Exploring the ‘psychic connection’ between man and his best friend

He makes no noise and no movement. No alarm is going off. But the instant Mark Alizart opens his eyes in the morning, his dog is right there, licking his hand. It’s not even as if the dog – a two-year old, black-and-white, curly-haired Spanish water dog – sleeps in the same room. But as soon as the human is awake, the dog is too. His alarm goes off. It’s the kind of thing Jung referred to as “synchronicity”, two hearts beating as one: a collective unconscious or brain fusion. And, says Alizart in his revelatory new book, Dogs, this is just what has occurred in the course of our evolution: “Everything indicates that we have one brain between us, that our brain is never complete unless it is paired with a dog’s.”

Alizart’s previous dog, a beagle, was called “Martin Luther” (he/they wrote a book about how Reformation theologians have influenced modernity). But the dog died when he was only six months old of a mystery virus. Anyone who has lost a dog will understand – and it’s worse when it’s a young dog, a pup, struck down in his prime – Alizart was in mourning for a year, paralysed by grief, surrounded by pictures of his late dog. “I couldn’t find relief in books or films, only in looking at other dogs.” At least Martin Luther (the theologian rather than the dog) thought that dogs would go to heaven: “Thou too in resurrection shall have a little golden tail,” he said to his dog Tölpel.

Alizart was brought up in London and had fancied becoming the next Stephen Hawking. But he failed miserably at his science exams. So he moved to Paris and went to the Lycée Henri IV. This time he failed in philosophy. He was a failure in both English and French. “I failed everything,” he says, disarmingly. Somehow he ended up working in contemporary art – only artists would have him. And a dog. The dog didn’t mind if he was a failure. And then he lost the dog. So he resolved to write a book about dogs, to fill the void that threatened to consume him.

If you’re looking for a book on how to train your dog, don’t bother reading Dogs. You’d be better off looking at videos on YouTube. This is a book about the meaning of dogs. It’s the “Dog Vinci Code”, explaining exactly why dogs secretly rule the world. You think it’s a coincidence that “dog” is “god” spelled backwards? Don’t forget Anubis. This is the dog as philosopher and seer (or, at least, sniffer). It is no coincidence that his current dog is called Master Eckhart, named after the great medieval mystic.  

We met at the British Library, Alizart and I, because as Groucho Marx rightly said: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend: inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Our dogs stayed home. I just hoped Waffle (my dog) was being good for a change: he generally wreaks revenge for being left behind. “Dogs definitely feel guilt,” Alizart says. “If you do, they do. When I watch my dog I can actually see him thinking about it sometimes: shall I or shan’t I make a lunge for that tasty titbit? I can see it in his eyes: he knows.” I’m not sure Waffle even pauses to consider: he’s a remorseless scavenger, hoovering the world clean of scraps, always on the alert for a stray chicken bone (the bane of London streets). 

Who would have a dog? It’s the kind of question that gets asked after your dog has just chewed up your favourite cushion or made a mess of your rug or got into yet another fight with a passing spaniel (or is having a shot at humping him). Why do I even have a dog? If you pause to consider this longer than it takes Waffle to wolf down a sandwich he has just stolen from picnickers in the park, you might conclude something like the following: the dog is a “happy imbecile”. You get to enjoy the joy, the irrepressible enthusiasm, of the dog. The dog effortlessly achieves that semi-sacred zen-like state that eludes most of us most of the time, of living “for the moment”, in the present, immune to nostalgia and hope, unencumbered by too many distracting thoughts.

But you’d be wrong. It’s true, dogs don’t worry too much about taxes, although if you worry, they worry. But, says Alizart, they are “the masters of time”. Whereas we are governed mainly by the visual and aural senses, they are governed by the olfactory. They have bigger noses, in the main (or, as I once heard this described, “great nasal architecture”). But the point about having a sensitive nose that is usually close to the ground and snorting up pungent scents of all kinds (I’m not sure there is a “gross” for dogs), is that you (the dog) are conscious of the past, of who passed by here not so long ago, leaving a trace. Every scent is like a clue. A bloodhound (or Lassie or Rin Tin Tin) on the trail of some miscreant or hunting for the missing owner of a sock is reconstructing a crime in his head.

Likewise, the dog is always up for the next thing (be it walk or dinner or someone coming home). No one who has seen a dog mourning the passing of a human or another dog (or, yes, even a cat) can say that a dog is invariably content with the present and the way things are right now. If they are capable of even more pleasure than we would normally have chasing after an old tennis ball, conversely they are also capable of more pain. Sadly, they are not immune to hopes and fears and memories.

I think my father kept a dog (always a boxer dog) mainly in order to have conversations (admittedly, mainly one-way) with Bruno or Brutus. The dog would listen patiently, sometimes cocking his head to one side in concentration. The response was not necessarily audible, but it didn’t matter because my father (towards the end of his life) couldn’t hear that much anyway. So what are we doing when we talk to dogs?

We are basically talking to ourselves, says the dog behaviourist (specialist in “canine cognition”) Alexandra Horowitz, in Our Dogs, Ourselves. There is something like a prohibition on talking to ourselves in public, at least. Isn’t it a sign of madness? But the dog gives you an excuse for getting your thoughts out there, even if it’s only the eternally hopeful “Good boy!” or “You don’t know when to behave, do you, laddie boy?” (me to Waffle, earlier) or (to quote some of the lines Horowitz has recorded in New York), “You had better stay your bottom right here, sunshine” and “I see you doing weird stuff. Cut it out.”

As she very reasonably argues we shouldn’t be seen – despite the letter of the law – as “owning” our dogs. They are too independently minded for that. We have responsibility for them, yes. And we should clean up after them too, no argument there (I have bags in my pocket right now). But it cannot be right for a divorce judge to say (as one in fact does), that seeking custody rights of Barney, a rescue dog, is equivalent to “a visitation schedule for a table or a lamp”. 

Maybe it would be truer to say that it’s the other way around and dogs own us. They are the great manipulators. We are an integral part of their environment. And just as a dog will go round and round, shuffling and nosing to get a comfy cushion just right (even though they can equally well curl up on a wooden floor), so too they try to lick us into shape, a shape that suits them. We don’t train them, they train us – to do their bidding. Having said that, I have to allow that, in exchange for a few minutes of excitement every day, a dog is willing (rather like a koala up a tree or a hibernating bear) to snooze through long periods of inertia and nothing-much-happening.

Obviously, when I walk down the street with Waffle, he is attached to me, I am attached to him. But more generally we are beings in search of an attachment. Or, as the philosopher Donna Haraway suggests in her Companion Species Manifesto, we are “prosthetic” beings. We require extensions and accessories (which may well explain our dependence on the phone). Like someone suffering from a “phantom limb”, there is a dog-shaped hole in our hearts (or our minds) when the dog is not there. I, for one, suffer from dog envy if I’m travelling without a dog. 

Our association – our collaboration – with dogs goes back to the Neolithic, when some wolves found it better to try to get along with Homo sapiens rather than eat them, and we realised it was fun to have them around. We have developed a symbiotic relationship. Now we can register the best friend as an “emotional support dog” (and thereby take the dog on a plane, so long as they sit on your lap). What Alizart shows is that, over the aeons, human brains and dog brains have converged and evolved in tandem. We have a dog brain, just as the dog has a human brain. 

This is not as crazy as it sounds. Consider, for example, the “cynegetic paradigm” – so called by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who traces a continuum between hunter-gatherers tracking a hairy mammoth, Sherlock Holmes picking up clues to Moriarty, Freud analysing mental states, and a dog following a scent. We are all following a trail: dogs just have their noses lower to the ground. There is a wonderful thriller by Robert Crais, Suspect, in which a wounded cop and an injured German shepherd provide a crutch to one another – and together solve a crime.

It was Freud who came up with one of the best answers to the question of why we are capable of loving a dog with such intensity: “[for their] affection without ambivalence, the simplicity of life free from the almost unbearable conflicts of civilisation, the beauty of an existence complete in itself.” The dog saves us from too much culture. But the dog is also saving us from our own nature. Paradoxically, the dog has humanised us, softening the worst of our vicious instincts. Alizart mentions the Chinese legend of a dog bringing seeds to humanity on his coat and thus kick-starting agriculture. The tragedy is that we have visited upon the dog some of our own stupid obsessions.

Function has given way to fashion. Weird genetic experimentation and inbreeding has produced dogs that are sick from the very beginning of their short and unhealthy lives. Dogs don’t worry about what you look like, only what you smell like (and they don’t demand Chanel either). But somehow we managed to inflict our own preoccupation with mere appearance on them. Alizart reckons this goes back as far as the 17th century, when humans moved out of the country to the city and took their dogs with them but didn’t give them a proper job to do. Maybe the labradoodle (and other hybrids) can save the dog.

Alizart is not that into cats. “I don’t want to revive the war between cats and dogs. Cats tolerate us. That’s very different. Dogs put a leg or two into our world.” He says that “dogs are nature’s communists”. I don’t know how good Waffle would be about sharing his dinner – not very I suspect – but he is very willing to share his life with me, to “band together”. Excluding writing, a dog will generally have a go at whatever you’re doing. I’ve known one very good surfing dog, better at riding a wave than most humans (having four legs is a distinct advantage).

Not all dogs like getting wet of course. I remember one old dog of mine who always steered scrupulously around puddles and when it came to bath time became a quivering wreck. I never tried him on a surfboard. He’d probably have been happier doing what I know a friend of mine is doing: going for a 3k run with her dog. Maybe we learned jogging from dogs.

I know a woman who recently tried putting her husband in the dog’s crate. Or rather, he got in there of his own accord. He could just about squeeze in. She helped him out by closing the door. He didn’t mind. It was cosy and comforting. Snoopy dreamed of being a First World War fighter ace. Who has not seen a dog curled up fast asleep in a basket or den or hogging the sofa and thought: I want to be a dog?

Andy Martin is the author of ‘With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher’ (Polity)