From Kirkus Reviews
Riding the wave generated by his bestselling When Elephants Weep (1995), Masson offers further clever musings on the emotional lives of animals, concentrating on that most fervent practitioner of interspecies devotion, Rover. Again, as in his earlier book, Masson serves a bounty of curious animal stories designed to at least hint at a complex inner life, full of deep feelings, in dogs. He doesn't claim to be following any particular scientific method. In fact, one of the best parts of this book is a canny dissection of anthropomorphism: when it is egregiously applied and clouds our understanding; when it serves as a scientific gag order, a closing of the mind. And he reminds the reader more often than necessary that his suppostions are a far cry from proof. He is just following his instincts, backing them up when he can from the formidable amount of research done on animal behavior. What this boils down to is Masson the storyteller, reeling off tale after tale of dog behavior that cries out to be considered on the emotional level. Many of the stories are of the winning, feel-good variety, of forgiveness and courage and loyalty (including one in which a trained police dog disobeys an apparently unjust order to attack), of their bottomless capacity for love and fun. There are darker stories, too--fashioned to raise our ire--of dogs' humiliation and abuse and abandonment at the hands of humans. But Masson can be irritating, tendering opinions as facts: ``No other animal (wild, tame, or domesticated) carries such meaning for humans as the dog,'' and ``Dogs do not lie to you about how they feel,'' as if he knows that dogs are incapable of a put-on. Masson may be an anecdotist, but he is also a graceful, powerful, informed writer. He knows how to keep our cogs turning. (line drawings) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
... Masson's dogs are literary animals created in his image. They fit within a sentimental tradition that sees dogs as childlike, loyal, compassionate, devoted, loving, guileless, pure. That is an uplifting portrait, but it is no more accurate than the view of them as biological machines. The flesh-and- bone dog is missing from both. -- The New York Times Book Review, Mark Derr
The strengths that this Sanskrit scholar ... brings to his subject are intelligence, originality and a refreshing willingness to go out on a good number of scientifically unsupported limbs in his enthusiasm for canines. -- Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Selma G. Lanes From the Publisher
"Masson provides us with another blockbuster about the emotional lives of animals [and] offers a thoroughly engaging discussion of what it means to think and feel as dogs do . . . he is a skilled philosopher and accomplished writer. Highly recommended."
-- Library Journal (starred review)"Riding the wave generated by his best-selling When Elephants Weep (1995), Masson offers further clever musings on the emotional lives of animals, concentrating on that most fervent practitioner of interspecies devotion, Rover. [Masson] is a graceful, powerful, informed writer."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Here at last, a beautiful and sensitively written book on the exceedingly important subject of dogs' emotional lives. It is high time that somebody takes on the subject, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Jeffrey Masson for doing so fearlessly, thoroughly, and lovingly."
--Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs
From the Inside Flap
ve an intense love for their dogs: thirty-five percent of American households owned a dog in 1994, representing a dog population of more than 52 million. "It hardly seems worth asking the question of why we love them," writes noted psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. "We love dogs because they love us, unconditionally. No matter how we treat them, what we do to them, how little attention we pay to them, they are eager to please us, eager to be with us." In Dogs Never Lie About Love, the New York Times best-selling author of When Elephants Weep shifts his attention from the jungle to the living room to explore the exotic and unchartered territory of dog emotion.
Why do dogs bark?
Why don't cats and dogs "fight like cats and dogs"?
Do some dogs commit suicide from despair?
Drawing from scientific studies, legends and literature, and from the stories of dog tra
About the Author
Jeffrey Masson has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Harvard University and graduated from the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. He was briefly projects director at the Sigmund Freud Archives; the documents he found there on Freud's approach to child abuse created a major controversy in psychoanalysis. He has written more than a dozen books, including most recently the national bestseller When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (with Susan McCarthy). He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, child, two cats, and three dogs.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Few who have lived with dogs would deny that dogs have feelings. Taking a cue from his great friend Darwin, who spoke of conscience in the dog, George Romanes wrote that "the emotional life of the dog is highly developed--more highly, indeed, than that of any other animal."1 (He did not include the human animal, though perhaps he should have done so.) Of course dogs have feelings, and we have no trouble acknowledging most of them. Joy, for example. Can anything be as joyous as a dog? Bounding ahead, crashing into the bushes while out on a walk, happy, happy, happy. Conversely, can anything be as disappointed as a dog when you say, "No, we are not going for a walk"? Down he flops onto the floor, his ears fall, he looks up, showing the whites of his eyes, with a look of utter dejection. Pure joy, pure disappointment.
But are this joy and disappointment identical to what humans mean when we use these words? What dogs do, the way they behave, even the sounds they make, seem instantaneously translatable into human emotional terms. When a dog is rolling in fresh-cut grass, the pleasure on her face is unmistakable. No one could be wrong in saying that what she is feeling is akin to what any of us (though less often, perhaps) may feel. The words used to describe the emotion may be wrong, our vocabulary imprecise, the analogy imperfect, but there is also some deep similarity that escapes nobody. My dog may appear to feel joy and sorrow much the way I do, and the appearance here is critical: We often have no more to go on when it comes to our fellow humans.
All dog caretakers (just another word for companion and friend) have marveled at the exuberant greeting their dogs give them after a brief absence. Sasha twirls around in delight, squealing and making extraordinary sounds. What accounts for this display of unbounded pleasure in our return? We tend to explain it by assuming a kind of stupidity: The dog thought I was gone forever. Dogs, we say, have no sense of time. As Robert Kirk of the Cornell Veterinary School once put it to me, dogs don't watch the clock. Every minute is forever. Everything is for good. Out means gone. In other words, when dogs do not behave as we do, we assume it to be irrational behavior. Yet a lover is entranced to see the beloved again after even a brief absence--and dogs are all about love. (For a fuller discussion on dogs and love, see Chapter 3.)
Another explanation for dogs' delight in our return may be found in the way in which puppies greet their mother. As soon as the mother appears, the puppies crowd around her, eager to nurse or expecting her to vomit food for them. Wolves have a greeting ceremony during which they wag their tales, lick one another, and bite the muzzles of other wolves. The pleasure of the puppies may be a vestige of this ceremony, as John Paul Scott and J. L. Fuller suggest.2
Soon after she joined the family, Sasha was sitting next to me one evening as I worked on an early draft of this chapter. I had been alone all day, working. There were just the two of us sitting in the living room, and it was very quiet. I looked over at Sasha and noticed that she was looking at me. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the thought: There is another being in this room, another consciousness. There is somebody here besides me. What, though, was Sasha thinking? Why did she suddenly glance up at me? Was she just checking to make sure I was still there, that I had nothing else in mind? Or was it a more complicated thought, one that was imbued (as many thoughts are) with feelings--affection, for example, or perhaps anxiety? She looked so peaceful, lying there. Was she feeling something like tranquillity? For certain Hindu philosophers, tranquillity is the master emotion, the one that underlies all others--it has been so fascinating to me that it was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis at Harvard. Perhaps I was merely projecting my own feelings on to Sasha. It is hard to know.
As Sasha sat quietly next to me, looking contented, every so often sighing with what appeared to be contentment, I wondered what she was actually feeling. How I would love to be her for just one moment, to feel what she was feeling. I have had this desire, more than once, with people, too. Does one ever know what another human being is actually feeling? It may be no harder to find out the truth about feelings in dogs than it is in people.
The question of how we know what we feel, let alone what somebody else feels, is beset with difficulties. Speaking to other people, we often use shorthand: "I feel sad" or "I feel happy." But more often than not what we feel is an emotional state for which there are no precise verbal equivalents. Think of how we restrict ourselves with language. "I'm depressed," we say. Yet that is only the vaguest hint of a more complex set of feelings. It is probably the same for dogs; their joy is at least as complicated (in the sense that we are not always certain of its components; perhaps memory of earlier pleasure plays a role and perhaps it is entirely bound to the moment) and hard to define.
While it is clear that we can learn a great deal about dogs from observing their behavior in terms of purely external actions, I think it is time to recognize that we could understand much more from observing how dogs feel. Moreover, we could learn something about our own feelings as well. For in the realm of feelings we can have no sense of superiority. After a lifetime of affectionate regard for dogs and many years of close observation and reflection, I have reached the conclusion that dogs feel more than I do (I am not prepared to speak for other people). They feel more, and they feel more purely and more intensely. By comparison the human emotional landscape seems murky with subterfuge and ambivalence and emotional deception, intentional or not. In searching for why we are so inhibited compared with dogs, perhaps we can learn to be as direct, as honest, as straightforward, and especially as intense in our feelings as dogs are.
Freud remarked on the fact that "dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations."3 In other words, dogs are without the ambivalence with which humans seem cursed. We love, we hate, often the same person, on the same day, maybe even at the same time. This is unthinkable in dogs, whether because, as some people believe, they lack the complexity or, as I believe, they are less confused about what they feel.4 It is as if once a dog loves you, he loves you always, no matter what you do, no matter what happens, no matter how much time goes by. Dogs have a prodigious memory for people they have known. Perhaps this is because they associate people with the love they felt for them, and they derive pleasure from remembering this love.
Sasha is possessed by my two small kittens, Raj and Saj. The minute she sees these two tiny fur dots, she goes into hyper-alert mode. She begins to whine and to moan and to groan. She looks at me with a pleading look, as if I hold the key to helping her get what she so badly wants. She sniffs them. She follows them from room to room, whining piteously. The first night they were here, Sasha never slept at all. She lay on the floor next to their cage, crossed her feet daintily, and observed them all through the night. When I let them out, she gently put her paw on them. The cats were a little dumbfounded by the whole thing, and especially at what Sasha took to doing by the second week: She would pick one up in her mighty jaws, taking great care not to harm him, carry him into another room, deposit him somewhere, and then head off to find the other one to do the same. Seeing her carrying these little orange dots from room to room was as puzzling for me as it was evidently for the cats. Soon, however, they wanted to play. One of the cats rolled over and reached out with her little paw. Yet their interest in Sasha is mild compared to hers in them. There can be no mistaking the intensity of her interest in these kittens. The nature of this interest is another matter.
What does she want? Could it be that a maternal instinct has been awakened and Sasha wants to act as a mother to the kittens? Does she really think they are her puppies, and want to bring them into a den? Or is her interest predatory, in that she wants to eat them and is torn between her desire to listen to me ("Do not eat the kittens!") and her instincts as a predator telling her that a kitten makes a good meal? Is she merely curious, wondering if these small beings are some odd kind of puppy? Maybe she is just herding them; she is after all a shepherd.
None of these explanations is entirely satisfactory. If it were a mothering instinct at work, she would behave similarly to rabbits, say, or geese, moaning when she sees them (instead of chasing them). Moreover, Sasha has had no pups. I doubt that she wants to eat them; I can barely persuade her to eat a piece of steak. Nor is she stupid; she knows the difference between a dog and a cat. If she were herding the kittens, she would not pick them up in her mouth, nor moan and groan with some inexpressible need or feeling. The truth is that I don't know why she's so drawn to them, and nobody else knows either. It would be so much simpler if only we could ask, "Sasha, why are you so interested in these small fur balls?" "Simple, just look at how adorable they are!" Or "They look so small and helpless, I want to protect them." Or even "Beats me." Whatever the behavior means, it is clear that Sasha is filled with feeling for these little kittens. It is clear because she moans and groans and follows them from room to room, and cocks her head and looks puzzled and intrigued. That is why I say she is possessed. She wants something from them, she feels something for them, and she seems to want to express those feelings.
It is hard to empathize with her because humans generally do not ...
