Faced with writing a column during a time of geopolitical turbulence, of picking sides in an uneven conflict, of political posturing within a context of unfathomable death and devastation, I have decided to disavow my responsibility as a member of the free press, retreating from the media minefield to the safety of one powerful exclamation: WOOF!
I am not the only one barking. According to recent estimates, there are 600,000 canine citizens in New York City. Undoubtedly, that number has grown since the pandemic prompted listless and lonely city dwellers to add a mutt to their mailing address. Although I was not an early adopter, I too succumbed to the pup-aganda perpetrated by social media savvy adoption agencies that rescue and relocate death-row dogs in the Dirty South with a one-way Greyhound ticket to the Big Apple (which are safe for dogs to eat in moderation). Spayed, microchipped, and apparently carrying ringworm, a part pitbull named Opal disembarked from a transport outside the PetSmart in Flatiron and trotted into my care.
As I discovered in my first few weeks with Opal, there’s something Lynchian (that’s urbanist Kevin Lynch) about what having a dog does to your perception of the city. Without a dog I am free to traipse around town for as long as I want. New York feels like it’s built just for me—my consumptive patterns, my stride, my size (humblebrag I’m six feet two, which no dog could ever claim). I float along in an immaterial world of self-importance that untethers me from the material reality of my trash-strewn surroundings.
Conversely, as I walk my hirsute toddler (I can’t bring myself to say “fur baby”), my head is drawn down, preoccupied with the protection of a pup whose delicate nose skims the sidewalk, trained on things we more sophisticated beasts are conditioned to avoid—dried piss, used napkins, and—gasp—discarded chicken bones. My eyes now scan over small signs positioned at a hound’s height on small swatches of dying grass that demand I “Be a good neighbor” and “Keep this a poop- and pee-free zone.” I notice the rusty corners of metal fences, discolored and disintegrating where mutts have marked their territory, and the smears of shit on the sidewalk, where a diligent dog dad has attempted to salvage a less than firm stool.
Waste collection aside, dog ownership conditions contrasting social and antisocial tendencies. You go out less, captive to the comfort of cuddling on the couch and the less comfortable guilt of leaving your couch companion home alone. (In case you haven’t heard, dogs are social animals.) But you go outside more, encountering a whole host of local characters you never would have met before. A dog settles you into your neighborhood—you begin to feel less transient and, for better or worse, more invested in the fate of your block. The allure of fame, fortune, and freedom that once drew you downtown fades with each forlorn look from your faithful friend.
Because the more time I spent with Opal, the more I began to identify with her loneliness, orphaned and sent to New York to satisfy the needs of some larger machination neither of us understood.
Of course, dogs don’t care about any of this. To be a dog is to bear no responsibility for one’s actions. To pursue innate needs and desires without question. To be evolved to fulfill the inscrutable needs of others. To be a living, breathing product of design. To look cute and cuddly. To be kept. To be, in other words, somebody’s pet.
When I put it like that, it sounds kinda nice, actually.
In deliberating whether to adopt, I would often return to the idea that I didn’t want to have a dog; I wanted to be the dog. Observing a rise in pup play, furry fandom, and the popularity of the gay cruising site Sniffies, I see that I am not the only person gone pooch, though I refrain from donning a puppy mask … for now. Wanting to be the dog seemed to track with an increasing abdication of adulthood, as millennials forego parenthood and homeownership in pursuit of a resurrected childhood in rental units. (Cue me talking about therapy.)
When I first got Opal, my therapist recommended the book Reaching the Animal Mind by Karen Pryor, who champions the concept of clicker training. Building on Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning, Pryor suggests that any animal, including humans, can be trained through a communication system of clicks positively reinforced by rewards. I wondered if my therapist was training me and what little system he had devised to shape my behavior. Were there imperceptible clicks that I couldn’t recognize but that got me drooling, demanding that I perform a story of myself he wanted to hear? And conversely, was my dog using her own system of conditioning to compel me to fulfill her needs to the detriment of my own?
Taking responsibility for Opal, watching her boundless energy and enthusiasm, I became aware of how far I had strayed from satisfying my own primal needs, stuck in my own convoluted Pavlovian prison of conditioned response. Rather than bring me joy and happiness, my dog became an avatar through which I vicariously experienced the joie de vivre I could no longer access. And worse, I had been charged with shaping her behavior to conform to the very confines of daily life I was so intent on liberating myself from. My therapist might have called this transference.
The typical clichés of the doggo genre—“You don’t save the dog; the dog saves you”—didn’t strike me as especially true. Because the more time I spent with Opal, the more I began to identify with her loneliness, orphaned and sent to New York to satisfy the needs of some larger machination neither of us understood. And despite all my efforts to center my narrative, I would always be some type of flesh-and-blood machine, driven by an incomprehensible will to survive yet guaranteed a certain death. Opal and I weren’t saving so much as enslaving each other, bonded together through a shared pain and unclear premise.
What is clear is that Opal now resides in Montreal with my husband, after I deemed full-time pooch possession too stressful for a busy butt sniffer like myself. (We still see each other regularly.) With my lease as my leash, caged in this giant city-cum-dog park, I continue to roam the streets as a stray, guided by my nose toward unseemly scents—the competing clicks of my overlords conditioning me to commute, consume, and write columns—until I am rescued, neutered, and shipped off to my forever home, the big farm in the sky, aka upstate.