How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain (28 page)

Nobody had ever suggested that Lyra might have Addison’s disease. It hadn’t occurred to me, Kat, or her regular vet. But the question made me wonder. Lyra had never been a high-energy dog. Could the “Sloth,” as we called her, simply have been fatigued and weak? Those would be classic symptoms. The intermittent vomiting could have been a sign too. I didn’t know.

Kat arrived and we all went back to see Lyra in the ICU.

She appeared to be sleeping. I was grateful that she didn’t appear to be in any pain. Several bags of different fluids were hung on an IV pole. Helen lay down beside her and stroked her head with the tenderest of touches. The vets were giving her steroids, presumptively assuming that she had Addison’s disease, but it was all guesswork. There wasn’t anything more we could do by staying at the hospital. Lyra appeared stabilized, and our presence could potentially excite her, which could send her into shock again.

I hugged her gently and whispered in her ear, “I love you, Lyra,” and wiped my tears on her fur. The vet promised she would call if anything changed.

The five-minute drive back to the house felt like it lasted an hour. None of us said anything.

The phone was ringing when we walked in the door. It was the vet. Right after we had left, Lyra vomited blood and started hemorrhaging from the other end too. If we didn’t do something right away, she was going to bleed to death into her digestive tract.

“She has DIC,” said the vet. I repeated that to Kat.

Disseminated intravascular coagulation
, or DIC, occurs for unknown reasons following trauma or shock. The body goes haywire, clotting in places it shouldn’t be and using up the clotting factors in the process. The end result is uncontrolled bleeding, which is what was happening to Lyra. When it happens in people, only the most aggressive care can save the patient, and even then, the prognosis is poor. In the world of veterinary care, DIC is grimly referred to as “dead in cage.”

Kat started to cry.

The vet wanted to give her a transfusion of dog plasma, which would contain clotting factors to stop the bleeding.

“Do you think it will work?” I asked the vet.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Lyra’s condition is grave. If we can stop the bleeding, she has a chance.” I gave the okay.

“If anything changes, please call us right away.”

Nobody wanted to sleep that night. To distract ourselves, we stayed up and watched TV until midnight. Maddy wanted to be alone, and Helen slept with Kat and me. Callie curled up at the end of the bed, confused.

In the morning, I waited as long as I could before calling the hospital. The doctor on call for the day reported that Lyra’s lab values seemed stable. Her blood count had not dropped much, indicating that she hadn’t lost too much blood. But her clotting factors were still out of whack, and she was still bleeding out of her GI tract. The plan for the day was to try to keep her blood pressure stable.

Around noon the entire family piled into the minivan, and we drove to the hospital. Even Maddy, who normally shied away from intense emotion, seemed to realize that this might be the last time she was going to see Lyra and agreed to come. Her face was twisted up as she tried to contain her feelings.

At the hospital, Lyra was in the same pen as the previous night. She was still sleeping and appeared comfortable. Helen curled up with her, and Lyra sensed her presence. She raised her head and sniffed Helen. The corner of Lyra’s mouth turned up ever so slightly in a smile of recognition, and she went back to sleep. Helen covered her up with a blanket that the two of them slept with.

We each took our turns. Watching the girls hug her, knowing in the back of my mind that this could be the last time with Lyra, was the most awful pain. I grieved for Lyra, and I grieved for the girls.

After thirty minutes, Lyra seemed to perk up a bit. She stood up and looked around. Helen’s face brightened. But then Lyra shifted position, revealing a bright red stain where her butt had been.

Helen rushed to me, sobbing. I started to cry too.

The vet tech cleaned her up quickly. But since our presence wasn’t helping Lyra, we all agreed that it was time to leave.

We tried to have a semblance of normal life at home. Callie seemed out of sorts, wandering the house looking for her big, fluffy pillow. I took to walking her around the block. Usually we walked in the morning and evening, but neither of us could get enough walking while Lyra was in the hospital. By the afternoon, we had been around the neighborhood four times.

I waited until the evening shift at the hospital to call again. Dr. Martin was coming back on duty, and I wanted her opinion of Lyra’s condition over the last twenty-four hours.

“She’s having runs of v-tach,” she said.

Ventricular tachycardia
, or v-tach, was a heart arrhythmia. Her heart was racing out of control.

“We just gave her an injection of lidocaine,” Dr. Martin explained. “It stopped the v-tach for now.”

There was no denying it. Lyra was slipping away. Her heart was racing because her blood pressure was dropping. But when the heart beats that fast there is no time for it to fill with blood, and blood pressure will continue to drop. Maybe she would go on like this for another day or so, but we had to confront the reality that her body was shutting down. Trying to save her would mean multiple drugs, transfusions, and being hooked up to a ventilator. Both Kat and I had seen this happen with people in the ICU, holding off the inevitable while the family held on to unreasonable expectations of recovery.

It was time.

I told Kat what the vet had said. Then we called the girls to the kitchen table and explained Lyra’s condition.

“Girls,” I began, stifling tears, “Lyra is not doing well, and her heart
is struggling to keep beating. It would be wrong to let her go on suffering, just for us.”

There was nothing more to say.

It is a heavy burden for an eleven- and twelve-year-old to make a choice between having their beloved dog come home or setting her free from her suffering. To spare them that guilt, Kat and I made the decision for them and simply framed it as the right thing to do. Even if I wasn’t sure myself.

I called Dr. Martin and told her that we didn’t want Lyra to continue treatment when the prognosis was so poor. She understood and assured me that we were making the right choice.

At the hospital, Lyra looked the same. I was relieved that she still appeared to be sleeping, even though mentally she was probably out of it, bordering on being comatose. Her heart monitor told the story. She was in v-tach, and her heart was beating two hundred times a minute, too fast to maintain blood pressure.

While Kat signed the forms, Dr. Martin explained what would happen next. Helen absorbed the information without expression. We all sat on the floor around Lyra, each of us laying a hand on her. The first injection was an anesthetic. There was no discernible change, confirming that Lyra was already, in effect, asleep, and this knowledge lessened my guilt a little bit. The second injection, a cocktail of chemicals, was just as unremarkable. No shuddering, no movement. Just a cessation of Lyra’s shallow breathing. The slight upturn of her mouth—her doggy smile—remained permanently in place.

For the last time, I whispered in her ear so that only she could hear: “Lyra, I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry I was deaf to what you were saying. And I’m sorry I didn’t understand what Callie was trying to tell me. If only I had taught you to go into the scanner too, maybe I would have known there was something wrong. I will miss you, always.”

By the time we got home, it was dark and it had started to rain. There was no question that Lyra would receive a proper funeral. But I would have preferred to wait until the morning.

Helen summed up the situation: “Dad, I can’t sleep knowing that her body is just lying here.”

So, with headlamps in place, Kat and I set to the task of digging Lyra’s grave in the dark. Despite the rain, the red Georgian clay did not yield easily to our shovels. Neither of us cared. After two hours of digging and prying rocks, we were staring at a hole so deep that we had to stand in it to dig any farther. We both took some comfort in the blisters that had formed on our hands. A tearing of the skin that symbolized the tearing in our hearts.

We lowered Lyra into the hole and called the girls outside.

They each placed a stuffed animal next to her, and we covered her in a favorite blanket. In turn, each of us placed a shovelful of earth in the grave.

The grief was too overwhelming for anyone to speak, so I spoke for all of us.

“Lyra, you were the gentlest, kindest dog we have ever known. You will be in our hearts forever.”

Choking back tears, and as I had upon Newton’s death two years before, I recited “The Rainbow Bridge”:

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge…

24

What Dogs Are Really Thinking

DIA DE LOS MUERTOS 2012

I
T HAD BEEN TWO
years since the inception of the Dog Project, and our shrine to the dead was now one soul larger. I thought back to the weeks following Lyra’s death. Nobody in the house had been the same. Maddy missed cuddling with the big teddy bear, and Kat longed for Lyra’s happy, vacant face staring up at her from the foot of the kitchen table. Even Callie had lost a little bit of her spark and had taken to following me around the house. Helen was morose and cried herself to sleep with Lyra’s collar in her grip.

After all we had accomplished, I wondered whether Lyra had been trying to tell me something. I supposed it had been possible, but I also knew that her personality was such that even if something had been bothering her, she wouldn’t have given any indication. It was the way of the golden retriever. Unflappable and perennially friendly, these are the reasons why goldens are so popular.

But the traits that make goldens so lovable also make it harder to know what they are thinking. I had learned to read Callie but I had taken Lyra for granted. For some time after Lyra’s death I faulted myself for this oversight. But gazing at Lyra’s picture, I realized just how different our dogs had been. Callie was a hunter. Lyra wasn’t. Although Lyra had come from a line of dogs bred for hunting and retrieving, she had never displayed any of those traits. She had never even taken to swimming.

Finally, after two years, the Dog Project had begun to find clues to why we love dogs so much and how dogs became who they are. Eventually, our results might even explain why dogs and humans came together thousands of years ago. The brain data pointed to dogs’ unique interspecies social intelligence. In answer to the question “What are dogs thinking?” the grand conclusion was this:
they’re thinking about what we’re thinking.
The dog-human relationship was not one-sided. With their high degree of social and emotional intelligence, dogs reciprocated our feelings toward them. They truly are First Friend.

Throughout the world, the two most popular pets are dogs and cats, and both are descended from predatory species. It seems odd that the first animals that humans supposedly domesticated were hunting animals. You would think that it would have been much easier for prehistoric humans to take in more docile species. A common explanation for this is that dogs helped humans hunt while cats caught vermin. While plausible, this theory assumes that humans domesticated animals because of their usefulness in survival.

The results from the Dog Project suggest a different explanation. While the caudate activation in the dogs’ brains shows that they transfer the meaning of a hand signal to something rewarding like hot dogs, the other brain regions activating point toward a theory of mind. Our results support a theory of self-domestication based on dogs’ superior social cognition and their ability to reciprocate in human relationships. Moreover, these interspecies social skills evolved from dogs’ predatory past.

Apart from humans, strong evidence for theory of mind has been found in only monkeys and apes, which have social cognition for primates but not necessarily other animals. Dogs are much better than apes at interspecies social cognition. Dogs easily bond with humans, cats, livestock, and pretty much any animal. Monkeys, chimpanzees, and apes will not do this without a lot of training from a young age. And even then, I would never trust an ape.

The different types of social cognition may be a result of the different diets of the species. Apes eat fruits, grasses, seeds, and sometimes meat. Like humans, they are omnivorous. Dogs (and cats), on the other hand, are mostly carnivorous. This means that dogs’ ancestors, the wolves, had to hunt their prey. Apart from humans, primates do not depend on meat for a substantial part of their diet.

Hunting is hard. It is not as simple as waiting for prey to wander by. Predator species must outsmart their prey. To some extent, this means that predators must get in the mind of their prey. A lion, for example, stalks a gazelle by anticipating what it is going to do, but the gazelle only reacts. All predators, whether they hunt alone or in packs, had to evolve an interspecies theory of mind to be successful. The brain-imaging results suggested that through evolution, dogs somehow adapted their ancestors’ skills in reading the mind of other animals from a predatory capacity to one of coexistence.

Around twenty-seven thousand years ago, a subspecies of wolves domesticated themselves and became dogs. During this period, the ice sheets had reached their greatest extent, stretching as far south as Germany in Europe and New York City in North America. The ice sheets would have pushed humans who had previously migrated north to move south again. The wolves, who were well adapted to cold climates, also would have moved south following the ice sheets. As a result, both humans and wolves probably came into contact with each other more frequently.

Why wouldn’t they have eaten each other? Perhaps they did. But more likely, a few wolves realized that they could hang around humans. Some researchers have suggested that the wolves survived by scavenging from human leftovers. However, John Bradshaw has pointed out that wolves require a prodigious amount of food, and it is unlikely that a wolf could have survived exclusively off human garbage. Others have suggested that wolves helped humans hunt. This might have been possible, but even modern dogs need to be trained to help the hunter. And wolves are not nearly as trainable as dogs. Moreover, dogs appear almost nowhere in prehistoric cave art that otherwise depicts human hunting activity.