihuahua play hour, and Chow had been sitting beside me doing much of the same. Then she got thirsty, leaped off my lap, took three steps toward the water bowl, and
kaboom.
This was the moment the train of dogs that was always racing round the house came racing round the house. Dagmar caught her hind legs and Farrah caught her head. Hugo managed to miss entirely, but Lux clipped her hips and sent her spinning into Bella, whose front paws slid beneath her belly and—being a pit bull and three times Chow's size—shoveled her straight into the air.

In
Dogs Never Lie About Love
, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson says: “Dogs do not appreciate time that is set by convention; they do not divide a day up into minutes or hours, nor do they think in terms of weeks or months or years. A dog does not tremble at the thought of his own mortality; I doubt if a dog ever thinks about a time when he will no longer be alive. So when we are with a dog, we, too, enter a kind of timeless realm, where the future becomes irrelevant.” This was one of those moments—it stretched and stretched. Chow backflipped over Bella and Bella rolled under Chow, and I could have knitted a sweater in the hours between dogs launching upward and dogs crashing down.

They landed in a tangled heap, faces inches apart, eyes locked, all hell about to break loose. I was already jumping out of my chair, but Chow had other plans. She leaned forward and licked Bella on the nose. I was staggered. Bella was dumbstruck. Her jaw dropped open and her tongue flopped out. Then she regained herself and barked once. Chow didn't need to be told twice. This was game on. She broke into a giant grin, jumped up, and ran off. Bella took off after her and all the other dogs fell in behind. The whole parade went galloping down the veranda and sometimes there's no better feeling in the world then watching a pack of happy dogs at play. Sometimes it's better than better.

Joy once told me of an exhilaration unlike any other she's ever known that comes from seeing a dog reborn. In the psychology of altruism, that rush is known as
helper's high
. The term was coined by Big Brothers Big Sisters executive director Allan Luks in the 1990s, after he interviewed more than three thousand Americans involved in volunteer service and found that their good deeds consistently produced a feeling of profound euphoria. “Many people were reporting,” he wrote in his now classic
The Healing Power of Doing Good,
“that as a result of their helping they were experiencing a rush of physical pleasure and well-being, increased energy, warmth and actual relief from aches and pains.”

Luks believes that helper's high is caused by endogenous—meaning internal to the body—opioids called
endorphins
. These chemicals help regulate parental bonding, social interaction, and physical contact. They kill pain and produce pleasure in the same way as exogenous—meaning external to the body—opiates such as opium and heroin. Since Luks's original work, researchers have further fingered
serotonin
, the “happy chemical” behind Prozac; anandamide, the body's natural version of THC—the psychoactive chemical found in marijuana; and, especially if risk taking is involved, the feel-good neurochemicals norepinephrine and dopamine.

Luks describes helper's high as a variation of what athletes call
being in the zone
or, as scientists now prefer, a
flow state
. Much of what we know about flow states comes from Claremont Graduate University psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has devoted his lifetime to the subject. Csikszentmihalyi defines this state as a joyous and complete merger of action and awareness, as “being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter: the ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.”

The depth and range of the experience vary considerably, but whatever the level, flow is considered among life's most exquisite ecstasies. The psychologist Abraham Maslow called flow states “peak experiences” and explains further: “During a peak experience, the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one's consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy.” Csikszentmihalyi notes this empathetic unity extends from one's immediate companions outward to “nature and contact with ultimate reality,” which, as Luks points out, creates a feedback loop of motivations: “the sense of bondedness … can be both the inspiration for altruism and the result of the altruistic act.” And for all these reasons University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman calls flow
autotelic
—an end in itself.

It's an elusive end as well. While the zone is most frequently associated with sporting pursuits, California State University at Fullerton psychologist Ken Ravizza found peak experiences relatively rare in an athlete's career. Yet Luks discovered that charitable deeds produce flow states with almost clockwork regularity. Ninety-five percent of his original study group reported the rush, while eighty percent of those reported that it lasted for hours, occasionally days—which is exponentially longer than the average flow state. Why this is the case is not yet known, but there's one obvious explanation. Flow is the merger of action and awareness, and for that merger to take place one needs to be thoroughly engaged in the task at hand. This is exactly where do-gooders have an advantage. Flow might be relatively rare in athletics and relatively common in altruism because, as Leonard Koppett famously pointed out in
Sports Illusion, Sports Reality
, sport is fundamentally an illusion: “specifically, the illusion that the result of a game matters.” Almost by definition, altruism is the opposite. The game always matters. Most of us don't need to be coached into keeping our eyes on the ball when actual lives are at stake.

Of course, I didn't yet realize actual lives were at stake, as I had been too busy enjoying myself. Watching Chow gallivant down the porch, I got my first taste of helper's high, and it came with the same deep time sensation I'd experienced at Wolf Mountain Sanctuary, only more intense and more intimate. It was a sense of cross-species connection that defied logic. I felt like I could speak dog. I felt, for the first time in my life, like part of the pack. How good did that feel? Two days later, I asked Joy to marry me—so go ahead, draw conclusions.