Coming to Our Senses, Doggy Style

Published 2.26.24 at garyborjesson.substack.com

The world was conquered through the understanding of dogs; the world exists through the understanding of dogs. - attributed to Nietzsche

Have you ever tried to have a video chat or phone call with a dog? Maybe you’re away from home, and your partner or child puts your dog on the call. You might get that endearing head cock of recognition. (Or maybe it’s puzzlement at hearing your familiar voice dissociated from its body.) But there won’t be any real connection: the media are too thin for that.  

A famous image, His Master’s Voice

Dogs don’t do virtual relationships. This is obvious, and rich with implications for the theme we’re exploring: how the medium through which we connect affects our alliances. 

Before looking at some of those implications, a short review. In the last two notes I’ve observed how virtual connections diminish the use of our senses and thereby the rich juicy thickness of our lived experience. In the last note I pointed out that if we connect by video we’ve already lopped off three of our senses—touch, taste, and smell. If by phone, we’re down to one. If by text, we literally have no sense of the other. Nevertheless, our technology allows us to connect through a variety of mediums that fall short of being there. And like the rest of us, I depend on these ways of being with others.

Dogs, however, cannot feel or care about any connection short of actually being together. By which I mean in the same room, under the same roof, under the same sky. Even out walking in the woods with the dogs out of sight, it’s not long (usually!) before they circle back to reconnect, like exuberant children periodically touching base before they’re off again to play. 

Isn’t it curious that “man’s best friend” can’t be any friend at all unless they’re with us in the flesh? Isn’t it telling that such an intelligent, socially minded, and fabulously successful species should be incapable of virtual connections? It makes you wonder how much we lose when we’re relating to one another virtually. Given the epidemic of loneliness fueling a mental-health crisis, perhaps we need some of what’s being left out.

Consider what’s not left out when we’re being-together as dogs need to be. For instance, there’s the warmly companionable body-to-body comfort of sharing the same bed. (One survey estimates that nearly half the dogs in the US sleep on the bed with their owners.) Similarly, felt connections happens when working, playing, sharing food, and being out of doors in all seasons, in all weather.  

There are the higher mysteries, but we do know a lot about the mechanics of how being-together, doggy style, helps us. Eye contact, touch, hugging, petting, and other close contact release the neurohormone oxytocin. This increases feelings of connection, well-being, safety, and trust. Related neurochemical cascades can lower stress by lowering cortisol levels and blood pressure, etc. Like us, dogs have well-developed limbic systems and are capable of the benefits of emotional co-regulation. Google “health benefits of dogs” and you’ll find no end of them, including this big one, that they help us “manage loneliness and depression by giving us companionship.” In short, some of what dogs offer is what’s lost from virtual connections, namely, the benefits of being in the same spacetime. Which is just to say, being-together doggy style means being in touching range.

When James Thurber wrote, “I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance—a sharp, vindictive glance,” he was noticing another kind of satisfaction that goes with being-together (“or not,” I hear the cat mutter archly). Mutual recognition. After all, it’s one thing to experience the flush of well-being from the release of oxytocin, but it’s something else to experience mutual recognition. I remember what I felt the other day when my dog Theila successfully tracked and found and—bless her—even retrieved an object I’d hidden off in the woods. (This is one of the ways we work-play together.) I was pleased with her, she was pleased with herself, and we both enjoyed the mutual pleasure of cooperating in a common cause. I saw that she was heartened by my recognition of a job well done; and I was heartened by the happy gaze of recognition I received in return. My book, Willing Dogs & Reluctant Masters: on friendship and dogs, goes deeper into what our ways of being with dogs reveal about our ways of being with each other.

Dogs remind us that much of being together has nothing to do with speech—a fact that is easy for garrulous animals like us to forget! They remind us that nonverbal, embodied, and often unconscious exchanges inform how connected we feel to one another, and how much we can recognize. One of the things I love about being with dogs is that exquisite moment-by-moment mutual awareness and mutual adjustment to each other’s presence that is possible. Obviously we can do this with humans too, but our capacity is easily diminished or lost in a sea of speech. We end up in our heads, and out of our bodies.

Which is too bad, because this felt sense of the embodied “dialogue” that happens when we’re animally present to one another is a root satisfaction of actually being with friends.