"Good dog": The stories we tell about our canine companions and what they mean for humans and other animals

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2002 by Armbruster, Karla

Not long ago, I found myself engaged in a conversation about dogs while at a restaurant with friends. Overhearing the discussion, our waitress contributed her own account of a dog she used to have and how much this dog meant to her: "She was my baby," she declared. Then, to my surprise, she went on to explain that she had had to "get rid of ' the dog when she moved, expressing no sense that this behavior contradicted her description of the dog as her beloved "baby." Although I didn't ask what eventually became of the dog in this particular situation, I knew what happens to most dogs in similar circumstances: they are relinquished to animal shelters, where a minority of them move on to new homes and a majority are euthanized.1 In retrospect, I shouldn't have been so surprised at the way this story turned out; sadly, the pattern it follows is quite common and illustrates a paradoxical attitude towards dogs that is troublingly pervasive in American culture. In his 1984 book, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, Yi-Fu Tuan sums up this basic paradox at the heart of our relationship with dogs: "Animal pets in affluent nations of the Western world receive, as we all know, lavish care.... On the other hand, pets exist for human pleasure and convenience. Fond as owners are of their animals, they do not hesitate to get rid of them when they prove inconvenient" (88).

A recent study of pet relinquishment in DOGWorld confirms Tuan's final assertion: most pet dogs who wind up in these shelters are given up because they become inconvenient due to changes in their human companions' life circumstances or to minor behavior problems that could readily be addressed through obedience training rather than because of major, insoluble issues such as deep-seated aggression.'2 Interestingly, many Americans, like the woman who shared her story with me, do not see any contradiction between the fondness and even love they say they feel towards their dogs and their lack of real commitment to the animals' welfare. On a broader cultural level, we seem to find dogs enormously appealing: kindness or cruelty to them speaks volumes about a character's basic moral make-up in fiction, television, or film, and the image of a dog on a book or magazine cover almost guarantees sales. The same fundamental paradox holds true, however; in the 1990s, 2.4 million of these animals who so stir our sympathies in the abstractwere euthanized each year in the U.S., and countless others experience ongoing cruelty and neglect.3

While the popularity of fiction, movies, poems, and other stories about dogs in American culture often contrasts with the ways we treat actual dogs, these stories are cultural artifacts that can also shed light on this paradoxical attitude. Analyzing examples of these popular narratives allows us to explore the ways they communicate powerful cultural messages about what it means to be a "good dog," along with what these messages suggest that we feel we owe to dogs, both good and bad, and why. Such an analysis can help us understand the cultural roots of our paradoxical relationship with dogs, what it means for the lives of real dogs, and how we might move towards more just and ethical relationships with these animals that clearly mean so much to us.

Specifically, this essay will begin by examining the novel and film versions of Old Yeller and John Updike's poem, "Dog's Death," which are both manifestations of the same basic narrative, a narrative that functions as a fairly overt formula that both reflects and shapes what we as a culture expect from dogs in order to consider them "good" and thus worthy of our care. This narrative is a classic story that humans in Western culture have been telling about dogs for centuries, ranging from the tale of Tristan's dog in Beroul's twelfth century Romance of Tristan to the 1989 film Turner and Hooch. In this classic formula, a dog joins a human family or community and must be socialized to behave appropriately. In other words, some of its natural impulses and instincts must give way to the demands of human culture. It is not surprising that this age-old story about the conflict between nature and culture centers on the dog; as domestic animals, dogs are seen as existing on the boundary between nature and culture-- and of all the domestic animals, they are most often seen as the closest to human beings and culture. Our widespread conception of the dog as "man's best friend" coincides with current evidence that dogs were the first animals to be domesticated.4

For many writers and thinkers today, the dog's perceived position on the nature/culture boundary promises modern humans a connection to nature that has otherwise largely been lost. As critic David Shumway writes in "Nature in the Apartment," "Companion animals, especially cats and dogs, represent a means by which urban dwellers can come to have sympathy with the larger nonhuman environment with which they otherwise have quite limited direct contact" (262). The classic dog narrative taps into this sense that domesticated dogs still possess a strong wild side by invariably representing the dog as initially unruly and defiant-even hostile to-the norms and expectations of human culture. In this narrative, however, the dog's wild side is not presented as the opportunity to renew sympathy with the nonhuman world around us that Shumway describes; instead, it suggests a deep cultural anxiety about the dog's status as a contested ally in the longstanding human project of dominating nature. In fact, in order to prove itself a good dog as defined by its human caretakers, the dog must do no less than conclusively demonstrate its loyalty to culture over nature, usually to the extreme of placing human interests above self-- interest. Frequently, one or more human characters actively resist the dog until it makes this transition. In many cases, the dog ultimately proves its loyalty by dying to protect a human being. While these narratives obviously valorize dogs that meet the criteria for being "good," they also suggest that those who do not measure up should be considered dispensable, and the statistics tell us that, indeed, many real dogs are treated accordingly.