How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (2 page)

Before she got too tired, we decided to make one attempt at a structural image. The structural scan takes thirty seconds, and Callie would have to hold still the entire time. After the scan, she bounded out of the magnet and pawed off her earmuffs. She jumped up and licked my face and then ran over to Lisa, who gave Callie a big hug.

“What a good girl!” she exclaimed.

We all went into the control room to see what the images looked like.

The structural image looked remarkably good. There were ghost images throughout, which occur when the subject moves, but it was clearly recognizable as a dog’s brain. The functional images were a different story. Out of 120 images, only one contained anything that looked like a brain. Mostly they were jumbles of digital snow with an occasional eyeball peeking into the field of view.

I hugged Callie and said, “I’m so proud of you.” But in reality, I didn’t know if this was going to work.

The next scan—with Callie, the other dog, McKenzie, and the whole entourage—was in three weeks. I hoped we could figure it out before then. If we didn’t, I would have to pull the plug on the Dog Project and acknowledge that the naysayers had been right: you can’t scan the brain of an awake dog.

1

Dia de los Muertos

TWO YEARS EARLIER

E
VERY NOVEMBER 1,
I push aside the remains of the Halloween candy and erect a shrine on the dining room table.

I begin with a vase that Kat and I bought in Mexico on our honeymoon. It’s a cheap thing, with a stylized owl painted on one side, but the vase has somehow survived multiple moves across the country, and I have come to value it for its resiliency rather than its beauty. It also provides the necessary ethnic authenticity for the ritual and functions as an ideal centerpiece to prop up photographs.

We keep the photos in a drawer all year long, only to be brought out on this day. Kat and I surround the vase with them: pictures of family members who have passed away over the years. Then, to complete the offering for their spirits, we scatter a cornucopia of the sweetest, most delicious baked goods.

Our two daughters, Helen and Maddy, had never questioned why we did this. They had, after all, lived with the ritual all their lives. But when they achieved the age of enlightenment, preteen-hood, they
realized that celebrating Dia de los Muertos
—
the Day of the Dead—was not a normal thing to do. At least not the way we did it.

We included the dogs.

Although I had grown up with dogs, it wasn’t until I finished medical school that I had the opportunity to acquire a dog that I could truly call my own.

Kat and I had been married for five years, and we were putting off children until I completed my training. So, in celebration of completing my first year of medical internship—a grueling year of hundred-hour weeks—we answered an ad for puppies. Pug puppies, actually. I note this with some qualification, because to many, pugs are a grotesque distortion of the canine form. Of course, Kat and I didn’t see them that way. Their large heads, with pushed-in noses and bulbous eyes, were almost human—a sort of baby substitute.

We named our new puppy Newton.

Like all pugs, Newton’s face was brachycephalic, meaning short-nosed, but his was foreshortened in the extreme, with his nostrils forming mere slits. He was what breeders call an apple head because of the taper of his skull. His panoply of malformations only made him more endearing to us, and his constant snuffling and snoring became a welcome background noise to our lives. At night, he slept with his unusual dome nestled in my armpit.

Newton was smart and energetic—and a prankster. He would chew the tags off our clothing only to vomit them up an hour later. Once, he got into a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans, prompting a panicked call to poison control. I could hear laughter before they assured the newbie dog owners that their precious pug would be okay.

We immersed ourselves in pug culture. We socialized with other owners, all of whom echoed the analogy between pugs and Lay’s potato chips: you can’t have just one. So it was no surprise that within
a year we had adopted two more pugs. Six-year-old Simon was the opposite of Newton: simple, sweet, and dimwitted. Dexter tipped the scales at thirty-three pounds after a lifetime of being fed hamburgers by a truck driver who took him everywhere but could no longer care for him. He was like Jabba the Hutt, waddling his rolls of skin around the house. Mostly he just liked having his chin rubbed.

Newton.
(Gregory Berns)

Dexter was the first to go. Helen was three years old and Maddy had just turned two. That was the year we started celebrating Dia de los Muertos. At first, Dexter was the only dog spirit, and Kat and I began the tradition of leaving dog treats for him. Simon followed the next year.

As much as we loved Newton, the house just didn’t seem right
with only one dog. It didn’t take long for the girls, especially Helen, to ask for a dog of their own. But they wanted a big, fluffy dog that they could play with. (Pugs in their later years don’t play very much.)

Not long after Simon’s passing, a respected breeder in our neighborhood had a litter of golden retriever puppies become available. Only three were left when we visited. We took home the only female, a sweet bundle of light golden fur. We named her Lyra, after the protagonist of Philip Pullman’s wonderful book
The Golden Compass.

Lyra settled into the house easily. She epitomized the affability that has made golden retrievers such a popular breed. She never protested when the girls’ friends climbed on top of her, and she got along with every dog in the neighborhood, even a pair of irascible Jack Russell terriers that lived down the street. In part because of her easygoing, submissive personality, and in part because of her flowing golden mane, Lyra became a popular fixture in the neighborhood. Kids would run up to her to embrace the walking teddy bear. And Lyra would just grin.

Helen, Maddy, and Lyra.
(Gregory Berns)

With time, the jet-black muzzle of Newton’s youth faded completely to gray, only his ears retaining some dark pigment. Most of his teeth were rotted out from a lifetime of mouth breathing, and his fountain of energy dwindled to a trickle. By the time he was fifteen, he suffered from a slowly progressive deterioration of the spinal cord. Newton eventually lost the use of his hind legs, requiring a doggy wheelchair. He soon lost control of his bladder and bowels too. Never in his life had Newton had an accident in the house, and his look of shame, as he struggled to crawl away from his mess, told us that it was time.

As I laid Newton in his grave, he gave one last snort. I knew it was the remaining air in his lungs being expelled, but I still like to think it was his soul crossing the Rainbow Bridge into the mythical land where pets and humans are reunited.

Even though I didn’t know it at the time, the seed for the Dog Project was planted with Newton. It was Newton’s spirit that continued to hold the greatest power over me. We had shared fifteen years together, and I had never really known what he was thinking.

What I really would have liked to know was whether he truly returned my feelings toward him. But I would have needed some sort of canine brain decoder to know whether he loved me.

A few months after Newton’s death, the kids were on spring break. Kat and the girls decided to take a trip to the animal shelter.

The first hint that something was afoot was a text message from Kat. She attached a blurry photo of a dog slung over her shoulder. It was a long, skinny thing with sticks for legs. It was so black I couldn’t make out any details except for its four white paws. Its head looked like an anvil with one ear pointing straight up and the other flopping over its face.

Game over. Once they had stepped into the animal shelter, there was no way Kat and the girls were coming home without a new dog.

The girls quickly set to drawing up a list of potential names, but for the first day we called the dog by her shelter name: Little Miss Piggy. The shelter had a new theme every week for naming the animals that came into its care, and this happened to be Muppets week. Given the randomness of the naming protocol, you wouldn’t think there was any significance to the shelter name. But Little Miss Piggy would soon prove otherwise.

The kids weren’t fans of the Muppets, so there was no question that the shelter name had to go. Plus, it was just too long. I couldn’t imagine standing on the porch yelling, “Little Miss Piggy, come. Little Miss Piggy, come!”

Our new dog was a mystery. We had no idea where she came from or how she had ended up in the shelter. While she wasn’t afraid of humans, she did seem to prefer curling up with Lyra. Maybe she hadn’t had much human contact. The shelter estimated her age at nine months. Most dog experts recommend socializing puppies to humans by six weeks. So although it was a bit late for our new pet, the lack of fear meant that even if she had had little human contact previously, at least she hadn’t been abused.

In the end, it was Maddy who came up with the name.

“How about Calypso?” she asked. Maddy was devouring everything she could find about Greek mythology at the time. Calypso was a minor goddess in the
Odyssey
who prevented Odysseus from leaving her island in order to make him her husband. This went on for seven years before Athena intervened and returned Odysseus to his true love, Penelope. In Greek, Calypso means “to cover” or “to hide,” and given her black coat, this seemed appropriate. So Little Miss Piggy became Calypso.

Callie for short.

Callie on high alert.
(Gregory Berns)

Weighing barely nineteen pounds, Callie was about twelve inches tall and eighteen inches from nose to rump. Like all mutts, her tail curled up in a C over her back. Her ribs were clearly visible.

Helen went online to figure out exactly what she was.

“Jack Russell terrier,” she said pointing to an image on the computer.

“The color isn’t right, and she’s taller than that,” Maddy said.

“She’s obviously a terrier of some type,” Kat pointed out.

I thought Callie looked a bit like the old RCA dog that peered into the cone of an early Edison phonograph. The lineage of that dog, named Nipper for his fondness of biting, is unclear. Some say he was a Jack Russell, others say a fox or rat terrier. Callie almost resembled a Manchester terrier. But Manchesters are always black and tan in color, and Callie was black and white, which ruled against a pure Manchester pedigree. Some say that the Manchester, or black-and-tan
terrier, as they were once called, was crossed with a whippet in the nineteenth century. Whippets are like little greyhounds, and this crossing surely increased the terrier’s speed. As we soon found out, speed was one of Callie’s defining traits.

In fact, Callie was the fastest dog I had ever seen.

The first time we let her in the backyard, she established a perimeter by running circuits just inside the fence. Most of the yard, though, was thick with English ivy, which in the lush southern climate grew in knee-high thickets. Callie would run full tilt, alternately leaping over the ivy and then diving beneath its heavy leaves. As soon as she got to the fence line she would tunnel under the ivy, tracking the edge of the fence. Like a torpedo, all you could see was a bulge moving through the ivy at high speed, only to explode out in a leap of joy. With her back muscles flexing and unflexing, she ran like a cheetah.