Life Lessons from Dogs

I am in love. A bug-eyed, speckled beagle has stolen my heart. His name is Albert, and he’s a recent addition to the current menagerie at the Victoria branch of the BC SPCA. As I entered the kennel area on Tuesday for the morning walk, his was the first face I saw, and the cuteness doubled me over.

My heart couldn’t take that look of perma-surprise in his bulging peepers and that unassuming expression on his face — the one that always seems to ask “Baroo?!” And, oh, those silky ears!

Albert is one of many furry treasures at the shelter. I’ve been a volunteer dog-walker for just two and a half months now, but I fall in love anew every Tuesday morning.

And more than having my heartstrings pulled, I feel like I’m learning a lot, ironically, about humans. I’m not referring to the dark side of our species — the reason many of the animals end up at the SPCA (abuse and/or neglect at the hands of humans); I think to experience the dogs as victims and walk away a misanthrope would be to miss the point. All you’re left with at the end of the day, then, is pity and hatred. I struggled with this at first.

The night following my first dog walk, I lay awake tormented by the image of dogs in cages. I would get teary imagining the horrors of their past and the veritable prison cells that were their present home. But I had to shake this off. Pity is a useless emotion that paralyzes you rather than calling you to action. It does nothing to benefit the animals or you, so you have to let go of it.

I had to remind myself that these dogs are already on the downhill of their happily ever after. They have been rescued. They are safe. They have a warm place to sleep. Their bellies are full. They get two 1.5 hour walks a day. They are much beloved by the staff and volunteers, and now it’s just a matter of time before they find their “forever home.” For these reasons, we can be happy for them! (The dogs certainly don’t feel sorry for themselves!)

Dogs have a lot to teach us about love, about openness, and about living in the present moment. To paraphrase Eckhart Tolle, “In dogs, there is preserved an enormous ability to be in the now, to be in a mode of readiness and receptivity to celebrate life, aliveness, this moment. The slightest excuse is good enough. You need only to look at some dogs, and they wag their tails.”

If ever there were a creature to embody, perfectly, Tolle’s message of delight in aliveness, it would be Casha, the three-legged pit bull with a smile that takes up her entire face.

Casha has taught me that lack is a matter of perspective. A few months ago, one of Casha’s back legs was amputated because of the irreversible damage and pain of an old, untreated injury. Despite the literal scars of her past, Casha bounds with energy and exuberance. She wags her entire body when you enter her kennel to leash her up and has the endearing tendency to insist on carrying a toy in her mouth on every walk.

And as she enthusiastically pulls her walkers around the Galloping Goose, you’d swear she’s gotten stronger minus a leg — and, free of the pain now, she probably has. The day I walked her, she startled me by suddenly tipping over and landing on her back (so spontaneously and ungracefully that I thought she fell, on account of her missing leg), but she had simply decided that now was the perfect moment to roll on the grass in the sunshine and request a belly rub.

Her tongue wagged back and forth in the giant gape of her huge smile as she wriggled joyfully on her back. She abruptly dropped like this three more times throughout the walk, which never ceased to crack me up.

In Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson writes that, “Perhaps one central reason for loving dogs is that they take us away from this obsession with ourselves. When our thoughts start to go in circles […] the dog opens a window into the delight of the moment. To walk with a dog is to enter the world of the immediate. Our dog stares up into a tree, watching a squirrel — she is there and nowhere else.”

Likewise, Casha not only lives in, but also revels in the moment. She isn’t about to let a lush patch of grass warmed by the morning sun go to waste! If we could all be so gleefully indulgent…

Recent Katie Paterson Articles:

• The Intrapsychic Battle of the Sexes
• TED Talk: A Darwinian Theory of Beauty
• Daylight Savings and Darwin
• A Good Will Announcement for All of You Ladies with Waves, Curls, or Frizz...
• Questioning the Future of Nostalgia: Technology’s Paradoxical Effect on Photographic Record Keeping
• The Orca Overture: Whale Watching in Victoria, British Columbia
• A Father’s Day Tribute to My Pet Cow, Spider Avenger, and Much-Beloved Daddy-Poo
• Body Language: Can You Plagiarize Confidence?
• In Defence of Peter Pan Syndrome (The Importance of Being Playful)
• More Life Lessons from Dogs: The Love You Give