Introduction

The lowest point in my transformation into a dog person came one drizzly night at 11:00 p.m., three months after we got our beagle, Sasha. I used to laugh at dog owners when I drove home on late, wet nights, seeing them standing like demented courtiers holding umbrellas over their dogs. Now here I was, sodden and tired, waiting for Sasha to relieve herself.

After she squatted repeatedly without effect and with apparent distress, I finally bent down to check out the problem. Illuminated by the streetlight, I saw something white and stringy hanging out her rear end. As if slipping on a surgical glove, I stuck my hand into one of the plastic newspaper bags that now always fashionably bulged out of my pockets. My chance to practice medicine without a license, I thought as I grabbed the object and yanked. It was long and stretchy, with a metal circle on one end, and when I finally confiscated all of it – to Sasha’s ecstasy – I realized I’d seen it before. It was the strap of my favorite bra. The bra had vanished a few days earlier; both my husband and daughter denied any knowledge of its whereabouts. (If my husband had stolen it, did I really want to know?)

“You’re no longer a suspect,” I said to him when I returned. “Sasha ate my bra.”

“That shows how much she loves you,” he said wanly. Since he was responsible for our becoming a dog- owning family, he was always trying to convince me how my life had changed for the better.

“How much do you love me?” I asked, thinking of which undergarments he could ingest to prove it. Our conversation was interrupted by the sound of Sasha tipping over the kitchen garbage can.

Many Buddhists believe that for a human to be reincarnated as a dog is punishment for being rotten in your past life. I am no expert in comparative religion, but I felt this conviction may have gotten things backward. It seemed more likely that as the baby boom was taking off a naughty dog died and came back as me. How else to explain the karma of being a middle-aged cat person whose life was now devoted to the care, feeding, training, and rectal maintenance of a formerly stray beagle?

After I told some friends about Sasha’s desire to make me wear strapless bras, one said I had to talk to his sister. I called Clarissa who told me that her two-year old Labrador retriever, Marley, had a passion for baked goods. Knowing this, Clarissa figured out just how far Marley’s reach extended at every point in her kitchen. One Sunday morning she was baking bread. While the dough was rising in a glass bowl, she pushed it to the back of the stove, and left to run some errands. When she returned the bowl and the dough were no longer on the stove. On the floor was shattered glass, a few small lumps of dough, and blood. Clarissa located Marley hiding behind a couch, her face cut and bloody. She had eaten the dough off the floor, broken glass and all.

Since it was Sunday (Sunday is dogs’ preferred day of the week for deadly ingestion) she took Marley to the emergency animal hospital, where Clarissa told the receptionist her dog had eaten a pile of glass. As she sat in the waiting room, Marley draped over her lap, she noticed that her dog’s midsection appeared to be expanding. Marley let out a thunderous belch and the room was filled with the enticing aroma of baking bread. Marley was rising! The belching and the baking continued until the vet showed up to take Marley off for an x-ray. Marley’s problem was not glass – she hadn’t eaten much – but dough. Because of the warmth of Marley’s stomach, the bread was going to rise until it exploded. Marley went in for surgery to have, at a cost of $3,000, the world’s most expensive loaf of bread removed.

When you have a dog, crazy stuff happens. I started clipping newspapers stories about just how crazy. There was the one about the bull terrier puppy in Liverpool whose owner noticed that he didn’t curl up to sleep anymore. It turns out the puppy had swallowed a seven inch knife – plastic end first – that was the length of its body. He recovered completely from his cutlery removal.

Early in my life with Sasha I wrote a piece for Slate.com about the shock of dog ownership. I expected to be denounced, but I was overwhelmed with emails of encouragement. This confirmed my impression that dog owners are among the nicest group of people I’d ever encountered. Or at least when you encounter people with their dog, they tend to be nice. Since dogs force you into social situations, even owners who aren’t naturally gregarious are obliged to be sociable. I even know two couples who met because they were first attracted to each other’s dogs. This doesn’t happen with cats. During my dating years my cats were less an enticement than a screening device. Potential suitors’ reactions ranged from hostility to indifference.

I realized almost everyone I knew with a dog had a story. Maybe companionship and someone to lick your feet isn’t what really motivates people to have dogs. Maybe being able to tell dog stories is. A friend told me she had a friend who went through an unusual burial ritual each time one of his dogs died. So I called Michael, who told me that even though he and his siblings were grown, they feel that a dog is not in peace unless it is interred in the family’s informal pet burial ground at their childhood home in Milwaukee. This has sometimes required long-term planning. Michael, who owned a ski lodge in Colorado, said one of his most recent dogs, Windsor, was a too-clever Welsh terrier who was constantly getting into mischief. He was an escape artist who could be found on top of ladders, or taking off down the road. He was destined to be hit by a car and when he was, Michael decided although Windsor had never been to Milwaukee, it had to be his final resting place.

I discovered that it wasn’t always the dog’s fault that previously important components of one’s existence -- family, work, running a home, sleep – became subordinate to the needs of the dog. I was talking to a dog owner who told me how his Dutch shepherd drove him and his wife crazy with a wake-up routine that started at 5:30 a.m. The dog, Riley, ran an ever-faster circuit around the bed, panting loudly, then bumping the mattress. When I asked how Riley was able to get all the way around the bed, his owner explained that the bed was pulled out from the wall.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Riley likes to run around it.”

This book is also an account of my unexpected journey to becoming a dog person. How else can I explain how I ended up being the foster mother to a series of homeless beagles? Not that I don’t still love cats. As Winston Churchill said, “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you.” It’s just that I discovered that being looked at from both those perspectives is where I want to be.