An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs

In this way, perhaps, David’s relationship with Grisby is healthier than mine. With me, Grisby is enmeshed; with David, he knows his place. In other words, David has what most people would probably consider to be an appropriate kind of relationship with his dog. He loves Grisby, worries when he’s sick, enjoys having him around, but doesn’t miss him—doesn’t even think about him, doesn’t even really notice—when he’s not there. He has his own pet names for Grisby—Bright Eyes, Big Boy, Señor—that are affectionate but not infantilizing. It seems ridiculous for me to be jealous, but sometimes I wonder whether, as males, David and Grisby have a bond I’ll never share. It’s tempting to romanticize the man-dog connection, and to overlook the fact that it can be instrumental or exploitative, or that it usually involves questions of aggression and control.

These issues appear most overtly in the hypermale world of dogfighting, a practice that goes back to ancient times. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Babylonians all employed fighting dogs on the battlefield. During the Roman invasion of Britain, the conquering legions were impressed by what early historians referred to as the pugnaces britanniae: the fighting dogs of Britain. The specific breed of these ferocious, battle-ready beasts is unknown, but in light of an early reference to them as “broad-mouthed,” it’s widely believed they were remote ancestors of the modern-day mastiff.

Soon after their invasion, the Romans began to import British fighting dogs, even appointing an officer whose job was to select especially pugnacious animals to send abroad. Some were trained to fight in battle; others were turned into gladiators and pitted against bulls, bears, and wild elephants in the Colosseum, a precursor to modern bullfighting. Later, the pugnaces britanniae were used in bearbaiting, a “sport” that flourished in the sixteenth century and was especially popular among English noblemen (ironically, it’s the blue bloods who pursue blood sports most earnestly). By the early nineteenth century, the pastime had become less common, owing to the increasing scarcity and rising cost of bears (as well as growing concerns about cruelty to animals), and in 1835 bear- and bullbaiting were both outlawed by an Act of Parliament. Henceforth, these “sports” were replaced by the cheaper, legal alternative of dog-on-dog combat, and fighting breeds were crossbred to create agile and vicious creatures capable of brawling for hours at a time.

Shortly before the American Civil War, English fighting dogs were imported to the United States, where they were mated with native breeds. Dogfighting quickly became a popular spectator and betting sport in the United States, and the United Kennel Club created formal rules and sanctioned referees. Fights were held in taverns and halls, and railroads would sometimes offer special fares to passengers traveling to well-publicized events. The observer of a Brooklyn dogfight in 1876 described its spectators as a “villainous-looking set … more inhuman in appearance than the dogs … a crowd of brutal wretches whose conduct stamps them as beneath the struggling beasts.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most dogfighters were men in typically macho working-class professions: police officers, soldiers, and firefighters. When dogfighting became illegal in the 1930s and ’40s, it was driven underground, where it continues to thrive, despite its being classed as a felony in all fifty states.

“Let dogs delight to bark and bite,” begins a hymn by the English theologian Isaac Watts. This is the line usually taken by defenders of legalized dogfighting—that dogs naturally exult in their strength and are eager for combat; that fighting, in other words, is “in their nature.” I know there are fighting rings in Baltimore, and I sometimes worry Grisby might be stolen for use as bait. Pet theft is apparently on the rise in the city, though since it’s lumped in with other kinds of property theft, it’s difficult to know how widespread it really is.

Such theft is certainly not as common as it was in nineteenth-century London, when substantial ransoms would be asked for the animals’ safe return. The most notorious of these mercenary pet pilferers was a gang whose members called themselves “the Fancy.” Their modus operandi was to wait until the dog was momentarily unattended, lure the unsuspecting creature—usually with liver mixed with myrrh or opium, or sometimes with a bitch in heat—then shove the poor animal in a sack and disappear into the crowd. When the gang’s demands weren’t met, the dog’s paws or even its head would be delivered to its owner. Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, was kidnapped three times by the Fancy, and each time she unhesitatingly and immediately paid the ransom (see FLUSH (#ue2bbefee-e105-584f-9bd5-499044ffde5e)). Who can blame her?

Still, when I asked an animal control officer whether I was taking a risk by leaving Grisby tied up outside a Starbucks, he looked amused. “No risk at all,” he assured me, condescendingly. “Anybody that’s involved in illegal activities is going to want to stay under the radar as much as possible. If they wanted dogs as bait, they’re not going to steal one off the street. For one thing, you can just go and get a mutt from the pound—this city’s full of people trying to get rid of dogs they can’t afford to keep. Another thing—if you steal a purebred, it’s probably going to have a microchip and it’s going to be worth some money, which bumps it up from a theft to a felony. Nobody’s going to take those kinds of risks for what’s at stake.”

I felt foolish. When you think about it, the idea of gangsters emerging from the ghetto to steal “our” innocent pets is really absurd; what’s more, it bespeaks all kinds of race and class anxieties. These sensitive issues also saturate the discourse around pit bull “rescue” campaigns, in which dogs are taken from young black men in the city’s run-down neighborhoods, inoculated, bathed, “altered,” given friendly names, adopted by middle-class families, and taken to live in the suburbs. We do to the dogs what we really want to do to the barbarians who breed them: make them submit.

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CAESAR III (#u0b32d8f8-4df1-577f-a08b-badef922da4b)

CAESAR III IS a Boston terrier who appears in the short story “Coming, Aphrodite!” by Willa Cather (first published in August 1920 under the title “Coming, Eden Bower!”). The narrative’s central character is Caesar’s master, Don Hedger, a solitary artist whose ascetic life is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a glamorous new resident to the Washington Square boardinghouse in which he lives. The sensual Eden (real name: Edna) Bower is a singer who uses her looks and talent to draw the crowds.

When we first meet them, Don and Caesar are living a quiet, uneventful life in Hedger’s small studio. Caesar, set in his ways, is a grouchy and sullen creature with an “ugly but sensitive face.” People complain about the dog’s surly disposition, but Don explains that it’s not Caesar’s fault—“he had been bred to the point where it told on his nerves.” Every day, the pair follow the same quiet, austere routine. In the morning, Hedger gives Caesar a bath in the rooming house’s shared tub and then rubs him into a glow with a heavy towel. All day, Don paints, and Caesar sits alertly at his feet; in the evening, the pair eat together at the same basement oyster house. For days on end, Don talks to “nobody but his dog and the janitress and the lame oysterman.” In summer, when the nights are hot, Hedger climbs up a ladder to the roof, carrying Caesar under his arm, and they sleep together side by side under the stars.

Eden Bower first appears in the hall outside the neighbors’ shared bathroom.

“I wish you wouldn’t wash your dog in the tub,” she complains to Don.

Until then, “it had never occurred to Hedger that anyone would mind using the tub after Caesar,” but suddenly made ashamed by Eden’s dignified beauty, “he realized the unfitness of it.” Eden Bower, he immediately realizes, is a different kind of creature from males like Caesar and himself. Listening to her sing and play the piano, Hedger finds her mesmerizing. He discovers a crack in his studio wall and starts to spy on Eden every morning when she exercises in the nude. Finally, he gets up the courage to ask her if she’d like to join him on a trip to Coney Island. Eden considers the prospect; her doubt focuses not on Don but on his dog. She concedes, but only as long as Caesar is left behind.

Hedger is taken aback. “But he’s half the fun,” he argues. “You’d like to hear him bark at the waves when they come in.”

Eden knows better. “No, I wouldn’t,” she retorts. “He’s jealous and disagreeable if he sees you talking to anyone else.”

So Caesar is left behind, “lying on his pallet, with a bone” while the couple spend the day at Coney Island. Here, Eden finds herself growing attracted to Hedger, though she’s slightly afraid of his brutality (“she had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lower jaw was like his bull-dog’s”).

When they return to Washington Square, Eden and Hedger become lovers, and decide to open up the double doors that separate their rooms in the boardinghouse. All at once, Hedger’s dark, cave-like lair becomes a bright love nest, and “Caesar, lying on his bed in the dark corner,” is startled by this invasion of sunlight: “the side of his room was broken open, and his whole world shattered by change.” A miserable interlude passes—miserable, at least, for the dog—during which Don bestows all his attention and affection on Eden Bower. True to his name, Caesar III is put in third place. Before long, however, Eden has become such a hit in New York that she’s booked on a European tour, summoned to take up her place in a feminine world of fashion and glamour. She soon becomes wealthy and widely known, while Hedger, the serious artist, remains alone in his creative struggle, uninterested in the wider world. He closes the doors on the sunlight, returning to his quiet life with his dog.

I’m so fond of Caesar that it disappoints me to discover everyone who’s written about this story regards him either as a symbol—invariably “phallic”—of Don Hedger’s masculinity, or as a representation of his master’s artistic practice (unfriendly, inward-looking, a force that prevents wider engagement in the world). I wonder: Why does Caesar have to represent anything? Why can’t he just be Caesar? To me, “Coming, Aphrodite!” is the story of a tormented love triangle that develops between Hedger, Caesar, and Eden Bower, whose arrival upsets the perfect balance of man and dog.

I’m drawn to Caesar in part because he’s a Boston terrier, and bully breeds remind me of Grisby, but also because he’s such a fully realized character in the story—all the more reason why it seems wrongheaded to see him as a mere symbol. Like Don Hedger and Eden Bower, Caesar III has his own scent, texture, and personality. In what to me are the story’s most moving scenes, the narrative voice slides almost imperceptibly from Don’s perspective to Caesar’s, and though we may not consciously notice it, we’re experiencing events from Caesar’s point of view. When Don carries his dog up the ladder to the roof, for example, we learn, of Caesar, that “never did he feel so much his master’s greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm for this perilous ascent.” The roof to Caesar is “a kind of Heaven, which no-one was strong enough to reach but his great, paint-smelling master,” where he and Don lie together under the stars, feeling the same delight, “lost in watching the glittering game.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Caesar when I came across a bull terrier in Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. In an early scene, Mrs. Bertha Dorset gets on board a train “accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering under a load of bags and dressing-cases.” This dog at once caught my attention, yet oddly enough, we never see or hear of the creature again. Bertha Dorset is a major character in The House of Mirth, and Edith Wharton has a fine eye for detail, so it’s surprising to come across this elusive bull terrier. Perhaps Mrs. Dorset borrowed the dog, regarding it as a fashionable accessory for a trip to Bellomont, the country home of her friends Judy and Gus Trenor. She does have a calculating, opportunistic nature, and she might very well forget, lose, or give away a dog that had lost its charm. And we’re never informed that the bull terrier belongs to Bertha Dorset—it could be a gift for one of the Trenors’ two teenage daughters, or for another member of the house party. It might even belong to her maid.

However unlikely it seems that a maid would be permitted to travel with her bull terrier, it makes more sense than the notion that Wharton would have introduced a dog into her novel simply to forget about it in the next chapter. From her childhood, dogs were her most loyal and lasting companions, though she preferred smaller breeds than bull terriers. In a well-known photograph, she has a Pekingese on each shoulder, the two creatures nestling comfortably atop the leg-of-mutton sleeves of their mistress’s dress. In other images, the author sits with dogs on her lap, under her arms, or at her feet. In one or two pictures, she sits at a desk, pen in hand, but these images were posed; Wharton actually wrote in bed, with her coffee, the morning papers, and her dogs all spread out around her. Like many women, she was not ashamed to admit she slept with her dogs. According to an article in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, 25 percent of female dog owners confessed to doing the same (as opposed to 16 percent of men; evidently, men are either more fastidious, less affectionate, or simply lying).

Wharton’s first dog was a puppy named Foxy, bought for her by her father when she was a young girl. “How I loved that first ‘Foxy’ of mine, how I cherished and yearned over and understood him!” wrote Wharton as an adult, looking back on her childhood. “And how quickly he relegated all dolls and other inanimate toys to the region of my everlasting indifference!” The author of The Age of Innocence felt she shared a special understanding with animals, writing that she was one of the few who “love and understand the little four-foots … [and] have the mysterious animal affinity [to] communicate with [them].” Her relationship with Foxy, she wrote, “made me into a conscious sentient person, fiercely possessive, anxiously watchful, and woke in me that long ache of pity for animals, and for all inarticulate beings, which nothing has ever stilled.”

The House of Mirth was written in 1905, when it was presumably acceptable for a lady to bring a small dog with her—or with her maid, at least—on the train. These days, Amtrak has a strict no-pet policy (with an exception for service dogs), though the inner-city rail networks in Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle all allow well-behaved dogs to ride with their owners. Outside the United States, railways are more accommodating. Dogs are allowed on trains in much of Europe. We took Grisby with us to London a couple of years ago, and he sat beside me on buses and trains, even in taxis. He remained composed and unflustered even in a subway car packed with patriotic revelers on their way to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (Grisby may not be a British bulldog, but he knows how to keep a stiff upper lip).

Of course, the best way to get to know a city is by walking, and this is true of dogs as much as humans. I get a lot more exercise since Grisby’s arrival in my life; these days, I prefer to travel by foot just for the pleasure of watching him trot along by my side. I like the way he draws my attention to things I’d never noticed before: stains on the sidewalk, discarded food, chewing gum, feathers, cigarette butts. For Grisby, every season has its special delights. In winter, he’ll climb through the snow, catching flakes in his mouth. In spring, he’ll stick his snout into damp gutters and rain-soaked trash piles. In summer, he, like Caesar, loves to bark at the waves on the beach, and in fall, he cocks his leg against piles of dried leaves; then, when he’s covered them with his smell, he’ll kick them all over the street, just to show everyone who’s boss. The only weather he really dislikes is rain. In wet conditions, his walk will turn into a run as he charges around the block at top speed, running up every stoop, trying to dodge inside every doorway, as if hoping some sympathetic stranger will take pity on him and invite him to dry off by the fire.

He enjoys getting dirty, but unlike Caesar III, he doesn’t enjoy his baths, and for this reason I try to keep them limited to once a month. It’s hard to resist, though, because it’s such a treat to have him in the tub with me, to hold his warm, wet body firmly between my knees. He soon stops struggling, allowing me to wash his ears gently, remove the dirt from his wrinkles, shampoo his neck, back, and belly. After rinsing him off, I’ll lift him out of the tub and watch him run around the room, shaking his body dry, looking oddly naked without his collar.

Grisby loves to walk, but he likes other modes of transport as well; he enjoys riding in the small red cart used by the concierge in our building to deliver large packages. If he loves to be pushed, he loves even more to be driven. Like Mr. Toad, he has a head for motoring adventures, and he’ll start racing in excitement whenever he realizes we’re heading for the garage. Like all dogs, he loves sticking his nose out of the window and catching a breeze, letting his ears blow back in the wind. He’s even worked out how to press the electric window button with his paw (though “worked out” may not be exactly the right way of putting it), which, on a cold morning, can lead to some frustrating battles between us (of course, he can undo the window lock, too).

Best of all are our rides back from the beach together on summer days, when Grisby—warm and wet, with sand in his fur—is strapped into his harness on my lap. On these drives, we’re connected at a physical level, like Don and Caesar climbing up to the roof. Strapped to my body, Grisby presses heavily into my stomach, and our bodies respond together to the jolts of the car. At those moments, with a wet bulldog snoring on my lap, it’s as though we’re merged together organically, a hybrid creature of flesh and fur, a single animal with two beating hearts.

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DOUCHKA (#u0b32d8f8-4df1-577f-a08b-badef922da4b)

DOUCHKA, A TROUBLESOME and neurotic German shepherd, was the subject of Behind the Bathtub, a book that won the Prix Médicis (a major French literary award) in 1962. The author of this sober and touching memoir was Colette Audry, a French literary critic, screenwriter, and expert on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she often collaborated. She was a militant feminist, deeply involved in the anti-Stalinist left.

When she first acquires Douchka, Madame Audry is divorced and living in Paris with her teenage son. The dog’s parents, she discovers too late, were brother and sister, and as a result Douchka has various psychological problems, the most serious of which, from Audry’s perspective, is her furious barking in cars. In the company of Douchka, any trip, however short, becomes a nightmare. Sedatives are completely useless. So relentless and unbearable is the racket she makes that at one point Audry seriously considers having the dog’s vocal cords removed. The barking gets so infuriating that she often wants to throw Douchka bodily out of the car, and on one occasion actually opens the door and lets the dog fall into the road, leaving the desperate creature to run for two miles on swollen paws—a punishment the dog’s mistress bitterly regrets.

Barking is Douchka’s worst problem, but not her only one; in fact, it may not be going too far to describe the dog as barking mad. She’s nervous and needy and can’t be left alone, demanding Audry’s constant attention, dragging her away from her writing and political activism. When her mistress goes out at night to put up antigovernment posters in the Paris streets, Douchka manages to escape and follows her; for the activists, the dog’s anxious barking becomes a dangerous liability. As time passes, Douchka’s needs gradually compel Audry to give up most of her customary activities, and often prevent her from leaving her apartment. On top of this, Audry is convinced it would be wrong to “alter” her dog, and consequently, twice a year, she ends up “fighting off Douchka’s would-be admirers like an officious chaperon.”

As she gets older, Douchka grows increasingly disturbed, and Audry finds herself almost overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for the creature. For a while, she considers putting Douchka to “sleep,” but is unable to go through with it, and she finally realizes that something must give. “I could neither cure Douchka or her neurosis,” she eventually admits, “nor myself of the enormous emotional burden she laid on my life.” For Douchka’s sake, then, Audry gives up “what no man had ever taken from me—my freedom of movement and decision,” and accepts the kinds of restrictions that, as a militant feminist, she’s battled against all her life. Yet once she’s stopped struggling, Douchka’s mistress starts to find that although in some ways her independence has been curtailed, the payoff is unexpectedly sweet. Now she can devote herself completely to the intractable Douchka, and she confesses that “loving her gave me a special pleasure: it was unlike anything else I have ever experienced, a mixture of responsibility, amusement, and gaiety, a small deep-rooted delight concentrated on her and her alone.”

Reading Behind the Bathtub is a mixed experience. The book is beautifully written but often very sad, and Douchka can be infuriating. It made me realize how blessed I am by Grisby’s placid nature and traveling chops. Sure, he likes to be around me, even to the extent of following me to the toilet and pushing open the bathroom door with his flat snout, but he’s never too clingy. At the beach, I’ll lie on a blanket and read while he plays nearby like a well-behaved child, paddling and exploring, safe in the knowledge that, should he need me, I’ll always be close by. When we walk in the woods, he’ll trot at my feet, but will fall back if he finds something interesting to sniff or chew. I don’t slacken my pace—I know that, before long, I’ll hear him panting and snorting behind me as he runs to catch up. In fact, when we’re apart, I’m sure I suffer more than he does, missing all the little signs of his presence—his small sighs and grunts, the sound of his claws on the floorboards, his jingling collar, his soft ears rubbing against my knees.

I try not to, but I often find myself wondering what he’s feeling in my absence, which, in J. R. Ackerley’s novel We Think the World of You, is the first step down the slope to madness and heartbreak. In this book, the narrator, Frank, upsets himself by worrying about the dog owned by his young lover, Johnny, who’s serving time in prison. Johnny’s German shepherd, Evie, is being “cared for” by the young man’s working-class family, whose treatment of her—she’s left alone in a small courtyard for ten hours a day—strikes Frank as profoundly cruel. He drives himself right to the edge of a nervous breakdown imagining the dog left at home alone, “hope constantly springing, constantly dashed.” He pictures how “she would gaze longingly at the lead on the wall, go over to it to investigate it with her black nose, employ all her little arts to draw attention to her needs, and get nothing, nothing … Day after day, day after day, nothing, nothing; the giving and the never getting; the hoping and the waiting for something that never comes.”

“I—I can’t bear to think of her,” Frank confesses to Johnny one day, during a prison visit. “Her loneliness. I can’t bear it. It upsets me.” His suffering is made worse by the fact that every time he gets up to leave after visiting Evie, she becomes hysterical, jumping up and down and looking at him with desperate hope. “It always affected me with a sensation of hysteria similar perhaps to her own,” says Frank, “a feeling that if I did not take care I should begin to laugh, or to cry, or possibly to bark, and never be able to stop.” Even after he’s adopted the dog and taken her into his home, Frank still worries about her during the day, when he’s at work and she’s at home alone. “That she was awaiting my return I had no doubt at all,” he says. “I knew that she loved me and listened for me, that whenever a knock came at the door her tall, shell-like ears strained forward with the hope ‘Is it he?’” In a similar fashion, Thomas Mann puts himself in the mind of his setter, Bashan. When Mann leaves for work every morning in the city, he confesses that “a pang goes through my heart—I mount the train with an uneasy conscience. He has waited so long and so patiently—and who does not know what torture waiting can be! His whole life is nothing but waiting—for the next walk in the open—and this waiting begins as soon as he has rested after his last run.”

If Douchka, Evie, or Bashan were human beings waiting anxiously all day for one person to come home, we’d probably describe them as being “in love,” perhaps even to an obsessive degree. But is this kind of love the same as human love? Marjorie Garber, in her book on the subject, makes the case that “dog love is local love, passionate, often unmediated, virtually always reciprocated, fulfilling, manageable. Love for human beings is harder. Human beauty and grace are fitfully encountered: a child grows up and grows away, a lover becomes familiar, known, imperfect, taken for granted.” Our complicated bond with our dogs, argues Caroline Knapp in Pack of Two, is profoundly gratifying because “dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to others, our needs for boundaries and autonomy and distance.”

Dogs know instinctively how to show their feelings for us, but it’s hard to know how to love them back. Some dog owners spend thousands of dollars on designer doghouses; some ruin their pets’ health with too many treats; some take their pals to sheepherding boot camps, or run them through agility trials every weekend. I do none of these things; I simply love to be with Grisby. I love to kiss and pet him, but while he seems to understand the point of my affection, he doesn’t always appreciate getting it as much as I enjoy giving it. This often makes me feel a little Humbert Humbert–ish, especially when Grisby’s sitting on my lap in the car and I have access to parts of his body that are normally inaccessible to me, like his soft piebald underbelly. Should I feel ashamed of myself?

The question remains: Do dogs “fall in love” with us the way we do with them? According to John Bradshaw, the author of In Defense of Dogs, the experience isn’t exactly the same. When a dog licks your face, says Bradshaw, it’s gathering information about you from your breath and sweat glands, learning when you had your last meal and whether there might be any bits of it left over. This is a gesture it’s instinctively programmed to go through every time it comes close to another friendly mouth, whether human or canine. In other words, when Grisby nuzzles my face, he’s displaying not affection but the same kind of instinctive curiosity that leads him to sniff a drain or stick his nose into the trash, though—from his point of view at least—my face is rarely as rich or rewarding. “Dogs are obviously attached to their owners—in the sense of their behavior, in the sense that they follow them around,” Bradshaw concedes, finally getting to the crucial question: Does your dog actually love you? At last, he gives me the answer I’ve been dying to hear (“Of course it does!”), but it’s too glib for me to take seriously. It’s too easy, too ingratiating: a sop to Cerberus. Dog love is more complicated than that.

After all, whatever word we might choose to describe them, our feelings for our dogs—and their feelings for us—may be gratifying, but they can also be painful and tormented, even more than our emotions for other human beings. In We Think the World of You, Frank is devoted to Evie, but his dedication is selfish, peevish, and sometimes even toxic. “I loved her; I wished her forever happy,” he admits, “but I could not bear to lose her. I could not bear even to share her. She was my true love and I wanted her all to myself.” As this novel testifies, love for dogs can be confusing, contrary, and full of terrible suffering.

Like many dog books, Behind the Bathtub ends unhappily. While she’s still quite young, Douchka is bitten by an infected rat, grows sick, and one night crawls to the place where she always used to hide when she’d been reprimanded—behind the bathtub. It’s a heartbreaking scene. Audry describes it clearly and without sentiment, struggling to understand the unique nature of the wordless, cross-species relationship the two females have shared. Reading this part of the book, I found myself wondering whether, when Grisby dies, I’ll look on our relationship with sorrow and regret, or whether memories of him will fade away fast as I move on to my second dog. Perhaps I’ll look at my photographs of Grisby the way I look at pictures of former lovers, wondering, as I toss them into the trash, what I ever saw in him, and how I could have deluded myself for so long.

The Prix Médicis is traditionally awarded to underrated authors with the aim of boosting their literary reputations and launching them to the next level of their careers (prizewinners have included such acclaimed writers as Monique Wittig, Elie Wiesel, Hélène Cixous, and Bernard-Henri Lévy). Yet the prize did little for Colette Audry, and some even ridiculed the committee for giving this important award to “a dog book.” Sadly, this brave and serious work of autobiography has long been out of print; its critical reception is illustrative of our uneasy cultural relationship not only with dogs but also with those who write about them. Many French reviewers were unable to take Behind the Bathtub seriously, dismissing it as a minor or negligible work.

Despite England’s reputation as a nation of animal lovers, response to the British edition (Douchka—The Story of a Dog) was equally condescending. According to one Sister Mary William in Best Sellers: “The book is easy reading and, I suppose, pleasant reading for dog lovers.” Sister William added sneeringly: “It seems to me that five dollars is quite a price to pay for this sentimental journey into the past of dog and mistress even though it … is said to have been a best seller in France.” Naomi Lewis in the Observer called Douchka “an angry, tormented book,” and Robert Nye in the Guardian described it as “run-of-the-mill animal stuff, all right if you can stomach it but otherwise about as appetising as cat’s meat and dog’s biscuits.” Francis Wyndham, reviewing Douchka in the New Statesman in 1963, was of the opinion that Audry “presumably writes that aggressively colloquial prose often favoured by intellectual French women” and suggests that “books about animals often seem unduly egotistic” because “there isn’t that much that can be written about them.” Finally, in her 1990 obituary of Colette Audry, Maryvonne Grellier in the Guardian completely mischaracterized Behind the Bathtub as “based on a childhood episode when she found the family’s pet dog dead behind the bath.”

We still make fun of women like Colette Audry who love their dogs “excessively.” (But who decides how much love is “too much”?) There seems to be an unstated assumption that this love is being “wasted” on an animal, that women who devote themselves to their dogs are slightly unhinged. For this reason, many women keep such feelings to themselves—but such emotions may be far more common than we think. The website Dogster includes a regular feature called “Doghouse Confessional,” where readers send in their secrets about their dogs. Past columns (all by women) have included “I Love My Dog More Than I Love My Husband,” “I Put My Dog’s Happiness First,” and “My Dog Has Outlasted All My Romantic Relationships.” If such feelings are widespread, moreover, it should be cause for celebration, not concern. You might love your dog more than you love your husband, but loving a dog doesn’t mean you stop loving people; in fact, evidence suggests that love for animals encourages a broader sense of general empathy.

Even today, despite the increasing importance of dogs in our lives, books about them are invariably dismissed as sentimental and lighthearted, lucrative but simplistic, the lowest form of literature. Alice A. Kuzniar, the author of Melancholia’s Dog, opens her thoughtful book on human-canine kinships by remarking that the subject of dogs is presumed to be unfit for serious scholarly investigation; “it is held,” she writes, “to be sentimental, popular, and trivial … Whenever I had to explain and justify to what I was devoting years of research and writing, I felt embarrassed.” Why can’t we let ourselves take dog love seriously? Is it because, if we did, we’d have to think seriously about other nonhuman animals, including those on our dinner plates? One way to keep these anxieties at a distance is to make fun of people who’ve got their pets out of all proportion; this is how we can restore the balance, reassuring ourselves that of course, although some people take their feelings for dogs too far, we know dog love isn’t “real love” (if it were, what would stop us from choosing dogs over people?). This, at least, is the only way I can possibly make sense of one reviewer’s perplexing summary of Behind the Bathtub: “Beneath the story of Mme. Audry and Douchka lies, almost hidden, the terrible tragedy of a loveless life.”

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EOS (#u0b32d8f8-4df1-577f-a08b-badef922da4b)

EOS, NAMED AFTER the Greek goddess of dawn, was a beloved female greyhound belonging to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. The German-born prince had a lonely childhood. His parents’ marriage was notoriously turbulent, and they divorced when Albert was five. The prince’s mother was exiled from court, his father grew cold and distant, and the boy’s only companion was his brother, Ernest, but when Albert was fourteen, Ernest left for college in Bonn. To keep the young Albert entertained, Eos, then a six-month-old puppy, was delivered to the royal family’s home in the Schloss Rosenau, and the pair were soon inseparable. “She was my companion from my fourteenth to my twenty-fifth year,” wrote the prince upon his greyhound’s death, “a symbol therefore of the best and the fairest section of my life.”