Talking to Animals: How You Can Understand Animals and They Can Understand You - Softcover

Jon Katz has written over twenty books, including Talking to Animals, Soul of a Dog, Izzy & Lenore, Dog Days, A Good Dog, and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Rolling Stone, Wired, and the AKC Gazette. He has worked for CBS News, The Boston Globe, Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Katz is also a photographer and the author of a children’s book, Meet the Dogs of Bedlam Farm. He lives on Bedlam Farm in upstate New York with the artist Maria Heinrich; his dogs Izzy, Lenore, and Frieda; and his barn cats, Mother and Minnie.

Talking to Animals 1

Talking to Lucky

I always have the same dream about Lucky; I’ve had it on and off for nearly sixty years, since I was eight or nine years old. In the dream, Lucky is curled up in a ball in a cardboard box in the basement of the school where I first saw him. He is small, white, sweet; he chews on my finger, wags his tail. “Hey, Lucky,” I say. “I’m taking you home. Talk to me.”

These were the first words I ever remember speaking to an animal. I still carry this radioactive seed of memory. The image of this tiny little creature, looking up at me with hope and love, struggling to lift his head up to push against my hand, has been etched in my consciousness more than any other childhood memory. At the time I didn’t know that he was responding to me, but I would come to understand the message soon enough: “Remember me,” he said. My life with animals began with Lucky.

Attachment theorists would say it began some years before that, in the earliest stages of infancy, when lonely and frightened children first experience animal dreams and fantasies, and embrace the idea of animals as beloved and special friends.

But my conscious life with animals began with Lucky, when I was a miserably awkward and unhappy student at Summit Avenue Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island.

I lived on the poor end of the east side of Providence, an Irish and Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Providence was a stern, gritty Catholic city. The Providence public school system was the gateway to education and assimilation for the children and grandchildren of immigrants, as public schools were for so many American children.

Summit Avenue School was an imposing industrial brick structure typical of urban public schools at the time. The halls were wide and shiny, filled with echoes. Boys and girls each had their own entrances and play areas. The teachers at Summit Avenue seemed old and severe to me. There was always tension between the children and grandchildren of immigrants and the children of those who were here before them. Classes were generally joyless affairs, lots of lecturing by humorless teachers and the scratching of chalk on a big green board. It was our duty to go and learn, theirs to try to ram some information into our mostly unreceptive brains.

I was lonely and strange and without a single friend in the school or outside of it. I was frightened much of the time, a bed wetter, and a physically awkward boy. I was terrified of a lot of typical adolescent activities—gym, recess, speaking up in class, getting vaccinations, doing homework, walking home alone, speaking to girls.

My family life was difficult—with my parents quarreling constantly—and I was afraid to go to school, where I was often chased and beaten up by bigger, older kids who ridiculed me and made it necessary for me to take elaborate and circuitous routes to get home safely. Many afternoons, I hid in the vast cemetery near our house. I had no friends, and was almost paralyzed by any kind of social interaction.

And then there was the abuse that is so often linked to bed wetting. Sexual and physical and emotional, it shaped so much of my childhood and my life. The point isn’t what happened to me, but how I have moved past it. Lucky was an angel who came into my life to help me move forward, away from all of that darkness.

The story of Lucky and me began at school one cold gray New England morning. My classmates and I sat shivering at our desks while the ancient radiators hissed and creaked and began the long process of warming us nearly to death in our seats. It was there I learned to drowse whenever anyone gave lectures or speeches, a habit I carry still.

I was sitting at my shiny brown school desk, staring at the carved initials of countless hapless students who had come before me and doodled their initials for posterity. I was already nodding off as the interminable daily announcements began over the school loudspeakers.

I paid little attention to the morning announcements, which were followed by a mass declaration of the Pledge of Allegiance, and a scratchy record playing the national anthem. But one announcement that morning made me sit up and listen.

“Students,” said Miss McCarthy, our teacher, “one of our families has a seven-week-old puppy that needs a home. The first student who arrives at the boys’ entrance on Monday morning at seven a.m. can take this puppy home. Mr. Wisnewski, our janitor, will be present.” Our teacher explained later that the puppy would be at the boys’ entrance because it was understood that no girl would wish to get up so early and walk to school in the dark.

It was a different world, of course. No discussions, parental notes, or permission slips were required. No one wanted to know if we had a fence, were home all day, believed in spaying or neutering, or had even consulted our parents. If you got there first, you could have the puppy and take him home, no questions asked.

I wanted this puppy more than anything; it seemed I had been waiting my whole life for him. He was mine. I had to have him.

We had once owned a German shepherd named King, but I was very young at the time and had nothing much to do with him. My father let him out in the morning, and in at night; he slept in the basement and never set foot in our house.

My parents did not spend money on dogs. King was not neutered, he was not rushed to the vet when he got sick; he holed up in the basement until he got well. There were little Kings running around all over the place. King was never walked or put on a leash, and my father would have chopped his arm off rather than walk around the neighborhood picking up poop and putting it in a plastic bag.

One day King did not come home. There were no posters put up in store windows or on telephone poles. He was responsible for himself. A neighbor told us months later that she had seen him get hit by a truck, his body hauled away in a garbage truck. King was never mentioned again.

We did not have warm and open discussions about things like dogs at the dinner table in my house. My father was not around much and paid little attention to domestic life. My mother worked, cooked, and ran the house.

I knew the decision about Lucky would be up to her, and I also knew I would be getting that puppy no matter what anybody said.

I found my mother in the kitchen after dinner—she always seemed calm and happiest alone in the kitchen doing the dishes, singing and talking to herself. I told her about Miss McCarthy’s announcement.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “You are too young to have a puppy, and I have enough work to do.” Despite her response, I never doubted for a second that she would eventually say yes. This was just the requisite dialogue we had to get through.

She said no at least two or three more times. She sounded angry, aggrieved. Who would be responsible for the dog? Clean up after it? There was no money for vet bills. She didn’t want any dog in the living room or near the furniture, or tracking up the floors or raiding the garbage cans. Who would be responsible for that?

I knew that my mother loved dogs; she was always stopping to pet them and coo at them. I knew how much she had loved King, and how sad she seemed when he was gone, even though she never spoke of it.

Back then, and for many thousands of years before, dogs lived at the periphery of life, not at the center. It is hard to even imagine a time when dogs and cats were not so intensely a part of our emotional lives. When they were kept around mainly to keep burglars away or catch mice.

America was in the midst of a great transition in the human–animal bond after World War II. Our relationship with animals was changing. The working animal was giving way to machines and cars; the wild animal was being subsumed by human development; the postwar period marked the beginning of the rise of the pet. The pet became a member of the family, and a multibillion-dollar phenomenon that has profoundly affected the way we live.

When I was a kid, dogs did not have human names and were not considered children. Animals were not family members. It would have been outrageous to suggest they were.

Dogs ate table scraps and often got hit by cars or vanished. If they got sick, they most often died, were put down, or, if one lived in the country, were taken out back and shot. There were no treats, no toys, no animal insurance plans. People got bit all the time, and female dogs had litter after litter of puppies, usually distributed free to neighbors and relatives.

My mother’s dance with me went on for an hour or so, as I made one pledge after another. I’ll take the dog out. I’ll train him. I’ll clean up, I promise. I’m sure she knew better; I know she wanted me to be happy. I saw her work her way through sputtering complaint to a softer stance.

I told my mother how much I wanted the dog, how much it would mean to me. I imagine she thought a puppy would be good for me, since she was always urging me to “step outside” of myself and join the world beyond my room, where I was invariably holed up with my books and my tropical fish.

So without exactly being agreed to, it was agreed to. She must have talked with my father about it. Nobody said no, which in that world meant yes. I could barely get through the week or sleep, I was so distracted with thoughts of my puppy. I named him Lucky because of my luck, not his. His entry into my life marked a turning point that would change the way I thought of myself.

That Sunday night, my mother loaned me her big old bell alarm clock, whose ticking kept me awake before the alarm had a chance to go off. “Good luck,” she said. “Be careful crossing the streets in the dark.”

Most people who love their dogs are not inclined to dwell too much on why, or how their intensity of feeling came to be. In Darwinian terms, dogs make no sense. We no longer need them for protection or help in hunting. But we love them more than ever.

People often psychoanalyze dogs, trying to determine what they are feeling and thinking. But I always found it more interesting to apply that kind of analysis to the people who own them. I write as much or more about the people who love and live with dogs as I do about the dogs themselves. That has always been what fascinates me the most: Why do we choose the dogs we choose? Why do we love the cats that we love?

This is where attachment theory comes in. Attachment theory is important when it comes to talking to animals and listening to them. It is the first step in learning to understand and communicate with them. Attachment theory helps us understand our need and love for them, the nature of our relationship with them. It is about self-awareness, the key to living with animals in a meaningful way. It explains everything that is important about Lucky and me.

Attachment theory is the seminal study of the dynamics of long-term relationships and emotions in human beings. It is the joint work of psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the 1960s, and has generally supplanted Freudian theory as the primary theory about the development of human emotions.

Bowlby revolutionized psychiatric thinking about emotions and early development, especially among preverbal children whose feelings are affected by fear, loss, or separation from their mothers. He believed that the template for most of our emotions—our security, anxiety, need for love—is shaped in the very first months and years of life, by the way in which our parents respond to our fears and loneliness.

Animal behaviorists, psychologists, and trainers have applied attachment theory to our relationships with animals. In that way, it can help explain why we attach to a particular dog or cat, why we need to rescue some dogs or hunt with others, why we love small dogs or big ones, why we only want one or have a dozen.

Attachment theory encourages us to understand the emotions and traits that we bring to the relationship. I once had a border collie named Homer, an awkward and fearful dog, or so I thought. He always seemed to lag behind, cowering at strange noises, other dogs, and loud people. I found myself yelling at him all the time, and soon I came to see I was making his problems worse. I was just not connecting with him in the way I connected with almost all of my dogs. One day—after shouting at him all during a walk to catch up, keep moving, stay with us—I stopped to ask myself why I was so angry with him.

All of a sudden, on this cool and sunny morning, it hit me that the voice I was using was not my own—it was my father’s voice.

My father was a good man, but a critical man. He believed lectures would solve the complex problems of children. He sometimes considered me to be a sissy, a disappointing child, bad at sports, with few friends, a bed wetter, awkward, and inept at any kind of physical work.

When I was eleven, he threw a baseball at me during our forced “catch” sessions, and hit me in the head and knocked me down. When I came up crying, he told me I was weak and had no real strength of character. I walked off the field, and our relationship never really healed or recovered from that day. We didn’t speak comfortably again for three decades.

Here was the key to what had been happening that morning with me and Homer. I was seeing Homer the same way that I was seen, as weak and fearful. A sissy. I never spoke to my daughter or any other person in that way, but here, with this poor little dog, it was coming out, the same voice, the same manner, the same anger and frustration. I realized that maybe, like me and my father, the two of us, Homer and I, just weren’t meant to have a healthy relationship.

I was living in northern New Jersey at the time, and luckily, there was a young boy down the street, named Jeremy, who loved Homer. He thought he was the most wonderful dog in the world. So I gave Homer to Jeremy. With Jeremy, Homer got all of the love and affection and attention that I was not able to give him. Homer lived happily with Jeremy for twelve more years.

Some of my friends and readers were shocked that I had given one of my dogs away. It is one of those taboos that exist in parts of the animal world. But I think it was the most loving thing I had ever done with an animal, and I had John Bowlby to thank for it. If I had not been familiar with attachment theory, I would never have been able to identify the root of why I had trouble connecting with Homer. I would have condemned this sweet creature to a life of tension and frustration.

People ask me all the time how I choose a dog. Simple enough, I say. I get the dog I want, for my sake and theirs.

Our emotional interactions with dogs are mostly a replay of our own early emotional development, and we generally treat dogs and other pets in one of two ways: the way we were treated as small children, or the way we wish we had been treated.

Through the prism of attachment theory, I have since come to understand why I am drawn to certain types of dogs—border collies and Labrador retrievers, in particular. The frenetic, ADD quality of border collies, their drive to work, their curiosity, and their great loyalty are traits I value, things that I need. The Labs offer me the unconditional love I have always sought in life, and not always ...