Into the Wild; an Introduction

by Michael Finley

Back when my daughter and I used to walk dogs at the Humane Society, I surprised myself several times by taking strange risks. Almost as if I were guided by voices, I found myself unleashing a big dog, who looked like she really needed a few moments of play, and let her run free in the crusted snow of Como Park.

It was a risk because I did not really know these dogs. They could easily have run away from me. The very fact that they were at the Humane Society suggests that that was how they got there - they were runaways. If I had allowed a dog to escape, it would likely have meant the dog's death, and certainly the end of our privileges at the center.

So what was I doing? And how did I know these dogs, many of them doomed to die in the weeks to come, would allow me to releash them afterward and return them to their cells?

It reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for twenty years, my decision to allow my dog Casi to roam free in the night streets of Minneapolis. I believed those outings of hers were the best parts of each day. I believed she needed and wanted freedom, and freedom was my gift to her - a gift that resulted in her death. I felt American wanting this freedom for her. But beyond that I felt a little wild and a little wise - that death was not too great a price to be a real dog, if only for a few years.

Responsible friends challenged me on this point. Where did I get this notion, and what right did I have to impose it on the creatures in my charge?

Indeed, what are an owner's responsibilities to a dog? That's the question that prompted this book. And I have two answers. The first is the answer I used to have, when I wished absolute freedom for all dogs everywhere. The second is a limited, modified answer that took me many years to get sort out - keep reading, and you'll get it.

But I can quickly tell you about the first. As a child a dog followed me home from school -- yes, I aided and abetted this following -- and I had him for all of three days before his master arrived to reclaim him. In those three days I fell totally in love with the dog, who may have been a standard poodle. He was smart, generous, funny - the best company I can remember from my childhood. And he was utterly doggy, silent, giving, and joyful. He not only captured my sympathies, he defined for me, for the rest of my life. After he was gone I dreamed about him coming back to me. Many, many times. He was a terrific dog.

Ten years later, as a vagabond longhair visiting communes in the sixties, I fell in love again with a bunch of dogs I encountered in the mountains along the Rio Grande in southern Colorado. They had the same qualities. They were fierce and wild and free, and I, like everyone does, mistook their panting, open faces for grins.

I told myself that if I ever had a dog, I would want them to be like those bodhisattva dogs of the Rockies, independent agents in the world, not obedience school flunkies. A dog chained to a fence all day loses its soul over time, I told myself. Dogs, like pumps, need to run free and often.

I was delighted when I started reading things by folks who had similar ideas. In 1994, Elizabeth Marshall published a little book called The Hidden Life of Dogs. Like me, Marshall let her husky venture out on long foot-journeys every night through the city and area surrounding Cambridge. Unlike me, Marshall decided to go along, shadowing the dog on his journey.

Stealing from tree to telephone pole, she kept pace with the dog on many nighttime journeys. What she discovered, and what she did after she discovered it, lent legitimacy to the bodhisattva vision of my youth.

She discovered that the husky wasn't going anywhere in particular. He had no destination. Instead, he did what he could to make contact with other dogs. He did this by marking bushes and trees and fences, and he did it with actual confrontations, in which he would establish he was dominant to the other one.

Marshall decided that the great secret of dogs, that people have been stupid about for centuries, is that they just want to be with one another. They need dog autonomy, time and space to resolve questions of hierarchy. Once that hierarchy is resolved -- by fighting, bluffing, or capitulating -- peace reigns.

So she revamped her dog-raising approach, letting them live in her back yard much as a pack of wild dogs would. There they burrowed, hunted, and settled scores among themselves the old fashioned way. They were very happy dogs.

Marshall's book revolutionized the way we think about dogs. But as with most revolutions, this one was attended by the usual share of overkill.

I missed that it was no longer OK to think of a dog as, well, a pal. In Marshall's story, the dogs retreated from human company to their own society. The old easy familiarity, as if we understood one another, was no good any more, because dogs were now too private and mysterious. The right course of action was to step back, way back, and think of your dog in the detached way a social scientist or wildlife biologist might.

And I missed anthropomorphism, our tendency to see everything through human eyes. That is a sin of incorrectness now, sentimental and unscientific. I missed sentimental and unscientific.

As our thinking about dogs has changed, the business of dogs has gone into warp drive. Baby boomers have taken ordinary dog knowledge to the same intense level they took ordinary coffee drinking. People who never attended a science class in their lives are dog scientists now, classifying their animals as alpha leaders and dominant females and discussing pheromones, olfactory neuroreceptors, and the like the same way they discuss cars, sports, and Wall Street.

Something is wrong in this picture. It is that, in letting dogs be dogs, we are forgetting how to be human. I don't want to stop being human. I want to be the 10 year old who was all agog over the dog that followed me home. It felt too right to be wrong.

I want to say this very carefully. I believe that anthropomorphism, "thinking like a human," is all we can do. Behavioral studies is one fascinating facet of human thinking. But there is much more, and it is not invalid. The great thing about dogs is precisely that they make us think, wildly and loopily. They draw us to them, by making us wonder wildly about their experience, and their point of view. And we draw them to us, without compromising their doggy natures. Dogs bring out the humanity in humans, and we feed and love them in return. That's the deal in a nutshell.

So I have pulled back on my notions of wildness. We don't really want our dogs to revert to a wild state. Dogs and indifference are a bad combination.

In a dog plebiscite, there are a few lupine breeds, and probably many individual dogs, that might vote to revert completely. But there is no dog plebiscite, and most dogs I know are Uncle Toms. They're too involved with their human families to return to the forest. They're too in love with their lives with us to look back.

How alarmed our dogs would be if we drove them deep into a wilderness area and set them free to pursue their natural inclinations. Even my free-roaming bodhisattva dogs in the Rockies turned to their dish when they were hungry.

Though dogs yearn to be with one another, they also yearn to be with us, to be our pets. They are willing even to put up with our anthropomorphism.

Dogs aren't wolves any more; that nature has been compromised by a thousand generations of breeding. They something new, despite their lupine DNA, occupying a new rung on the ladder of being.

Dogs and people have grown together, in a hybrid helix -- crazy totems of animal and angel. It's the deal we cut ages ago. It's food for love, but more than that. It's a fondness rooted in our souls, that enriches both species. They help us understand right now; we give them a shot at living forever, by knowing them now, and remembering them later.

This is a book about the right way to know a dog - a way that is beyond sentiment and beyond science, but is never beyond being human -- and the blessings that flow from that knowledge.

MICHAEL FINLEY, AUGUST 1998

A free gift awaits visitors to Michael Finley's web site at http://mfinley.com. Mike is co-author of this spring's eagerly waited book Transcompetition.

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