These books show that the old dog can teach us new tricks
We train dogs to sit, but dogs train us to live, as four writers discover.
By Carol Blair, Times Staff Writer
Published August 5, 2007
Dog Days: Dispatches from Bedlam Farm
By Jon Katz
Willard, 270 pages, $23.95
Dog Years: A Memoir
By Mark Doty
HarperCollins, 224 pages, $23.95
Marley & Me
By John Grogan
William Morrow, 304 pages, $21.95
Cesar's Way
By Cesar Millan
Harmony, 234 pages, $24.95
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Wordless companionship. Physicality. Joy of life. Dogs have traits that not only endear them to us; they can teach us and sustain us.
A popular hybrid of the modern memoir chronicles human life through the lens of dogs and their role as a salve for the midlife psyche. Often these books become the story of turning points in the writers' lives in which dogs provide emotional sustenance, mining the symbiosis of human and canine.
Jon Katz's Dog Days: Dispatches from Bedlam Farm joins recent books by a poet, a trainer and another journalist-turned-author in examining the impact of dogs on our lives and minds. In this book, Katz, who has become an introspective serial examiner of his relationships with dogs, settles into life as a novice farmer and continues a battle with anger and restlessness that is relieved by communion with animals.
One of Katz's earlier works, A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs and Me scheduled to be released later this year as a film starring Jeff Bridges, focuses on his finding herding work to fulfill his energetic border collies' lives. But now he has found that his farm responsibilities are the work he needed to supplement his writing. The farm is where he finds renewal, serenity, elemental emotional relationships with animals and, finally, balance.
While his tolerant wife spends much of her time in the city working, Katz's dogs join him on his upstate New York farm: border collies Rose, whose mysterious and lonely spirit teaches him how to find harmony in work, and Izzy, the closest to being his latest animal soul mate; plus Labrador retrievers Clementine, eternally affectionate and pliant, and Pearl, whose perseverance through myriad health problems is a model of recovery for a man with a serious spine condition.
Dog Days makes adaptability a recurring theme: Katz even decides to share custody of his darling Clementine with a friend, because he thinks he can't give the lively dog enough attention. "My life with dogs may never follow the classic American version," he writes.
Katz thoroughly enjoys his dogs, but even as he is charmed by donkeys and a steer he adds to his furry family, Katz mourns the willful and free-spirited border collie Orson, introduced in A Dog Year.
Orson, who was smart and stubborn enough to learn to open a refrigerator, was put to death for biting people, and the dog haunts Katz's thoughts even as he surprisingly finds another "lifetime dog" in Izzy.
Izzy helps put things in perspective one day while Katz is training him to herd sheep. Unlike Orson, Izzy fails to respond when Katz shouts commands in anger, but he excels when Katz is calm and uses positive reinforcement.
"Is it finally beginning to work through your impenetrable skull?" Katz asks himself. "Anger does not work. It's not effective, not with people or with dogs. And this new dog is a messenger here to drive this truth once more into your woeful consciousness."
As Katz promises in a note at the beginning, "No dogs die in this book," but some cynicism about them does creep in. He dispels the One True Love Dog notion, the idea that a pet will always adore one owner only, and an owner likewise. Of dogs, he writes: "They are loving, but they are also bribable. If they were politicians, we'd see a steady stream of indictments."
Ultimately, his dogs teach the aging Katz to go with the flow, and he feels less like a loner as a result, building strong human friendships as well. Again, he credits dogs as a model: "Their dominant trait, their special genius, is their adaptability."
'Marley' revisited
Katz's rapidly growing body of dog works has made him successful, but the 2,000-pound gorilla of dog memoirs is Marley & Me, former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Grogan's phenomenally popular account of the exploits of a large Labrador retriever.
That book, too, is driven by human psychological forces. It could have been titled Marley, My Marriage & Me, as much of it turns out to be a crafty portrayal of marital dynamics in the context of human-dog relationships.
Tucked amid funny anecdotes of Marley's drool flinging and couch killing, another priority emerges: assessing his impact on his owners' lives as a couple. It begins with humor, as the author and Jenny, his pistol of a wife, test their new marriage by squaring off about names for their puppy. (Louie is okay, she zings, "if you're a gas station attendant.") But her desire to get a dog in preparation for having a baby is prescient, and her diligent nighttime potty training of Marley proves her ready for diaper days.
"For all his juvenile antics," Grogan writes, "Marley was serving an important role in our home and our relationship. Through his very helplessness, he was showing Jenny she could handle this maternal nurturing thing."
Later, as Grogan turns 40, he muses: "I had never thought of Marley as any kind of role model, but sitting there sipping my beer, I was aware that maybe he held the secret for a good life. Never slow down, never look back."
Dogs can teach us
Cesar Millan's Cesar's Way provides a different kind of tutelage. Millan, of the National Geographic Channel's Dog Whisperer show, describes himself as practicing dog psychology, but clearly he is a soul searcher as well, crediting gurus Tony Robbins, Phil McGraw and Oprah Winfrey with helping him get his life on track. But it was dogs, he says, that helped him with childhood loneliness in Mexico.
His training experiences led him to the mantra of exercise, discipline and affection, with exercise being the key to calming and satisfying dogs.
Millan drives home his sermon on exercise with this surprising assertion: The ideal dog owner is a homeless person, who spends every day outside with the dog migrating for food. There you will find the most happy and stable dog, for running, walking, smelling and exploring are what really make dogs happy.
An owner's calm, assertive demeanor is key to Millan's philosophy as well. But he has learned over the years that this energy also improves human relationships. In fact, he credits his methods, and dogs themselves, with much, in ideas both intriguing and obvious.
Ultimately, we need dogs more than they need us, he says. "Animals are put into our lives for a purpose, to teach us lessons and to help us become better people."
But a human's greedy need for unconditional dog love can be misguided. When we treat our pets like "humans in a dog suit," it might fulfill us, but the dogs are often troubled. The exercise-pushing Dog Whisperer encourages us to let dogs be dogs.
Dogs and depression
Another recent book, poet Mark Doty's Dog Years: A Memoir, takes psychological probing to an almost existential level with a gut-wrenching investigation of self. Doty couches his two dogs' lives and deaths within the story and aftermath of his partner Wally's death, as well as poignant passages on the impact of 9/11.
Dog Years is about loss as reflected in the 16-year life of his black Labrador retriever, Arden. The serious illness of a younger dog, Beau, a golden retriever, helps to trigger a journey into depression begun by the death of Wally.
During the descent, Doty finds that the best therapy is needing to care for another. The steady needs of Beau help to draw him back as he considers jumping off a ferry to drown himself one day.
"What is it that pulls one back?" he writes. "Somehow my faith in human attachments, my belief in the cementing bonds that hold us all together, just wasn't there. It was only the trusting silent fellow at my feet, who kept looking down at the racing wake through the small hole at the base of the ferry railing - it was that trust, that day, that kept me in the world."
As he contemplates death, he is struck by the dog's enjoyment of life even when it is frail: "It isn't that one wants to live for the sake of a dog, exactly, but that a dog shows you why you might want to."
Ultimately, these books are at times more interested in human psychology than dog psychology. But dogs are the conduit.
Dog therapy is often used in nursing homes and hospitals, but these writers make it clear that bringing dogs into the average American home can be a powerful form of self-medication.
Carol Blair can be reached at cblair@sptimes.com.