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MAKING YOUR DOG

As you choose a new dog from among a litter or a loud shelter of baying mutts and bring him home, you begin to "make a dog" again, recapitulating the history of domestication of the species. With each interaction, with each day, you define—at once circumscribing and expanding—his world. In the first few weeks with you, the pup's world is, if not entirely a tabula rasa, awfully close to the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that a newborn baby experiences. No dog knows, on first turning his eyes on the person who peeks at him in his shelter cage, what the person expects of him. Many people's expectations, at least in this country, are fairly similar: be friendly, loyal, pettable; find me charming and lovable—but know that I am in charge; do not pee in the house; do not jump on guests; do not chew my dress shoes; do not get into the trash. Somehow, word hasn't gotten to the dogs. Each dog has to be taught this set of parameters for his life with people. The dog learns, through you, the kinds of things that are important to you—and that you want to be important to him. We are all domesticated, too: inculcated with our culture's mores, with how to be human, with how to behave with others. This is facilitated by language, but spoken language is not necessary to achieve it. Instead we need to be alert to what the dog is perceiving and to make our perceptions clear to him.

The first-century Roman encyclopedist Pliny's prodigious Natural History includes a confident statement of fact about the birth of bears. The cubs, he wrote, "are a white and shapeless lump of flesh, little larger than mice, without eyes or hair and only the claws projecting. This lump the mother bears slowly lick into shape." The bear is born, he was suggesting, as nothing but pure undifferentiated matter, and, like a true empiricist, the mother bear makes her pup a bear by licking it. When we brought Pump into our home, I felt I was doing just this: I was licking her into shape. (And not just because there was a lot of licking between us—after all, it was exclusively she who was licking.) It was our way of interacting together that made her who she was, that makes dogs that most people want to live with: interested in our goings and comings, attentive to us, not overly intrusive, playful just at the right times. She interpreted the world through acting on it, by seeing others act, by being shown, and by acting with me on the world—promoted into being a good member of the family. And the more time we spent together, the more she became who she was, and the more we were intertwined.

Sniff

First sniff of the day: Pump wanders into the living room in the morning while I am dishing out her food. She's looking sleepy but her nose is wide awake, stretching every which way as though it's doing morning exercises. She reaches her nose toward the food without committing her body, and sniffs. A look at me. Another sniff. A judgment has been levied. She backs from the bowl and forgives me by nosing my outstretched hand, her whiskers tickling while her moist nose examines my palm. We go outside and her nose is gymnastic, almost prehensile, happily taking in smells that gust by …

We humans tend not to spend a lot of time thinking about smelling. Smells are minor blips in our sensory day compared to the reams of visual information that we take in and obsess over in every moment. The room I'm in right now is a phantasmagoric mix of colors and surfaces and densities, of small movements and shadows and lights. Oh, and if I really call my attention to it I can smell the coffee on the table next to me, and maybe the fresh scent of the book cracked open—but only if I dig my nose into its pages.

Not only are we not always smelling, but when we do notice a smell it is usually because it is a good smell, or a bad one: it's rarely just a source of information. We find most odors either alluring or repulsive; few have the neutral character that visual perceptions do. We savor or avoid them. My current world