The Superiority of Dogs to Humans

The Superiority of Dogs to Humans

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved.

In Richard Burton's recently published diaries, this once-renowned actor and would-be writer agreed with my opinion that "My Dog Tulip" is the best dog book ever published in English.  This opinion might seem strange.  Why should J.R. Ackerley's rendition of Ackerley's life with his German shepherd surpass in esteem such masterpieces as Jack London's brilliantly imagined "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang"—novels about a dog that turns into a wolf and a wolf that turns into a dog?  Precisely because London's novels are fiction, they do not fascinate me as much as Ackerley's true-life love letter to Tulip.

Tulip was the central passion of Ackerley's emotional life.  This well-respected English editor and writer found human, including familial, relationships frustrating and incomplete.  When Tulip came into his life, she responded to his love and care with a devotion that moved this sensitive and observant man very deeply.  Forsaking all others, he cleaved only unto her.  Commenting that "unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs," he described himself.

Indeed, all of Ackerley's very detailed descriptions of Tulip described, not only his beloved, but also himself as a loving observer.  His account of their emotional intimacy is touchingly tender. It reminds me of a man I once saw in a vet's office very gently cradling his Alsatian, his arms around the dog's broken legs.  Tulip responded intensely to Ackerley's intensity.  A vet said to him after a tumultuous office visit during which Tulip barked her notable distress over Ackerley's absence: "Tulip's a good girl. She's just in love with you."

Besides feeling touched by their mutual devotion, I feel concerned by Ackerley's failings as a dog owner.  Ackerley loved Tulip "not wisely but too well."  Preoccupied by his interpretations of her emotions and considerably obsessed by the project of finding Tulip a "husband," he failed to discipline her properly as well as to obtain medical care that might have pained her but that she needed.  Nevertheless, Tulip lived a long life (her death crushed Ackerley), and she found sexuality and motherhood—although not with the "appropriate" purebred Alsatians that Acklerley selected, but with a jaunty mongrel named Dusty whom she fancied.  Both love and conflict make "My Dog Tulip" memorable as a true-life romance.   

Another fascinating account of dogs as the central passion of the writer's life is Elizabeth von Arnim's "All the Dogs of My Life."  Again, I find the displacement of human relationships by canine ones—in this case, 14 dogs over a lifetime.  A famous novelist and nonfiction writer, von Arnim was born in Australia, and she lived in England, Germany, Switzerland, the French Riviera, and the United States.  Married twice, to a German count and an English earl, she gave birth to five children.  Nevertheless, her autobiography ,"All the Dogs of My Life,"  just barely mentioned her birth family, her husbands, and her children, and it depicted them solely in the context of her passion for her 14 dogs.

As with Acklerley, I sometimes question whether von Arnim was really at all times a good dog owner, but I remain impressed by the centrality of her preference for dogs.  Her praise of dogs candidly admitted why:  "Once they love, they love steadily, unchangingly, till their last breath." "Besides [being] delightful, … entirely devoted, loving and uncritical," "[dogs are] never going to complain, never going to be cross, never going to judge, and against [them] no sin committed will be too great for immediate and joyful forgiveness." She referred to "that need for something more than human beings can give, that longing for greater loyalty, deeper devotion, which finds its comfort in dogs." 

There you have it:  both von Arnim and Ackerley believed in the superiority of dogs' love, devotion, emotional reliability, forgiveness, and loyalty.  Ackerley noted how people might not perceive this superiority of dogs to humans:  "how should human beings suspect in the lower beasts those noblest virtues which they themselves attain only in the realms of fiction?"  With astonishing vanity, some humans actually deny that other species have emotions; with rare self-knowledge, perhaps our fickle species should acknowledge dogs' superiority.  For, as the playwright and animal lover George Bernard Shaw contended, “Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”

first published in The Woodstock Independent