Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [108]
It is here that dogs distinguish themselves from the other social animals. There are three essential behavioral means by which we maintain, and feel rewarded by, bonding with dogs. The first is contact: the touch of an animal goes far beyond the mere stimulation of nerves in the skin. The second is a greeting ritual: this celebration of encountering one another serves as recognition and acknowledgment. The third is timing: the pace of our interactions with each other is part of what can make them succeed or fail. Together, they combine to bond us irrevocably.
TOUCHING ANIMALS
Neither of us is truly comfortable but neither of us moves. He is on my lap, sprawled across my thighs, his legs already a little long and dangling down the side of the chair. He's settled his chin on my right arm, right in the crook of my elbow, his head tilted sharply upward just to keep in contact with me. To type, I must strain to pull my trapped arm up and just over the desktop onto the keyboard, with only my fingers able to move freely, and my body leaning precariously. We're both working to hold on to each other, to keep that gossamer of contact that says we are going to intertwine our fates—or they are already intertwined.
We named him Finnegan. We found him at a local shelter, in a cage among dozens of cages, in a room among a dozen rooms, all filled with dogs who we could just as easily have taken home. I remember the moment I knew it would be Finnegan. He leaned. Outside of his cage, on the tabletop where germ-carrying humans were allowed to interact with the sick dogs, he wagged, his ears flopped around his tiny face, he coughed long bursts of coughs, and he leaned against my chest, at table height, his face tucked into my armpit. Well, that was that.
Often it is contact that draws us to animals. Our sense of touch is mechanical, matter on matter: different than our other sensory abilities, and arguably more subjectively determined. The stimulation of a free nerve ending in the skin could be, depending on the context and the force of stimulation, a tickle, a caress, unen-durable, painful, or unnoticed. If we are distracted, what would otherwise feel like a painful burn might be a niggling irritation. A caress might be a grope if it comes from an unwanted hand.
In our current context, though, "touch" or "contact" is simply the erasing of a gap separating bodies. Petting zoos have arisen to satisfy the urge to engage that animal on the other side of the fence not only by looking at it, but by touching it. Better still if the animal is touching back—with, say, a warm tongue or worn teeth grabbing at the food in your outstretched hands. Children and even adults who approach me on the street as I walk with my dog want not to look at the dog, to watch her wag, to meditate on the dog—no, they want to pet the dog: to touch her. In fact, after a cursory rub, many people appear satisfied with that interaction. Even a brief touch is sufficient to bolster the feeling that a connection has been made.
Occasionally one might find one's toes, hanging off the end of the bed bare, being licked.
Dogs and humans share this innate drive for contact. The contact between mother and child is natural: by dint of the requirement for food, the infant is drawn to the mother's breast. Thenceforth, being held by the mother may be naturally comforting. A child who has no caregiver, male or female, will develop abnormally, in ways that it would be inhuman to experimentally test. Inhumane or not, in the 1950s a psychologist named Harry Harlow enacted a series of now notorious experiments designed to test the importance of maternal contact. He took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and raised them in isolation.