Scratch My Chest, You'll Feel Better

She walked around the room, a little unstable or a little nervous, looking I believe for a way out, for the way back home—back to the predictable life she knew, that’s what she had been waiting for patiently, submissively for more than a month I think—and chanced upon some chimes hanging low to the floor in the far corner. She nudged the chime just a touch and when the small bright room filled with a rich baritone hum like the meditative “Om”, Kristina looked back at us with an expression that told me she knew within the hour she was going to die.
    If I tell you that Kristina was my dog, a nearly constant companion for 11 years since my daughter and I picked her up at the Animal Protection League in Cleveland, a few of you will roll your eyes. I understand the instinct; I grew up with pets, but throughout my early adulthood I was without one for many years and I rolled my eyes a lot at what I considered the flakiness of dog and cat owners who seemed to treat their animals like prescient people.
   Truthfully, of course, I can’t know what my sweet black border collie mix was thinking or feeling when she looked back at us—curiosity about the sound of the chime? fear and confusion at being in a strange place? Or perhaps she was just feeling sick and dizzy and lightheaded because she had a bleeding mass in her stomach that required surgery that night and a catheter injection to keep her hydrated.
   She died three years ago this week, a month before I was to move back to Washington, D.C., where my job was. (I had spent 13 years working for the same outfit but working from home in Cleveland, where I was helping to raise my daughter. When the daughter went off to college, I went off to D.C.) Kristina and I were staying temporarily with a friend in Shaker Heights, after I abandoned my apartment in Cleveland in preparation for the move. She had collapsed on the pavement—just like that, like air going out of a balloon—while on a walk in the neighborhood in the early evening. She had not been well for some time, I believe. For several years, I had noticed her slowing down, becoming more anxiously attached to me. About a month and a half prior to the night when she collapsed on the pavement, a tic had lodged itself in her scalp. I think I managed to get most of it out, but the scar that was left looked to be infected. I took her to a vet, who said she was fine, but in retrospect I am not convinced. After K and I moved into the friend’s house, I came home one night to find her hiding in an upstairs room, apparently delirious with pain from what turned out to be a raging ear infection. I spent a long night at a veterinarian hospital that night before she was treated with an antibiotic and a painkiller. But I don’t believe she was ever the same.
   At the hospital that night she died two or three weeks later, it was after 9 pm. when the nurse came out to talk to me about her condition, informing me that she would need surgery, and that there was no surgeon on call at the time. I would have to drive with her to Akron, 40 minutes away. And there was no real way of knowing what her prognosis might be after surgery, assuming she survived it.
   That’s as far as I’ll go in justifying my decision to euthanize my friend, put her “down.” She was given two shots, a painkiller and one that stopped her heart. She died with her head in my lap.
   What do our dogs and cats think and feel? Does a dog have a “personality” or a soul? Did Kristina know when she rang the chime at the vet’s office that she was dying, that her life with me was over? Or do we simply project onto household pets our own longings?
   The most cursory google search yields a lot research indicating that animals of all kinds display traits of distinct personality, although the science is “bedeviled” by the problem of anthropomorphism, of human bias or projection in the attribution of personality traits, as described by one particularly cogent report from 2013 in Real Clear Science. 
  
All animal personality scientists grapple with how to reduce the human bias embedded in their experiments. “Trying to eliminate research bias is what this field is devoted to,” says biologist and coder Alison Bell from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She says that even with coding, measuring a behavior as simple as two fish biting each other includes some level of judgment. What constitutes biting? Do the fish just need to bump mouths or must the researcher see teeth sinking into flesh?
   Western culture is quick to attribute qualities like “shy” and “brave” to cats and dogs, says animal ethologist Kristina Horback from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Horback says that when the same traits are observed in an experiment looking at dolphins or elephants, for example, researchers steer clear of using adjectives to describe the behaviors. “Shy” and “brave” are risky words in a scientific setting, she says, because they are reputed as subjective and only ever applied to humans.

Who cares? It might be more useful and interesting to wonder why anyone should doubt that to which virtually everyone who cares for an animal can testify: the almost palpable sense that their companion animals are more human than some of the people they have to deal with at their offices or in their families.

Kristina was almost universally described as “sweet.” Border collies generally are. But she had an inner wolf that came out in certain situations, most vividly when another dog sought affection or recognition from me; that other dog was likely get the what-for, particularly as Kristina grew older and crankier. This inner wolf, by the way, was a trait I found extremely endearing, not because I enjoyed watching her beat up other dogs, but because she expressed it instinctively, without pride, and did not seem to revel in it; after she routed a dog, she went back to business as usual, as if she’d been interrupted while reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette.

I believe animals suffer a lot at our hands—K. spent entirely too much time alone in my care, which is why I cannot tell people who ask me that I will get another dog. (When someone loses a mother, sister or a brother, no one ever asks, “Will you get another?”). I do relish the memories of our many hours walking and exploring in the MetroParks, enjoying the crisp air off Lake Erie in Lakewood Park, walking the path at Stinchcomb Hill, or Edgewood Park in Rocky River.

And we have a lot to learn from them. Sometimes when my daughter was young and still at home and we would argue (sometimes loudly, sometimes toe-to-toe), Kristina would stand between us, wishing us to be nice to each other. She also had a talent for using her paw to prompt you to scratch her chest. Sometimes when Tess was upset, K. would sit up close to her, paw at her hand as if to say, “Scratch my chest, you’ll feel better.”

It always worked.