Years ago a friend, who is as knowledgeable in his field as I am in mine on my better days, and I were discussing books. Our conclusion was that, relative to any particular subject, there are two kinds of books. Those written from the outside in, and those written from the inside out. Michael Schaffer’s One Nation Under Dog is an outside in book.
At this point, common sense demands I define my terms. An outside in book is one that’s written by someone outside a profession or field of study describing something that’s going on in it. The author begins with a premise and then collects information from those with first-hand knowledge to support that premise. Outside in books are almost always written by professional writers and, as such, tend to be well-written. In the past, outside in books were strictly descriptive. But over the years authors have increasingly added their own opinions that are sometimes obviously presented as such, but other times presented in a manner that those unfamiliar with the material could construe as fact. This creates no problems as long as these authors and the rest of the media realize their limitations. Unfortunately, sometimes that doesn’t occur and instead the writer is viewed as an expert who may even give advice to others as if he or she were.
An inside out book is one written by someone within a profession or field describing their field of expertise. Because these authors aren’t professional writers, their writing usually isn’t as polished as the outside inners. And only rarely do they have the access to the media to promote their books like the outside inners do. But they do have a much greater grasp of the material and its more subtle nuances.
Having dispensed with the necessary definitions, One Nation Under Dog is an inside out book about a topic that has fascinated me for years. Consequently, I was delighted to discover mention of quite a few people I know personally, as well as references to studies and events with which I’m very familiar. It’s not often that happens.
The stated purpose of One Nation Under Dog is to address a need for information regarding the cultural and economic changes that underlie those wacky dog-related stories the media so loves when they’ve run out of dog-related tear-jerkers to publish or report. I found this a laudable goal and for a while I thought the author was going to pull it off. Early in the book when he was describing the sometimes bitter battle over proposed leash laws, he wrote “It’s a case of people making one activity central to their identity, and viewing all efforts to regulate that activity as un-American plots to control their very identity as a class of people.” I could not agree more with this statement, which applies to a wide range of human control issues that those involved in these want us to perceive as solely related to animals.
Alas, the author didn’t expand this insight the next step necessary to understand the true breadth and depth of this cultural and economic phenomenon. Instead, in his conclusion he takes the safe way out and chalks up all the money Americans are spending on their dogs saying, “Pets, and how we treat them, are a public reflection of our deepest individual values.” Then he refers to nurturing, family, generosity, and compassion as some of the values that fuel this largesse toward our dogs.
Although such lofty values might fuel some pet-owners, the reality is that we’re no different from any other animal. We want to get what we need using the least amount of energy. And what fuels the extremes regarding what we do with and/or for our dogs is the willingness combined with the ability (i.e., time and/or money) to reduce dogs to symbols of a variety of human needs, not values. Even though people have always done this to some extent, up until the last 50 years or so there was always a population of free-roaming dogs about who displayed normal canine behaviors to remind us that dogs had their own unique species needs and agendas too. We could project emotions and beliefs on them, just as we could on wild eagles and tigers and bears, but this usually didn’t interfere with the free-roaming dogs’ abilities to fulfill their own needs.
Urbanization, spay and neuter, and leash laws changed that. In a very short time, we had a pet canine population whose owners’ lifestyle often demanded total human dependency in order for those people to be accepted in the human community. Simultaneously we also had an increasing human population with little to no knowledge of normal dog behavior. Because of this, the dog became a virtual blank slate onto which we as a society could project whatever we wanted.
And what better projections than our own desire to feel needed, to feel special, to feel in control, to feel loved?
Our dogs allowed/allow us to work through these fundamental human-human issues in a very public way without fearing the rejection that projecting such beliefs on other humans might precipitate. Best of all, we could call ourselves “dog-lovers” and say that our great love of our dogs, not self-interest, motivated us.
But the author never took the plunge and discussed this. He would skirt around the role of the contemporary human-canine bond, but then go back into the reporting mode any time he got close. But for me at least, it was always there, hovering just below the surface.
From my perspective, the most profound moment in the book came when the author described feeling compelled to stand up during a pet-loss support group meeting and talk about his own dog. This was a doubly egregious faux pas. First, he was at the meeting as a journalist and his profession’s ethics should have prevented any interference of any kind. Second, his dog was still alive. Moreover, he went to this meeting after his wife asked him why he kept going back to the group: were there other issues he hoped to work out there?
In the context of the way the author (to me) deliberately tried to avoid what all this tells us about the human-canine bond, this double faux pas was practically inevitable as was his wife’s question. Here was an obviously intelligent man who loved his dog who was trying to figure out why: Why is the dog worth all the money, energy, and time he’d spent on him?
I suspect that as the author listened to people talking about the animals they’d lost, he started to think about his own aging Saint Bernard and the answer to the elusive “why” that he sought. Perhaps as he heard the familiar responses to pet-grief, he sensed that these might be avoiding the larger and more troubling (and most likely unmarketable in today’s publishing environment) issue that most pet-owners face: regardless how much or how little we do, we use our dogs for our own purposes. And in our quest to do that, and although our pets might suffer from our ignorance of their true needs in the process, they can become our most reliable reference points. When they die, we lose that reference.
It’s not just the loss of the animal we grieve. We’re grieving for the loss of the animal who served as our stand-in, our buffer, our public image when we lacked the courage to assume that role with other humans.
Right up to the very end, the relationship is about us.
We’re grieving for the loss of a part of ourselves.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.
Years ago a friend, who is as knowledgeable in his field as I am in mine on my better days, and I were discussing books. Our conclusion was that, relative to any particular subject, there are two kinds of books. Those written from the outside in, and those written from the inside out. Michael Schaffer’s One Nation Under Dog is an outside in book.
At this point, common sense demands I define my terms. An outside in book is one that’s written by someone outside a profession or field of study describing something that’s going on in it. The author begins with a premise and then collects information from those with first-hand knowledge to support that premise. Outside in books are almost always written by professional writers and, as such, tend to be well-written. In the past, outside in books were strictly descriptive. But over the years authors have increasingly added their own opinions that are sometimes obviously presented as such, but other times presented in a manner that those unfamiliar with the material could construe as fact. This creates no problems as long as these authors and the rest of the media realize their limitations. Unfortunately, sometimes that doesn’t occur and instead the writer is viewed as an expert who may even give advice to others as if he or she were.
An inside out book is one written by someone within a profession or field describing their field of expertise. Because these authors aren’t professional writers, their writing usually isn’t as polished as the outside inners. And only rarely do they have the access to the media to promote their books like the outside inners do. But they do have a much greater grasp of the material and its more subtle nuances.
Having dispensed with the necessary definitions, One Nation Under Dog is an inside out book about a topic that has fascinated me for years. Consequently, I was delighted to discover mention of quite a few people I know personally, as well as references to studies and events with which I’m very familiar. It’s not often that happens.
The stated purpose of One Nation Under Dog is to address a need for information regarding the cultural and economic changes that underlie those wacky dog-related stories the media so loves when they’ve run out of dog-related tear-jerkers to publish or report. I found this a laudable goal and for a while I thought the author was going to pull it off. Early in the book when he was describing the sometimes bitter battle over proposed leash laws, he wrote “It’s a case of people making one activity central to their identity, and viewing all efforts to regulate that activity as un-American plots to control their very identity as a class of people.” I could not agree more with this statement, which applies to a wide range of human control issues that those involved in these want us to perceive as solely related to animals.
Alas, the author didn’t expand this insight the next step necessary to understand the true breadth and depth of this cultural and economic phenomenon. Instead, in his conclusion he takes the safe way out and chalks up all the money Americans are spending on their dogs saying, “Pets, and how we treat them, are a public reflection of our deepest individual values.” Then he refers to nurturing, family, generosity, and compassion as some of the values that fuel this largesse toward our dogs.
Although such lofty values might fuel some pet-owners, the reality is that we’re no different from any other animal. We want to get what we need using the least amount of energy. And what fuels the extremes regarding what we do with and/or for our dogs is the willingness combined with the ability (i.e., time and/or money) to reduce dogs to symbols of a variety of human needs, not values. Even though people have always done this to some extent, up until the last 50 years or so there was always a population of free-roaming dogs about who displayed normal canine behaviors to remind us that dogs had their own unique species needs and agendas too. We could project emotions and beliefs on them, just as we could on wild eagles and tigers and bears, but this usually didn’t interfere with the free-roaming dogs’ abilities to fulfill their own needs.
Urbanization, spay and neuter, and leash laws changed that. In a very short time, we had a pet canine population whose owners’ lifestyle often demanded total human dependency in order for those people to be accepted in the human community. Simultaneously we also had an increasing human population with little to no knowledge of normal dog behavior. Because of this, the dog became a virtual blank slate onto which we as a society could project whatever we wanted.
And what better projections than our own desire to feel needed, to feel special, to feel in control, to feel loved?
Our dogs allowed/allow us to work through these fundamental human-human issues in a very public way without fearing the rejection that projecting such beliefs on other humans might precipitate. Best of all, we could call ourselves “dog-lovers” and say that our great love of our dogs, not self-interest, motivated us.
But the author never took the plunge and discussed this. He would skirt around the role of the contemporary human-canine bond, but then go back into the reporting mode any time he got close. But for me at least, it was always there, hovering just below the surface.
From my perspective, the most profound moment in the book came when the author described feeling compelled to stand up during a pet-loss support group meeting and talk about his own dog. This was a doubly egregious faux pas. First, he was at the meeting as a journalist and his profession’s ethics should have prevented any interference of any kind. Second, his dog was still alive. Moreover, he went to this meeting after his wife asked him why he kept going back to the group: were there other issues he hoped to work out there?
In the context of the way the author (to me) deliberately tried to avoid what all this tells us about the human-canine bond, this double faux pas was practically inevitable as was his wife’s question. Here was an obviously intelligent man who loved his dog who was trying to figure out why: Why is the dog worth all the money, energy, and time he’d spent on him?
I suspect that as the author listened to people talking about the animals they’d lost, he started to think about his own aging Saint Bernard and the answer to the elusive “why” that he sought. Perhaps as he heard the familiar responses to pet-grief, he sensed that these might be avoiding the larger and more troubling (and most likely unmarketable in today’s publishing environment) issue that most pet-owners face: regardless how much or how little we do, we use our dogs for our own purposes. And in our quest to do that, and although our pets might suffer from our ignorance of their true needs in the process, they can become our most reliable reference points. When they die, we lose that reference.
It’s not just the loss of the animal we grieve. We’re grieving for the loss of the animal who served as our stand-in, our buffer, our public image when we lacked the courage to assume that role with other humans.
Right up to the very end, the relationship is about us.
We’re grieving for the loss of a part of ourselves.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.