by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

For some of you out there, this is likely the first time that you have come to our church. You’ve been thinking about checking this place out and you woke up this morning and decided that today was the day. You made your way here. You sat down and you see that the sermon today is on the subject of dogs…and you are wondering whether the minister might just be, as they say, barking up the wrong tree.

Dogs are a big part of our lives, whether you have one or not. Just look at all the fuss about dogs in parks here in Portland, about when and where they can be off leash. Dogs are big business. A staggering amount of money is spent on dogs—and pets in general—every year in this country. For those who love and care for dogs, they are important creatures in our lives. And, I will admit, for others, the place of dogs in our society is yet another sign that something is wrong. They just don’t get the fuss about dogs.

As an adult I had thought about getting a dog for years. But I kept putting it off, mainly because my schedule is unpredictable and because I didn’t know whether I would have enough time to devote to a dog. My dog growing up was named Peewee. He was a mutt that looked exactly like the movie dog named Benji. We lived in the country and Peewee had all kinds of adventures, with possums, with other dogs, you name it. When he came home we were never sure how he would smell. But Peewee was a great dog. He died of old age when I was in high school.

Two years ago, when I was at the end of my sabbatical, I was suddenly clear that it was time to get a dog. I’m not altogether sure where this awareness came from, but it was clear. The concerns about having enough time for the dog were there, but I decided I would work it out.

I think it had something to do with the time I spent in Bali, an island in Indonesia, where everything seems connected. There is a not the kind of separation that we have between work and family and spirituality. It all seemed to be part of the same whole. I will say that in Bali, dogs are not viewed in quite the way they are here. The Balinese believe the dogs are reincarnated thieves and they treat them as such. The animals are thin and mangy and they scrounge for their food. But still that experience in Bali seemed to translate for me here as time to get a dog.

So I was back from Bali and it was time to get a dog. I knew that I had about a month here before I would be at the church. I was told to carefully check out the want ads, to not just go anywhere. Well here I was, I wanted a dog—a pug, I was pretty sure. I looked in the want ads and there were plenty to choose from. I settled on one place and called. I made an appointment with the breeder.

The next day I found myself sitting on her living room floor and all of a sudden here came the dogs—fourteen pug puppies from two different litters—and they were running all over the place.

Now this is just about as cute as life gets. Puppies are cute, but pug puppies are especially cute. I didn’t know how in the world this choice was going to be made. But there was one of the dogs that kept hanging around me. As the rest of the pack made their circles around the coffee table, the dog for me became clear. It wasn’t as hard as I had thought it would be.

My dog Lucy turned two last week. My life is different with her around. I will confess that I actually hosted a doggie slumber party last weekend….But that’s another story.

But I will say that in the last two years I have met more neighbors than I had in the previous seven years. Lucy has been good for me. She makes me laugh and generally lightens things up whenever she is around. And when I come home and have not had such a good day, she is good energy to be around. I don’t have to describe what has been difficult. I just have to be in a different space. And Lucy has a way of calling me to the different space. I can’t quite imagine life without Lucy.

Our relationship with our dogs—and I should say here that this relationship can also be with cats, with horses, with birds—but my experience happens to be in the realm of dogs. This is a fascinating world. Sometimes I just ponder how it is that any one owner chose any one dog over others. And sometimes just watching the dogs together and how their world is ordered is good at the end of a long day. And sometimes the world of dogs—and our relationship to them—raises questions about the roles that we put them in in our affluent society and whether that is really so good for the dogs. 

Some items of note:

*Most pet owners, reports American Demographic magazine, refer to themselves as Mommy or Daddy. 

*Americans spent $29 billion on their pets in 2001, up from $17 billion in 1994.

*An American Hospital Association survey found that three-quarters of pet owners would go into debt to provide for their animals’ well-being.

*Nearly a third—and almost half of all single people—say that of everyone in their lives, they rely most on their pets for companionship and affection—some saying that pets are more faithful than friends and that pets are more reliable than their parents.

We indulge animals in all kinds of ways: with fancy collars that can cost hundreds of dollars; there are specialty boutique hotels just for dogs. Pets get everything from Prozac to St. John’s Wort to flower essence therapy to lift their moods.  There are pet communicators—another word for psychics—and pet counselors. Doggie day care is now just about as common as childcare. There are even stories of plastic surgery and Botox just for Woofie.

All of this raises questions about what it is we are spending our money on.

Yes, after traveling to other countries, there is a question about how we can spend this on animals here when children there don’t have their basic needs met. There are real questions about how we use our resources. It is said that we can tell a lot about the wealth of a country by how dogs are treated.

But I have also come to wonder just what all this means for the dogs themselves. Underneath the pampering of our dogs seems to be some desire for them to take on almost human qualities. We want them to be cute and charming. We want them to companion us in our isolation. We want them to want us, but we may not want them to do the things that dogs like to do, like roll in something smelly at the park, or eat something that we may find pretty undesirable.

We want them to be all the things we want them to be. We want them to be perfect packages that are there for us, but sometimes they may really not be getting what it is they most need. And if they can’t live up to our expectations of them, the dogs may be the ones who suffer.

Writer Jon Katz, in his book The New Work of Dogs, argues that dogs today have a job which they have never had before. Since dogs were domesticated thousands of years ago, most of them have been work animals of one kind or another. They were companions, but they were sheep herders, hunters, and watchdogs.  In their remarkable capacity for learning and for bonding with humans, dogs earned their keep among us.

But in today’s world the job description has changed.  “The new work of dogs, is attending to the emotional lives of Americans, many of whom feel increasingly disconnected from other human beings.  More people than ever see dogs as partners or surrogates as they deal with serious problems in their past or current lives.”

Dogs can help us heal old wounds. In a culture where many people are isolated, animals can be the only company that someone has.

The Journal of Marriage and Family published a questionnaire designed to measure the bonds between family members and pets.  Here are some comments from the survey:

1. I feel closer to Jake than to many of my friends.

2. I like Jake because he/she accepts me no matter what I do.

3. Jake keeps me from being lonely.

4. I like Jake because he/she is more loyal than other people in my life.

5. Jake gives me something to take care of.

6. There are times when Jake is my closest friend.

Dogs do play a particular role in our lives. Because they can both give and receive affection, can come to be substitutes for the emotional support we want to receive from others in our society. They can be tremendous support through a transition or a hard time. They are, in fact, uniquely qualified to care for us in some ways. This is their new work.

But there is a shadow side to this. Sometimes our expectations might just exceed what the dog can offer. And if those needs don’t get met, then we end up resenting the dog for not being what we want it to be.

In our culture, dogs can become another object to consume. We get focused not on their needs but our needs. The spending on them might really be about us. What happens when somebody who lives in a small apartment in a city gets a dog that needs to run a lot every day? The dog gets neurotic. There are the stories of dogs that are kept alive on respirators because their humans can’t let go or the treatments that make them very ill. What is their experience of that treatment? Is there an understanding of why they are being made ill? When do we do something at their expense because we want it? And sometimes we get through a hard time and there is no longer a need for them. In the book there is the example of Rushmore, a German shepherd, who was shipped off to the pound after his owner died. In fact, over 10 million dogs are in shelters, many abandoned, and half of those are euthanized. They don’t turn out to be the fuzzy creatures we expected them to be.

The thing is that dogs have become very good over time at trying to be what we want them to be. Good for us, but maybe not always good for them.

In 2002, a team led by Harvard biological anthropologist Brian Hare found that dogs demonstrate an uncanny ability—far better than our closer relative, the chimpanzee—to read human cues and behavior, accurately interpreting even subtle hand gestures and glances. Hare and his fellow researchers found that this talent has become an innate trait among dogs, selected and bred over thousands of years to live compatibly with humans.

But does this backfire, sometimes, on the dogs? Because of this ability for them to adapt, do our expectations rise and then do we turn on the dogs if our too-high expectations don’t get met? And what happens if we don’t understand our responsibility to the animal?

When I go to the park with Lucy, I love meeting the other dogs and the other owners. There are no two that are quite alike. There are the purebreds and the hound dogs. There are those who go to daycare every day and those who sleep at home. There’s talk of the new balls on the market. There’s talk of the latest park rules about dogs.

There are all kinds of relationships between humans and dogs. The question is what is our need and what is their need? Take the story of Sandra. Sandra is a wounded soul. She doesn’t like her work, she is recently divorced. She is isolated in the world. One day she decides to get a dachshund puppy she names Eleanor Rigby. She said she was giving up on the idea of finding a good man and decided she would find a good dog instead.

She almost instantly falls in love with the dog. She doesn’t want to leave it. It sleeps in a baby crib in her apartment. She quits her job and spends almost all of her time with the dog. And she doesn’t want to set any rules for the dog. She is afraid that the dog is too fragile to discipline, even if it is simply positive reinforcement. She doesn’t want to start the process of training the dog to pee outside, so it doesn’t learn. It pees in her lap, in her bed, all over her apartment.

“For the first time in my life, I’m getting this kind of unconditional love,” she explained. “I keep telling myself, god, you can get this even from a different species.”

Eventually, her apartment is pretty smelly and she finds that she is isolated from her friends. She doesn’t want to leave the dog. And, not surprising, she begins to resent the dog for the mess that she is in.

The story does have a happy ending. She begins to take the dog out for walks. She finds that she and the dog like it. And in meeting other people she eventually she comes to find a balance in support from friends, from her work, from her dog. But for a while she wants everything from the dog. And as she comes to have this balance the dog’s life also improves.

Dogs can be tremendous gifts to us. I know that sometimes when I have had a particularly long day the best thing that I can do is go home and sit in my favorite chair with Lucy by my side. I don’t need to describe the details necessarily, I just have to be in that different space with this lovely creature by my side.

Of course we don’t know what is going through a dog’s mind at any given moment. I can make a few guesses based on what I observe in Lucy. She likes food—she really likes food. She likes treats. She can carry a bone the size of her head up the stairs. She likes attention, she likes clear instructions, she likes to be with other dogs, she is in her element when she is playing with her friends Lorenzo and Leo and Luna and Cooper at the park. Since Lucy is smaller than most of them, she has developed a bark that I only hear at the park. It is a crazed bark and as far as I can tell she is saying make sure you don’t forget that I’m down here.

Beyond getting those needs met, I’m not sure there is a whole lot that matters. She gets most of the aromatherapy she needs by smelling all the good spots at the park.

Dogs today play a great many roles in our lives: they join in search and rescue missions, help the blind, guard property, sniff for bombs and illegal drugs. They comfort the elderly, the traumatized, the bereaved and the lonely. Therapists enlist dogs in treating drug and alcohol addiction and in a broad range of rehabilitation work. They increasingly use dogs to help emotionally disturbed children.

Author Katz writes that with dogs’ new roles, we are closer to them emotionally because we need them more than our grandparents did. He writes: “Because we are increasingly discontented, disaffected, isolated, needy. Because we are lonelier. Because we feel powerless and vulnerable, removed from the people who run our work and civic lives. Because many of us hate our work and resent the people who make it so insecure. Families scatter; friends can let us down. More and more, we’re turned to dogs when we need love, or despair of unfulfilling lives.”

Dogs, it appears, have their work cut out for them. The question in all of this can’t just be what do we need? But also what do the dogs need? Where is our work in all this?

How is it that we are to be with dogs—with all creatures and with the planet we inhabit? When it comes to my dog I’ve learned that I have to ask myself what it is that I’m doing for her and what it is that I’m doing for me. I try to be as clear as I can about what that is. It is our responsibility to try to keep this in perspective.

Dogs do have a big job in our world. They manage to do it pretty well. And our job? I think we can give thanks for the many jobs that dogs fulfill in our lives. There are things we can learn from dogs, in fact just last week a congregant sent me the list. And it is helpful.

When loved ones come home, always run to greet them

When it's in your best interest, practice obedience

Never pretend to be something you're not

If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it

When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by, and nuzzle them gently

Avoid biting when a simple growl will do

When you're happy, dance around and wag your entire body

No matter how often you're scolded, don't buy into the guilt thing and pout...run right back and make friends

Some good advice. We are part of an interdependent web. We are called to love and to be loved. And we are called to know our responsibility for this creation of which we are a part.

A congregant once told me the prayer that goes, “God, help me to be the person that my dog already thinks that I am.”

In all of our days, may this be so. Amen.

Prayer

Great Spirit, we give thanks for our lives, for all creation. Call us to sing a song of thanksgiving in all of our days. Call us out of our isolation and into an awareness of our connection, of our interdependence. Call us to be mindful of the responsibility that comes with the power we have in the world. For all these things we pray. Amen.

Benediction

Go through your day, with companions at your side. Live fully, love fully, be a blessing to the world. Amen.
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Copyright 2005, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.