Man's Best Friend

To be completely honest with you, as a rule, I usually don’t care for men. There are of course exceptions to the rule: Grandpa for one, Leo at A Dog’s Day Out for another. And of course, Max. I’m sure there are others, or have been, but you’ll have to forgive me for not being able to call them to mind immediately—the number is vanishingly small. It’s nothing personal. But you have to understand where I’m coming from.

First and foremost is their size. I understand there’s nothing humans can do about walking on two legs like absolute maniacs. (Imagine your mode of locomotion being perpetually controlled falling with the most important part of your body being balanced on top and having to hold all of that up with two completely inadequate, elongated paws. This is how I know God doesn’t exist. That, and the existence of pugs.) And of course, I understand the sexual dimorphism, probably even better than they do if I’m being honest. But why do the males need to be that much larger than the females? I could see perhaps if we still lived in caves and needed to fight for food, engage in fights to the death for every resource. But I know for a fact that their food is procured from large refrigerated buildings that they drive to in their cars. (I’ll give them that one. As inventions go, humans really hit it out of the park there. If you don’t believe me, it’s only because you’ve never had the pleasure of feeling the wind in your ears.) The humans don’t even have to harvest the food themselves. They just pluck boxes of their various flavors of kibble in boxes and bags and place them in wheeled baskets in which they also place those of their young who are too young or too rowdy to be trusted to stick with the pack. And look, I know the males of Canis familiaris are usually bigger than the females too, but there are so many different varieties of us that it becomes a moot point. When you’re fifteen inches from paw to crown as I am, anything bigger than English Springer Spaniel feels like a threat.

Human males are also too loud, and I know from loud. At least in my case, it was purpose bred, a baying and full chested howl meant to be heard across meadows and downs and from the depths of the deepest hollers. The word for my breed comes from the french begueule, meaning “open throat.” My song is sonorous, powerful! Human men are just loud. Their voices come out in this nearly subsonic rumble more akin to growling than anything else. Human women can be loud too of course, but the register is closer to the cooing of a mother dog. A poor facsimile to be sure, but at least they try.

Then there’s the smell. I feel this is a point that even other humans are able to understand, limited though their scent repertoire may be.

(In some ways, I envy their pathetic olfactory abilities, not being able to catch changes in weather patterns hours in advance or which of their neighbors is dangerously close to developing a kidney stone or which obnoxious nest of grey squirrels has decided that 7am on a Thursday is a phenomenal time for an orgy. They’ve never had jobs detecting things like decomposing hair or nanoparticles of nitroglycerine. But they’ve also never had the ecstatic thrill of putting their snouts to the ground and catching the telltale hints of allicin, citronellol, lactones, and 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline while on a walk to relieve themselves, only to discover, 10 blocks away, that a pizza crust that had very nearly been tragically washed into the gutter before it could be eaten. Perhaps that’s the trade off for being able to see red. And so what if we need to pass that gutter on every walk for the next month? We may be the product of ten-thousand years of evolution, but that doesn’t mean we’ve lost the instinct for revisiting our successful hunting grounds just in case!)

The human smell is a fascinating melange of every single space they have occupied; every single meal they have eaten; their soaps, shampoos, spray cans of aluminum chlorohydrate; synthetic esters, musks, essential oils, and ethyl alcohols; the volatile chemical bonds of their own endocrine systems; and of course the excretions of the one hundred billion bacteria that live on their skin. Men, and there’s no delicate way to say this, reek. I spent enough of my formative years in a lab setting to know that this is because of their increased testosterone and greater number of sweat glands.

And of course, this is all to say nothing of my puppyhood. The tender months spent with brothers and sisters and cousins, with our mothers only long enough to be whelped and weaned, before one by one they were taken away, their cries for us no longer heard but the smell of them lingering long after they had vanished. Most of my kin would eventually fade into scent memory. What human hands did touch us, naively hoping for hunks of cheese or a scratch on the tops of our rumps or a soft blanket placed in our cold steel enclosures, were always sterile, gloved, and more often than not delivering pain. And they were male. Always male.

***

With Max, it started slowly.

When he first brought me home, he went by a different name, but then I had gone by a different name before meeting him, so I assumed this was simply a part of human culture. I now know I was at least partially correct. I went from A2249578 to Cheddar. He went from Megan to Max.

(For a while, even after I began to sense the change in him, Grandma would sometimes accidentally call him Megan, and even though he always told her that it was okay and he knew it wasn’t on purpose, I could still smell the elevation of cortisol at the backs of his knees whenever this happened.)

I had an inkling that Max’s change was fairly significant, but of course so was mine. I had never had a true name of my own before he picked me up from the rescue organization. Dogs do not really have names for each other the same way that humans do, but once one is bestowed upon us it becomes a crucial piece of our identity. The way a human mouth is able to shape sounds is very unique. Canine vocalizations are no less varied of course, but our language is much more nuanced, not solely based on the movement our tongues make against our teeth. Also, we don’t have lips. So when a human selects a sound shape for us, we understand the ancient evolutionary bond being established. And “Cheddar” sounded right coming from him, high and melodic in the way a mother dog’s voice might be. It was soft. Soothing.

Which is why when his voice changed I almost didn’t realize it until it was a full 50hz lower than it had been upon my arrival to his studio apartment in Jamaica, Queens. This is a difference that even other humans were able to pick up faster than I did, which never failed to please Max (a surge of dopamine and oxytocin in the moisture of his palms was my main clue). I like to attribute my obliviousness to a combination of living in a home for the first time and also the elongated timespan over which the change occurred. And look, I know I said that on the whole I find human male voices to be obnoxious, a fact which remains true. But Max’s maintained it’s melodic quality, despite the change in pitch. He no longer sounded like a mother dog, but I think maybe I no longer needed a mother.

The next major change was his shape. Upon picking me up at LaGuardia two years prior, Max had had a slightly hunched shape, always curled in on himself. I recognized the posture. Any dog who has had to visit the V-E-T (and yes, I am aware of what that spells and am self-censoring for any of my fellows who haven’t sussed it yet) has assumed this pose themselves, hiding their paws underneath their bodies with their heads tucked onto their haunches, all the better snap at the doctor’s fingers with my dear. Hah. Max seemed to be doing it to protect a particular softness that clung to his body, mainly around the jaw, midsection, and hips. I think maybe he was trying to disguise the vulnerability to attack of those particular regions. You really never knew when a hand or electrode or scalpel was going to threaten your underbelly, and so I had to respect him for his caution.

But then he’d visited the human v**, while Grandpa and I had “boy time” (we both slept on the couch while the Islanders v Bruins game played at high volume on Max’s television), and come home looking very weak and smelling of betadine, citrus-based, antibacterial cleaning products, and blood, I knew those monsters had worked their evil on him. After all, he was laid in bed on painkillers for nearly a week (notes of both opioids and cannabinoids, plus the matzah ball soup Grandma kept bringing him). Even after, his movements were stilted and slow for several weeks until the scabs flaked off into the potpourri of dust particles that gave home it’s particular accords.

But after that, perhaps about a month or so onwards, it seemed to me that maybe whatever those scoundrels had done had actually made Max, loath though I still am to believe it, happy. I know, I know. It sounds like an impossibility. But would you believe me that I actually thought Max had grown several inches? He had not; his spine had simply uncurled, standing straight where it had once been bent, firm in the places that had once been soft.

The most striking thing of all though, as you might have guessed by now, was the smell, and surprisingly it was one of the last things to change. Because you see it didn’t really change. Max still smelled as he had the day he’d taken me to the park and I got to feel grass under my paws for the first time, still smelled the same as he did whenever he took me to Kingston Spice and Miss Mavis would sneak me some spare chicken feet and roti when she thought he wasn’t looking. But now, when we did those things, I could smell other things that I hadn’t before. Yes, the Old Spice Fiji deodorant and the uptick in sweat around his ass crack (another particular evolutionary phenomenon about humans I will never understand—what predator species needs that much meat on their hindquarters?), but also the joy.

He may have still done things a little differently from other men—sitting down to urinate for one. (My anxious attachment style necessitates me chaperoning any and all bathroom trips in my apartment.) And neither of us would ever father a child, certainly. But we are happy to be ourselves. Two very good boys.