For the Love of a Dog (20 page)

One of the important roles of the limbic system is not just to assign an emotional state to an event, it’s to record those associations in an immediately accessible place. Even though we may not be as good at using our noses as dogs are, we can relate to the strong connection between smell and emotional memories. Perhaps the scent of pines brings back the happiness you felt every summer when your parents took you camping. You might notice a perfume you haven’t smelled in years, and remember your first love as an adolescent. Of course, these associations are not always good ones. The smell of champagne brings back the day I combined my first hangover with my first sailboat ride on the open ocean. Forty years later, all I need is one sniff of champagne and my stomach begins pitching like a ship in a storm.

I’ve always wondered whether the relationship between smell, memory, and emotion explains a confusing kind of case related to dog-dog aggression. Behaviorists see a small but consistent percentage of aggression cases in which dogs appear to be acting like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At first, they send out all the signals of friendliness while greeting another dog—wagging from the shoulders back, mouth open, eyes relaxed. This continues until the dogs have greeted one another for a second or two, and then our previously slap-happy dog explodes, growling, lunging, and sometimes attacking and injuring the other dog. You can imagine how confusing and frightening this is to owners (not to mention the other dog), and I’ve been perplexed by it for years. I have an inkling that it’s related to smell. The only pattern I can find in these cases is that the dog’s friendly demeanor always changes right after he or she has gotten a good whiff of the other dog’s anal-genital region. That suggests the dog’s reaction is related to smell, although I’m
not sure this hypothesis will help us to understand it better. We have so much to learn about the world of scent that our dogs live in—we don’t even know what information they obtain when they sniff one another, or when they smell urine deposited by others as scent marks. Can they sense the emotional state of a dog from his urine? It’s a reasonable possibility, given how the body’s chemistry and physiology change as our emotions change, but we don’t really know.

We do know that there is another relationship between smell and emotions that doesn’t rely on memory or any kind of learning. Certain odors seem to have inherent effects on us, no matter what our early experience. The scents from the oils of some plants appear to improve our mood by changing our brain’s chemistry so that it produces proteins that tend to make us feel good. Lavender, for example, is known for producing feelings of calm and well-being in those who smell it; even babies in nurseries sleep better and longer when the scent of lavender is in the air.

There’s no reason that scent wouldn’t have an equally important effect on your dog. One practical application of the relationship between smells and emotions is the use of DAP. “DAP” stands for “dog appeasing pheromone,” and it seems to be useful in improving the mood in some dogs who are anxious about being left home alone or are afraid of thunderstorms. It is a replicate of the pheromone produced between the mammary glands of a lactating dam, and is presumably received by the pups when they’re experiencing the happy feelings of getting a good meal. I’ve had clients who reported great success with it. Others couldn’t detect any difference at all in their dog’s behavior, so don’t expect miracles if you try it. But it’s clear that the relationship between smell, emotion, and canine behavior is an important one that we need to learn more about.

We could talk about the senses of a dog for a long time, but that’s already been done beautifully in other books, such as Stanley Coren’s
How Dogs Think
. That book is a great resource for how all of your senses compare with your dog’s, and I highly recommend it. What I want to emphasize here is that there are many similarities between the brains of people and the brains of dogs. We share ancient systems found in thousands of species to keep the machine of the body running as efficiently as possible. We both have structures, shared by all mammals,
that mediate fear, anger, and joy, as well as primal drives like hunger and sexual energy. Our brains are designed to filter sensory information coming from the environment, to process that information and compare it with memories stored in the midbrain before deciding how to respond. Certainly, our brains differ from those of our dogs in many ways—in the information that they take in, and in their abilities to form mental abstractions and to solve problems. These differences are important, but they don’t override the fact that our brains and dogs’ brains share much of their architecture and design. There is little question that the parts of our brains that mediate emotion are more similar in people and dogs than they are different. Your brain and the brain of the dog at your feet are amazing structures, fragile mazes of chemicals and electricity that are responsible for your fears, your occasional frustrations with each other, and the love that binds you together.

Bo Peep’s leg never functioned very well, but her story ends happily nonetheless. She had used her forelegs and shoulders as a young pup, and the active pathways between them and her brain allowed her to develop tremendous strength in them. She’d flip her hips the way dogs do when they lie down, and pull herself forward with her massive front legs, dragging her hips behind her, her thick fur protecting her skin. She was amazingly fast and agile, and could scoot up the hill faster than I could. She lived happily with the sheep all her life, and I never lost an animal to dogs or coyotes again. Visitors would stop and stare dumbfounded when she flopped her way down the hill inside a flock of ewes, looking like some crazed white seal who had abandoned the ocean for green hills and the company of sheep
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She protected my flock for nine years and was as much a part of Redstart Farm as I was. She didn’t know her hindquarters were supposed to work any differently than they did, and she remained sweet and cheerful her entire life. One afternoon, while working upstairs, I heard her alarm-barking and looked out the second-story window. Bo Peep had caught a large stray dog in the act of running off with my only male duck. While Uncle Bert the Stud Duck squawked and flapped his one fee wing Bo Peep streamed down the hill like frothy white water in a flood, picked up the intruding dog in her huge jaws, and shook him like a rat. She released him the moment he dropped Uncle Bert, and let him run away, yipping
like a cartoon dog down the center line of the road. At first I had been frozen at the window in horror, but I finally ran down the stairs and flew out of the house to help. By the time I arrived, the dog had disappeared and Bo Peep was gently nudging Uncle Bert back toward the barn. She’d lick his injured wing then nudge him toward the barn, let him walk a few shaky steps, then lick and nudge again. I stopped in my tracks, transfixed by their slow, dancelike procession
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Uncle Bert survived his injuries, but Bo Peep died a few years later of a hateful kind of cancer called hemangiosarcoma. I found her in a coma in the barn, carried her in a panic to the car and drove like a race car driver to the vet’s office. She died, never having woken up, a few days later. Her death hit me so hard I attended a group counseling session for pet loss, where I passed around photographs and told her story to sympathetic listeners. I cried buckets for days on end, and finally planted a raft of white tulips in her honor. That’s where the next big white dog on the farm got her name—Tulip, named after the flowers I watered with tears for Bo Peep
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It turned out to be the perfect name, because Tulip is the essence of springtime, year in and year out. She is playful and shiny-eyed and so athletic that in her youth she climbed my fences the way a fireman climbs a ladder. Just calling her name, “Twooooooooo-lip!” makes me smile. She and I visit Bo Peep’s gravestone every day. For a while I didn’t think there’d be room in my heart for another dog whose life was as big as Bo Peep’s. Turns out I was wrong
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By the time I met him, Blaze was in big trouble. He had a record of three serious bites, one for every year of his life. A strikingly handsome Border Collie, Blaze was owned by Father Murray, an eighty-year-old Irish priest straight out of central casting. They made quite a pair—Blaze with a generous ruff of black-and-white fur, Father Murray with dancing blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and an angelic sweetness that melted my heart the minute he walked into my office. But this wasn’t going to be a fun consultation; I knew that before it started. A mutual friend had talked Father Murray into coming to see me, sick with worry about the future of both man and dog. The two adored each other, but Blaze had become so aggressive to visitors that no one could get out of their car in Father Murray’s driveway without being bitten. Walking into the house was out of the question
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The problem was compounded by the fact that Father Murray was so hard of hearing I had to yell, even in my small office, so he could hear me. When visitors came to his isolated old house deep in the country, he couldn’t hear the car drive up or the knocking on his door. His only clue that company had arrived was Blaze charging toward the window, barking so aggressively he became almost hysterical
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In short order, it became clear that Blaze was a danger to society. Even Father Murray was at risk, given the extremity of Blaze’s behavior and the chance that he’d lash out at anyone in his frenzy. Father Murray would have done anything to rehabilitate Blaze, but the chance that he could manage a successful rehabilitation was almost nil. Blaze was a young
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healthy dog bred to work hard all day, with boundless energy that went in all the wrong directions. Father Murray may have been active for his age, but I’d be hard pressed to describe him as hearty or agile. His hearing problem and his isolation in the country complicated the situation. If he couldn’t rehabilitate Blaze himself, the only alternatives were rehoming him or having him euthanized. I found myself forced to scream words difficult even to whisper—“I SAID, ‘EUTHANIZE’”—desperately trying to communicate with this dear old man who loved his dog as much as life itself
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The thought of giving up Blaze devastated Father Murray. That’s the only way I can describe it. He began to cry in that deep primal way we do when all our inhibitions have been overrun by emotion. I sat helpless at my desk while this dear old man sobbed in my office, until, in a classic case of emotion trumping logic, I offered to take Blaze and try to rehabilitate him myself. As soon as I said it, I knew it was crazy. Adding another dog into my already busy life was the last thing I needed. But I took Blaze home, wrapping my life and the life of my dogs around his rehabilitation for the next three months. I’m glad I did, although I’ve asked the office manager to carefully screen consultations with adorable, elderly priests for a while
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