Sadie Part II

Several hospital and vet office trips later, we were able to bring Sadie home with us last night. She is still not out of the woods. At this point, she still has a 50-50 chance of survival. Her body's ability to produce more platelets will likely make or break her. So far, her platelet count is decreasing. We are obviously hoping to turn a corner very soon. But for now, she is home. And we count that small miracle as a blessing beyond measure.

Below is an interesting article that I found at the vet's office.

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Love is Never Having to Say Anything at All
Patricia B. McConnell

Cool Hand Luke is not going to die. I won't stand for it. I know, of course, that he will, at least part of me does.

After all, he's 11, he's a dog, and he's already cheated death from cancer, cars, and a 300-pound ram determined to kill him or me, whoever came first. I'm more grateful than I can say that Luke is still here. His front paws may be swollen with arthritis and he may tire easily, but he still loves working sheep, fetching tennis balls, and sitting in silence with me in the rosy light of the sunset. And I still love him so completely that I imagine his death to be as if all the oxygen in the air disappeared, and I was left to try to survive without it.

I'm not alone in this love affair. Everywhere I go I talk to people who have soul mates like Luke, dogs so special we get tears in our eyes just talking about them. This phenomenon is not new--people have been in love with dogs for centuries. Nor is the love of pets unique to industrial societies--even hunter/gatherer societies have animal companions.

While not everyone loves dogs, there's a phenomenon that needs explaining: Those of us who love dogs love them so deeply it hurts. It's easy to demean these feelings, as people often do. Dog lovers have been described as neurotics or social incompetents, and though dog lovers can be just as emotionally illiterate as the rest of the world, loving dogs is not, in itself, the problem. There's something much bigger than neediness that drives our love of dogs. People the world over have sought an answer to why we love dogs, perhaps an indication that the question is deeply rooted. I don't think it's a trivial question, either, and not just because I'm stupid in love with my dogs. I'm also a scientist and applied animal behaviorist, and from the perspective of biology, the question is both interesting and important.

Indeed, biology itself provides some of the answers. One obvious connection between dogs and humans is our shared natural history. Dogs and people may be strikingly different in many ways, but, if you compare our behavior with that of other animals, we share more than we don't. Like dogs, people sleep, eat, and hunt together, and that in itself is notable in the animal kingdom. Pandas are notoriously solitary. Feral cats can live in groups or alone, but they don't hunt together. Butterflies are often seen together, but only because they're attracted to the same minerals in the puddle in your driveway. In contrast to animals who are seen together without social relationships, dogs and humans ore so social that we even raise our young together, sometimes deferring our own reproduction in order to assist another member of the group. Individuals of both species will nurse the young of another female, and that fact alone puts dogs and humans in a special category.

Many other factors of natural history have a profound effect on our relationship with dogs. Dogs, like people, live in social hierarchies, and are generally amenable to doing what high-status individuals ask of them. Both human beings and dogs are "Peter Pan animals," whose behavior is shaped by a process called paedomorphism, in which adult, sexually mature individuals retain the characteristics of adolescents, remaining curious and playful all their lives. It's easy to take playing with your dog for granted, but go ask a cow to play with you and see how far you get.

Equally important is our shared tendency to nurture needy individuals. In both species, offspring are born helpless, desperately in need of care and a safe environment in which to learn survival skills. Humans have such an extended period of parental care that we're hard-wired to go week-kneed at animals who look infantile. If you want people to feel all warm and gooey and nurturing, show them a baby mammal with a disproportionately large forehead and over sized hands, and listen for the "Awww's" coming out of the crowd. This reaction to young, needy mammals is such a primal part of who we are that psychologists have labeled it the "Aw phenomenon."

Dogs don't stay cute little puppies for long, but they remain dependent and nonverbal, much like very young children. Some of us may have great respect for our dogs, as I do for Luke, but, although he can load the ram on the truck single-handedly, he still can't open doors or pull his dinner out from that magic place under the counter. Natural selection has emphasized nurturance in our species, and surly dogs have profited from it.

All these shared characteristics are important, but somehow all of them don't seem enough to explain the passion many of us have for our dogs. A love of play and strategic hunting techniques may drive our relationship, but a shared natural history isn't enough of an explanation when some big, strong fireman is sobbing in my office while discussing euthanizing his dog. The depth of pain we dog lovers feel when facing the loss of one of our best friends can be overwhelming.

In some ways it's similar to the grief we feel when we lose a human loved one. But something not particularly obvious is different about our grief over losing a dog. People who've never cried in their lives cry over losing their dogs. I'll never forget the episode of the TV series M*A*S*H* when, surrounded by the relentless agonies of injured and dying soldiers in Korea, the medical team coped with black humor, bravery, and stamina--until a little stray dog they'd ado[ted died. Then they fell apart. It may have been just a television show, but it reflected something universally true about the effect dogs have on us.

I remember watching the movie My Dog Skip with a friend and crying at the end with the same pure emotion I say on that M*A*S*H* episode. We weren't simply crying about the loss of a dog, we were crying over loss itself, and when personified in a dog, that sense of loss was easier to let out. The tendency of humans to be able to grieve so deeply over a dog indicates that something big and primal and important goes on between people and dogs that has as much to do with our emotions as our shared natural history.

So why is it, then, that dogs can elicit the purity of emotion we often cover up in our human relationships? Perhaps, just perhaps, it is because dogs don't talk. Sure, you already knew that. But the more I think about the consequences of our nonverbal relationship with dogs, the more benefits there are. Psychologists have told us for years that dogs give us "non judgemental positive regard," and we intuitively understand exactly what that means. The pure and simple you that radiates from our dogs every time we come home is rarely duplicated in human greetings, and it can elicit the feeling of pure love that we all seek from infancy onward.. Dogs indeed love us with tremendous intensity, and the fact that they can't talk acts to underscore it, not diminish it.

Of course we can communicate with dogs. They understand hundreds of words we use and get a tremendous amount of information from our intonation. But even the most avid dog lover can't sit down and have an in-depth conversation with their dog.

If dogs could talk, I suspect things wouldn't feel so pure and simple. Though most of our dogs love us deeply, they don't necessarily love us every second of the day. Luke can shoot me a look that can be summed up in two words. The second is "you," but the first is not "love." Why should intelligent individuals not make judgments about what happens to them? Surely our dogs can get frustrated if we delay that walk in the woods for the phone call that came just as we were going out the door, just like our spouses or partners can. I don't say this cynically, and I don't want to burst any sacred bubbles, but perhaps what dogs give us is the perception of continual "nonjudgmental positive regard." If I could teach Luke to talk, I'm not sure I'd always be happy about what he had to say.

A hurtful word can live a long time in the heart of the receiver, and influence the relationship forever after. In the case of dogs, perhaps it's easier to ignore an irritation here and a ruffled feather there, because our dogs can't put words to them.. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" may be common refrain, but it's not based in reality. Words can cause terrible damage, sometimes lasting a lifetime, and the fact that dogs can't use them may be a blessings.

Our lack of a shared language can be a great disadvantage, causing us grief when we're desperate to ask our dogs what's wrong, or yearning to explain why we're torturing them with another radiation treatment. Our ability to talk to one another may be one of the greatest accomplishments of the human species, and there are times when I'd give anything to be able to communicate with Luke in greater depth than I can now. But speech comes with a price. Being in conversation with even a good friend raises your blood pressure. It takes a lot of mental energy to make decisions about what words to say, how to string them together, what tone to use when you say them. That's the very same energy that spiritual leaders advise us to turn off as a way of revitalizing ourselves. The constant conversation that most of us have in our heads can be exhausting and is so inherent to the way our brains work that we actually have to practice turning it off. Anyone who's tried meditation knows how difficult it can be to shut off the internal chatter that comes with being verbal.

Experts at meditation can be "in the present," and free of mental noise for hours, but I'm thrilled to turn off my brain for a minute or two. That's because I'm a novice at a skill we humans need to learn and practice. But I doubt Luke has to practice meditating to be able to experience the kind of spiritual peace humans have to learn to find. Being nonverbal allows an otherwise intelligent, highly connected animal to live in the present without the hailstorm of internal conversations that complicate our human lives. If you think about it, most of what we "talk" about in our won heads isn't about the present, it's about the past or future. But dogs keep us firmly rooted in the here and now, and that, it turns out, is a notable accomplishment.

Where but with dogs can we have such a deep and meaningful relationship with so little baggage? Words may be wonderful things, but they carry weight with them, and there's a great lightness of being when they are discarded. The story of the Garden of Eden is a lovely allegory about the cost of cognition. Being able to use our brains the way we do separates us from the rest of the animal world, and, like most everything else in life, it has its costs as well as its benefits.

Perhaps it's not just the things we share with dogs that wrap us together in mutual love. In the lovely, balanced irony of yin and yang, it's the differences as much as the similarities that bring us together. Some of the happiest times are when Luke and I sit silently together, overlooking the green, rolling hills of southern Wisconsin. Our lack of language doesn't get in the way, but it creates an opening for something else, something deep and pure and good. We dog lovers share a Zen-like communion with our dogs, uncluttered by nouns and adverbs and dangling participles. This connection speaks to a part of us that needs to be nurtured and listened to, but is so often drowned out in the cacophony of speech. Dogs remind us that we are being heard, without the additional weight of words. What a gift. No wonder we love them so much.