For the Love of a Dog Read Online Free PDF Page A

share? I’ve said that sometimes Luke lost his temper with me—but how could I know that? Without language as a bridge, how can any of us really know what goes on inside the heads of our dogs?
    In one sense, we can’t. We can’t ever know what it is like to be a dog; some argue we shouldn’t even try. But many of us try to understand the mental lives of our dogs every day, and we’re not going to give up just because the task is difficult. One of my earliest childhood memories is of lying on the living room floor wondering what was going on in the mind of my dog, Fudge. I wanted to know what she was thinking, what she was feeling. Even at the age of five or six I wondered, What is life like inside her soft, furry little head? Is she happy? Is she sad?
    These are reasonable questions for any dog lover to ask. Our emotional connection to our dogs is the fundamental glue that binds us to them, and it’s natural to want to know more about their emotional connections to us. We can’t have long intellectual discussions with our dogs as we do with our human friends; perhaps that’s part of the attraction. Our intelligence and ability to use language can make our human relationships pretty complicated, as any marriage and family therapist can tell you. Our relationships with dogs are simpler in many ways than our relationships with people, but simplicity doesn’t necessarily make something less important. E = mc 2 is simple, but it’s an equation of great value. Perhaps our emotional connection to dogs is similar: pure, primal, and as basic as oxygen and water.
    I don’t remember whether I ran forward or stood frozen in fear during that endless second when Luke was in danger, but it was only a moment or two before a woman behind me calmly said, “Down your dog.” I will forever be grateful to her, because this was perfect advice. A working guard dog is unlikely to be aggressive to a dog who lies down and stays still when approached, rather than running at the sheep like a hungry wolf
. “Liedown!”
I bellowed, and two hundred yards away, Luke hit the dirt like a Marine on maneuvers
.
    If Luke had been a much younger dog, he might have kept running. Asking a dog to stop on his outrun goes against his nature, and although an experienced trial-ready dog should be able to do it, it’s an advanced skill that takes some serious teamwork to achieve
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    Luke’s age and training might have saved his life, because he dropped to the ground at my first request. Just in time: the guard dog got to him within seconds. “Stay there,” I said in a low, steady voice, finally coming to my senses enough to be able to function. Luke stayed motionless, glued to the hillside, while the Pyrenees sniffed him from head to toe. (Well, really it was from rear end to muzzle, but you know what I mean
.)
    Although I was still terrified about what might happen to Luke, my brain was working again, and I was able to remember that my own guard dog insisted on inspecting any visiting dog from tail to collar. Tulip has been aggressive toward a visiting dog only once—when it ran away from her instead of standing still for scrutiny. I’m reminded of airport security guards, who are benevolent if we accept their inspections, but who react instantly to anyone who resists. Tulip behaves in a similar way, and once she’s cleared canine travelers of harboring some doggy equivalent of sharp objects, she ignores them or invites them to play. That’s exactly what happened that morning at the fun day. After a round of intense sniffing, the dog trotted off to check in with his flock. Soon his owner came and put him away, and Luke was able to complete his outrun and ease the sheep down the hill to me
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    We had a great time working the flock after the interlude with the guard dog, and drove home tired from our day outside in the fresh air. Later I told a client about what had happened, and she suggested that Luke had probably been traumatized by it. “Look at