Bad Dog

Why live with a difficult animal?
A dog on a leash barking while the reflection on a puddle shows a sad dog.
Illustration by Jo Zixuan Zhou

The first time Jack came to live with me was in July. He’d caused trouble at another foster home and been kicked out. A few days in, my boyfriend explained that I could choose to share my home with him or with a dog but not both, so the next day I walked Jack up the road and handed his leash over to a girl who lived in Gramercy. I became sour about it. I didn’t see why my boyfriend couldn’t tolerate living with a dog. Our relationship faltered, then disintegrated, so when, in September, the head of the rescue called to ask whether I could take Jack on once again, I was living alone. An hour after the call, I was in front of my apartment building, watching for a taxi. It stopped at the lights, and Jack was handed out of the back-seat window, held around his chest, so that his hind legs dangled and hit the window frame. As cars behind started honking, a garbage bag followed, hitting the sidewalk as the car took off. Back inside, I emptied the bag onto the floor to find toys and bedding that I’d bought for him months earlier. Jack ran the length of the apartment—tail wagging, the buckle on his harness clacking—and then jumped into my bed, dug at the covers, and went to sleep.

Jack wasn’t a good-looking dog. He weighed eleven pounds, and had a solid little barrel chest, bowed legs, long feet, a pinched snout, and rabbit-like ears. He was dirty white, with brindle patches, and his short neck was almost as thick as his skull was wide. The sclerae of his eyes were cloudy with pigmentation. When I handed him a treat and he worked the gummy meat around in his mouth, I noticed the warm, sharp smell of rot.

I’d been told that Jack was “tricky,” but he seemed lower maintenance than other dogs I’d fostered. A champion sleeper, he was ornery if he didn’t get his eighteen hours a day. In the evenings, while I sat on the couch drinking a beer, he shook his toy sheep and threw it across the room, watched it land, and raced after it again. Each time, it was as though he were encountering a brand-new sheep. At dinnertime, I would “send him a letter”: take a business envelope with a plastic window, place a handful of kibble inside, seal it up, and give it to him. He would spend the next twenty minutes in methodical focus, holding the envelope in his mouth and shaking it, plucking at the corners with his teeth, pawing at it to investigate potential openings, until his prize spilled out. After a few days, the sight of my picking up the mail on the entryway table caused him to become still and watchful, ears tall and ready.

The first time I saw Jack’s ferocity, we were on a walk. It had been raining. We were rounding the far corner of the park when Jack, who had been sniffing the wet concrete, spotted a man walking seven feet ahead of us, casually holding an umbrella at his side. Jack ceased his sniffing and produced a savage-sounding bark. Hearing the racket, the man looked around. Jack shrank away, turning his head and averting his eyes. The man kept walking and, a moment later, transferred the umbrella from his right hand to his left. Jack’s eyes darted again, pale rims showing around the liquid brown-black. He gave another snarl and lunged, jaws snapping, tautening the leash. The man looked up at me and down at Jack. As he walked on, Jack watched him, unblinking.

I noticed Jack’s unusual hackles. Many dogs, during piloerection, have a few raised tufts at the base of the neck and the tail. Jack’s ran the entire length of his spine, giving the impression of a full-body Mohawk three-quarters of an inch tall and held up with hair spray. As he watched the man walk out of sight, the Mohawk collapsed, follicle by follicle.

Jack had arrived bearing the strong smell of cheese, and all of his things, which were soft and dirty, had it too. A week after the park incident, I put the torn, dirty harness that Jack had arrived with in the laundry basket and bought a new one, from Pet Central. At home, I lifted him into my lap to put on the new harness, talking to him. As I was inserting one of his legs, I felt him go a little stiff. I paused. No big deal, I thought. I touched his right paw with the other side of the harness and he turned, silently, and bit my hand—first my index finger, which he relinquished quickly, and then, when I did not pull away, my thumb, on which he clamped harder, and for a second longer, before he sprang off my lap and ran. He scuttled around behind his bed and turned, just his eyes and ears visible, watching for what I’d do next. At first, my hand didn’t look that bad, because there wasn’t much blood, but when I brought my index finger and thumb together a sharp pain shot through. One of his canines had gone straight through my thumbnail, and part of it came away as I pressed.

I went for a walk anyway, without him. It was evening, and my dad happened to call. “Well, he has to know you’re the boss—the alpha,” he said, when I told him what had happened. I stopped feeling sorry for myself, and instead felt annoyed at Dad, because he was so wrong.

My dad grew up around the flat plains of the Western District of Victoria, in Australia, living in the residences of the small rural schools where his father taught. Dogs lived outside, often working on farms. I inherited from my father a notion of dogs as peripheral, useful creatures, and when, as an adult living in New York City, I began taking in dogs from local rescues, I realized that I had never much thought about the affective states of nonhuman animals. A couple of dogs before Jack, I had begun buying clinical manuals and ethology textbooks, giving myself a slipshod education in dog behavior.

The term “alpha,” as my dad had used it, originated in the nineteen-forties with a Swiss researcher named Rudolph Schenkel. At the time, the predominant theory of the dog’s origin was that humans had domesticated canids, or wolves, by selectively and methodically hand-raising wolf pups. (Scholars have since questioned the importance of humans’ deliberate intervention; popular theories hold that canids, either co-hunting with humans or scavenging from human waste sites, opportunistically adapted to elicit caregiving behavior from us.) Schenkel designed a study using ten wolves that were kept in an enclosure of ten by twenty metres. He noticed that a male and a female wolf appeared to preside over the others, sometimes by using agonistic body language, and surmised that wolves dwelt in groups of unrelated individuals that met up at the beginning of each winter and formed a hierarchical unit or pack.

Schenkel’s language found its way into popular culture, and his work was still influential in the late eighties, when a scientist named L. David Mech began spending his summers on Ellesmere Island, in the Arctic Circle. By observing wolves in the wild, Mech discovered that packs are, in fact, simply families, with dynamics that change as pups reach mating age. The competition that Schenkel had observed, Mech found, was a result of the wolves’ conditions in captivity. Mech published two papers correcting the record, and the “alpha” terminology fell out of scientific use. Still, the myth has stuck. For many people, training a dog is an exercise in proving our power and authority, in vying for the position of the alpha.

While ethologists such as Schenkel saw behavior as genetically installed, other scientists were interested in how an animal’s behavior is the result of learned experience. In 1938, the American psychologist B. F. Skinner published “The Behavior of Organisms,” in which he laid out a unified theory of human and nonhuman behavior that he called “operant conditioning.” It resembled a Darwinian model of selection: behavior that performs well survives. Tell a joke and hear laughter, you may tell that joke again. Tell it and hear silence, less likely. Behavior can be changed by harnessing the emotional outcomes with which it’s associated. Behavior that produces unpleasant outcomes, such as pain, fear, nausea—the systems that signal risk and harm—is likely to die out. For this reason, those outcomes can make effective punishments.

The problem with using fear and pain in behavior modification is that fear is also at the root of aggression. For dogs, biting, snarling, and lunging are designed to create distance from a threat. The scientific literature of the past thirty years shows that dogs subjected to “dominant” or punishing training techniques—striking, kicking, staring, spraying water, shock and prong collars, choke chains, raised voices—have the highest incidence of aggression. These dogs also have elevated levels of cortisol, a greater fear of humans, and an inhibited ability to learn.

Some people believe that channelling a dog’s motivation—giving the dog a reward, for instance—can do only so much, and that the only way to eliminate unwanted behavior is by punishment. This is a misunderstanding. The way to eliminate any behavior is to replace it with different behavior. Barking at the doorbell is incompatible with sitting quietly when it rings. Biting is incompatible with growling and walking away.

Critics argue that Skinner’s theory is too mechanistic, and that operant conditioning doesn’t explain the huge range in individual behavior—the reason that humans, especially, can be self-sabotaging, confusing, altruistic, strange. But one of the things that makes animal behavior mesmerizing is the way it tends to make sense. The idea that animals can be relied upon to act for their own survival and advantage does not make their behavior less challenging, graceful, or tragic. It doesn’t mean it’s always successful. We still constantly misinterpret it.

Jack’s first recorded contact with humans came in August, 2014, when he was picked up as a stray in Brooklyn by Animal Control and sent to the Animal Care Center, the municipal shelter. His paperwork shows that he was judged to be around two years old and to have signs of gingivitis. Under “behavior,” his intake assessment reads “friendly allows all handling,” which is about as positive as an A.C.C. assessment gets. A small, foster-based rescue pulled him from the A.C.C., to increase his chances for adoption, and, two weeks later, he was adopted by a man in Brooklyn. Five years after that, in July of 2019, the same man surrendered him to the rescue, citing aggression.

Jack was toilet trained to the hilt and walked beautifully on a leash, but he also showed signs that he associated humans with frightening experiences. The incident with the man in the park began to make sense after Jack displayed the same reaction on observing another man casually swinging a rolled-up newspaper at his side, and another holding a bottle of wine. The speed and deftness with which Jack would hide and defend his food were other signs that, to him, humans were not benefactors but competitors. At times, if I made eye contact with him at the wrong moment, his limbs would stiffen until I looked away. Then he would trot over and sit next to me, licking his lips nervously.

The most challenging thing was that Jack didn’t growl, a tendency that has been linked in scientific literature to electric-shock collars. (Jack, maybe not coincidentally, was also terrified of collars, and never allowed me, or anyone else, to put one on him.) Growling is innate and its suppression is learned, usually by punishment; this is dangerous because growling is important social behavior. Dogs do not growl at their prey, but they do at peer animals—humans, sheep, other dogs—with whom they need to communicate. If growling doesn’t work, the dog might graduate to a less semantic method.

The second time that Jack bit me, I had handed him a dog biscuit and then, without thinking, reached out to pat him along the side of his rib cage. He froze, dropped the biscuit, sank his teeth into the upper edge of my hand, and streaked away. There was blood, but not much. The third, fourth, fifth, and all the subsequent times were similar. Everything would be normal, and then I would blithely cross an invisible line.

Jack’s adoption profile mentioned only that he took “time to warm up” to new people, and he received applications pretty regularly. But each bite was another incident that I was ethically obliged to disclose. My strategy was to speak to each applicant on the phone before meeting. “Just so I can tell you a bit more about him,” I’d say.

One applicant, a man in his forties who worked from home, ghostwriting addiction memoirs for celebrities, said that the biting didn’t bother him. We arranged to go for a walk in the park. Jack was in my arms, so that I could control what he came into contact with. When the man arrived, he had his girlfriend with him and, distracted by her unexpected presence, I failed to notice when the man reached out to touch Jack’s head in greeting. I felt the heave of Jack’s little body in a would-be lunge, and stepped back just in time.

“Bad dog,” the girlfriend said.

When he wasn’t fearful, Jack was lazy and affectionate, eager to be close. In the low-lit hour before the neighbors sent the sounds of plumbing through the walls, I would hear the drop of his gnarled feet on the carpet, the tap-tap-tap of his paws down the hall, and turn to see him in the doorway. He would stand by my chair until I lifted him into my lap, where he would fall back to sleep and start snoring. He often followed me around the apartment, sitting outside the stall while I showered, facing away, like a security guard. He’d lie in bed and watch me get ready for work, eyes narrowing and jerking open again. In the evenings, he arranged himself on the couch with his flank alongside my thigh. I would try to stay as still as I could and delay getting up.

What we regard as bad behavior might be better described as unsuccessful, misunderstood, mismatched to the environment. Many people are annoyed by dogs’ barking, but, living alone in a building with a history of break-ins, I appreciated Jack’s vocal warnings when he heard the scrape and thud of heavy feet approaching our door, his looking at me to make sure I’d heard. When he was frightened, his affectionate tendencies were the first casualty. The day that he came home from a dental extraction at the vet, he sat, miserable, under a stool for twelve hours, stiffening if I neared him. I stopped having anyone over to my apartment—not because it was unpleasant for the visitor to be eye-stalked and barked at by a ten-inch-tall dog with a bristling mohawk but because I couldn’t bear to see the stress that visitors induced in him.

In October, I noticed Jack pawing at his ear and shaking his head. One of his play moves was to dive sideways onto the rug and torpedo his head along it while wagging his tail, but these new gestures made me worry about an ear infection. I took him to the rescue’s vet, where he had undergone his dental procedure, a small animal hospital in an East Village basement. As soon as we turned into East Fifth Street, Jack began to shake, refusing to advance. I picked him up, placing him lengthwise against my chest so that he faced backward. Through my jacket, I felt his heart beating fast. In the waiting room, he clung to me, stiff, paws digging in. When the nurse approached he became briefly more still, and then lunged and thrashed, snapping. Dr. G., a gruff man who is deft and gentle with the animals, stood a few feet from us. “Take him back outside,” he told me.

Jack was calmer out in the cold air. I stood in the gutter and held on to him as the vet, who was not wearing a jacket, circled us, trying to look into Jack’s ears. Jack would not let the doctor out of his hard stare.

“It’s O.K., sweetie,” the vet said, in the voice he used for animals. “I’m not going to get closer.” The reassurance gave me a rush of sadness. If only I could make Jack understand that we meant no harm! The vet sent me home with antibiotic ear drops, hedging the fact that he couldn’t examine Jack against the possibility that he had an infection. He was given a prescription for Prozac, too, which had no discernible effect.

Jack did make progress. One October morning, we were crossing the road to the park when my friend Christie pulled up in the bike lane and waved. She took one hand off the handlebar and reached down toward Jack. I gave her a warning, but his tail whizzed and he put both paws on her leg while she caressed his head and neck. I was so happy that I hugged her. When my friend Roxanne turned thirty-one, I took Jack on the subway to her birthday party, a trivia night at her apartment in the West Village. I told the guests to avoid touching or making eye contact with him. Surprisingly fast, he let his guard down, accepting Parmesan crisps from the birthday girl and falling asleep on the couch curled up against my trivia partner, a man he’d met just hours earlier.

Still, I was scared of Jack. I developed a reflex of jerking away from him. If we were playing with a toy and he turned his head too quickly, I’d shrink back, and he would freeze and stare at me. I knew that I was missing important signals that might have enabled me to change the way that he saw the world.

On a Saturday in November, Jack and I were heading north on Chrystie Street. Walking along the street with a dog like Jack recalibrates your view of the world. A new smell coming from the kebab cart or the dark patch of another dog’s piss may slow you down. It may be worth crossing the street to avoid a thicket of ankles. A child holding her dad’s hand, face lighting up, hand reaching out, may mean that you must rapidly catch the father’s eye, and shake your head.

That morning, a man in an army cap—crouched on the curb, his back to the sidewalk, a witch’s hat to his right—was using both hands to strike a tool against the concrete. I hung back until the man put his tool down and picked up his phone. Just as we drew level, the man picked up his tool and in one motion brought it down hard on the edge of the curb, making a cracking sound that reverberated. Jack launched, his movement seeming to coincide with the sound. He connected with the man’s back, bit down, and sprang back. The man dropped his tool and cried out, grabbing his lower back as he spun around, and looked upward, at the space a human or a much larger dog might occupy. When he saw Jack, his expression changed.

“I am so sorry,” I said, scooping Jack up into my arms.

The man said something in what I think was Cantonese. He lifted his shirt and turned in a circle, chasing his tailbone to inspect himself. His skin was clear. He raised his hand in a “don’t worry about it” gesture.

Days later, I was at the bakery next door, Jack in my arms. In the line in front of me were a woman and her two young daughters with backpacks on. The younger one tugged on her mother’s sleeve, pointed at Jack, and whispered in her mother’s ear.

“Can my daughter pet your dog?” the mother asked me.

“I am sorry, but no,” I said.

The mother looked surprised, her smile fading. There was another whispered conference.

The girl started crying. Jack, leaning his head against the space below my shoulder, breathing evenly and ignoring the activity around him, blinked.

The mother looked at me again, as if I might see the problem that I’d created for her and relent. I stayed silent, staring ahead. As they moved away from the counter toward the door, I couldn’t bear it. “He’s not a nice dog,” I called out after them. “He’s not even really my dog.” For the rest of the day, I had the feeling that I’d betrayed Jack. Why should he tolerate being touched by a stranger?

Before Jack came to live with me again, I had planned to go to my friend Pagie’s family farm, in the Catskills, for Thanksgiving. Now my options were to not go, to find a person who could handle him and leave him in their care, or to take him with me. I bought him a train ticket, and started worrying. I visited Pagie’s family in the city with Jack, so that he could meet their dogs, who responded mildly as he ran around with his hackles up for forty minutes and then settled into my lap and fell asleep. Pagie’s mother, Anne, stood by the fireplace and told me that I’d have trouble finding a suitor with a dog like that. I expressed my anxiety that he’d bite someone over Thanksgiving. Anne waved the hand that was holding a cigarette, leaving a cartoonish plume of smoke in the air. “Look how small he is,” she said.

I got more nervous. What if, when it was time to leave the farm and get on the train back to New York, Jack happened to be in one of his fear zones, moving in slow motion, hostile and untouchable? I would be stranded upstate. I imagined the incredulity of Pagie’s parents, should I be stuck in their home and overstaying my welcome all because I could not approach my dog. I bought bite-proof gloves, made for handling birds of prey.

On Monday, the day of our train to Hudson, I woke up terrified. By the time of his morning walk, I was in a state of dark anxiety. I picked up his harness and took two steps toward him. He hesitated, looked at the harness, the window, me. He took a step away. I set the harness down on the floor, where I often spread it out before lifting him and placing his feet in the holes. He looked inscrutable. I felt time running out. I moved my hands toward him to pick him up, and he took another step back. I began to doubt myself, to hear a dissenting, chaotic voice. What if my tiptoeing de-escalation was, in fact, ineffective? What if Jack simply didn’t know that he shouldn’t bite? I have been so patient, I thought.

I stood tall over him and put my hands on my hips, trying to embody authority. His alertness grew. Our eyes met. The air between us was thick and staticky, and I felt sweat on my palms, hatred for myself. Pretending that I was not afraid, I leaned down and put my hands on either side of his torso. It was instant. Once he had my hand in his jaws, he shook it, as he did his toy sheep. I was barefoot, and he went for my feet next. I cried out several times. I’d pull one foot away from him, which meant leaving the other one in his range. I reached out for the bookshelf, trying to haul myself up and away, and books cascaded to the floor.

When we broke apart, I kept my eyes lowered. I’m terrible with blood. Even thinking of it can make me light-headed. I thought I saw bone exposed on my hand, and I reeled and looked up and away. In doing so, I accidentally looked directly at Jack. He was backed up, pressing his flank against the wall, shaking. The whites of his eyes were showing. His hackles were up, his body crouched, his knobbly bowlegs looked weird and gnarled. When our eyes met, he tilted his head upward, paused his desperate panting, closed his jaws, and bared his teeth.

I crumpled to the floor as if I’d been shot, and curled into a fetal position, facing away from him. There was silence for twenty seconds. Then the tap-tap of toenails. I felt the nub of his skull near my coccyx, and a warm pressure as he lined himself up alongside me, lowered into sphinx, and lay down. The buzz of his shaking came in uneven phases, rising and falling like an outgoing tide. Five seconds, still. Three seconds, still. I stayed there counting until I noticed my hand was dotting blossoms of blood on my shirt.

I left for work, bought a bandage at CVS, and spent the day calling around for another foster to take him. By 4 P.M., I’d found a girl my age who lived in Queens and had experience with aggressive dogs.

“Can you pick him up this afternoon?” I asked through tears. She could.

When I got home, he was sweet and coöperative. I took him for a walk, packed a laundry bag with his things, and went to Penn Station, leaving Christie with a key to let the new foster in. Before I left, I put him in his harness and leash, not wanting the new foster to have to take the risk. He followed me to the door, inserting his head slightly into the frame as I tried to close it, his liquid eyes alert and questioning. “Go on,” I said, and used my shin to press him back inside.

When the new foster arrived, Christie recounted to me, Jack was hostile and nervous and hid in the shower stall, but the woman was patient and relaxed, and, half an hour later, he followed her out of the apartment.

“He’s so sweet!” she texted me. “I love him! He even climbed into my lap in the car to look out the window!” On the train, the conductor looked twice at my ticket, and said, “You’re supposed to have a dog with you.”

When I got home a week later, I texted the new foster and asked to have Jack back, although I knew that I’d ceded my claim. She said no—she thought that she was making progress and wanted to keep him. I checked in every few days, asking for pictures. I heard that he and the cat in his new home wouldn’t go near each other. “Put him in a baby carrier on your chest,” I wrote. “Being held calms him down.”

“It worked,” she texted back.

Within a week, another dog had arrived at my apartment. Jack’s bite marks began to morph into scars—a faded, round, shiny-white welt on the lowest knuckle of my left thumb, and matching puncture marks on my feet, where his canines had sunk in, as though from the world’s smallest vampire.

I was at my desk at work, six weeks later, when I found out that Jack was dead. Over the previous few days, his outline had appeared to me several times, and suddenly it felt important to have news of him. The girl who had taken over from me had stopped responding to my texts. I assumed she thought that I was meddling and annoying. I texted the head of the rescue instead.

“I’m so sorry,” she wrote back. “I should have called you. We just sent him over the rainbow bridge.” The Rainbow Bridge is a reference to a poem or song that features a mythical overpass to a field of animal souls, or freedom, or something.

Later, I found out that there had been several more incidents. Jack had bitten the new foster’s boyfriend, then her mother. She had taken him to see Dr. G. for a euthanasia consultation. Jack had gone mad with fear before he’d even reached the sidewalk in front of the clinic. No cajoling could calm him down enough to get him to the doorway. She took him to a vet in Queens, one he’d never been to, and asked them to do it immediately, and they did.

Home from work, I called my dad. I told him that this was the wrong outcome, that I should have done more. This time, he got angry.

“He was an aggressive dog. That dog was no good. He didn’t like people. What do you think you could have done? You think you can save all these dogs?”

I replied that I could have adopted him, kept him safe.

“And never let anyone in your apartment again? Never go away again? Get sued when he bites someone? It’s self-sabotage.”

My mum came to the phone, echoing Dad and asking whether I wanted to be “alone, with dogs” forever. I told her that that didn’t sound like being alone.

My parents were speaking to me from the southeast coast of Australia, where I grew up. It was mid-January, and more than forty million acres had recently burned in what was likely the worst fire season in history. The photos in the paper looked like illustrations of Hell. A billion animals had died.

My parents’ house, which was built to replace one that had burned down in the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983, is in Aireys Inlet, a town of eight hundred people, on heathlands where the coastal wind stunts the growth of the tea trees and ironbarks that grow in the red, claylike Kurosol soil off the sandstone cliffs. The house is a small cedar-wood structure surrounded by scrub. There are holes in the walls through which the chill coastal breeze comes in at night. This is because their house is in the process of being eaten by cockatoos. There’s also a creature that lives in the roof. The last time I visited my parents, in December of 2018, I could hear its scrabbly movements on the other side of the ceiling panel as I lay in an upstairs bedroom. I could have guessed its weight within a pound. It had four legs, and toenails.

One morning on that visit, I found Dad in the kitchen just after sunrise. At that hour, the coolest time of the day, before the sun comes up and decimates everything, there’s a bristling stillness around the house. I began describing the alive-sounding movements above my head throughout the night. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’s either a bush rat or a brushtail possum.”

Perhaps because I hadn’t been around him in a long while, I launched into a discussion of how I could help him remove the creature, whether or not he had the right ladder.

“Why do I need to get rid of it?” he asked.

Though he grew up in the bush, my dad still gets a thrill when fauna chooses to cohabit with him. This feeling extends to various birds and spiders that live around the house, and to a blue-tongued lizard that sometimes dwells in the compost bin. He keeps tabs on them, and, if the visitor doesn’t turn up at the usual time, he remarks on it, and keeps checking back. When it returns, he lets everyone in the house know.

The sciences that study the way animals behave define several categories of symbiotic relationships between species. Among them are commensalism, in which one species benefits and the other is unaffected; mutualism, in which both parties benefit; amensalism, in which at least one species is harmful to the other; and parasitism, in which, between two species living together, at least one benefits at the expense of the other.

Though wild and seemingly independent, my dad’s compost lizard and the cockatoos eating his home have entered into symbiosis with him. The lizard is commensal. The birds seem parasitic—but my father’s relationship with them has some qualities of mutualism, too. The cockatoos and parrots eat the ironbark and wattle flowers, digest them, and defecate on the ground he has prepared. The weight and moisture of the birds’ feces can bind the seeds to the arid ground to allow them a chance at reaching the stage at which my dad can propagate the seedlings. The last time that I was home, I looked out the kitchen window and saw my dad, barefoot in the garden, moving so as not to disturb the birds that were feeding a few feet above his head. He was out there with his wattle seeds, which he submerges in boiling water before planting, to simulate the conditions of a bushfire—the flora in the area is adapted to fire and ash regeneration, and intense heat helps the seeds to germinate. When those trees grow with his tending, they’ll attract more of the birds that are eating his house, providing them an alternative food source.

When Dad asked why he should remove the mammal living in the roof, I had assumed a parasitic relationship. But what if the presence of that creature was preventing other, more invasive creatures from moving in, and was striking a balance with the environment’s other inhabitants? The animal’s cohabitation, its lack of fear at the human sounds in the house each night, fulfills some of the criteria for tameness.

We tend to understand our limitations and our responsibilities in relation to wild animals—if we do too much, they will disappear—but we place the burden of behavioral adaptation on domestic animals. We forget that a domesticated interspecies relationship is a social one and should come with a kind of social contract. In “The Little Prince,” a fox approaches the prince and asks to be tamed, because doing so would create meaning for both the fox and the prince: “If you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.” The fox explains the process of taming, which the prince understands because of his experience with the rose he dotes on and cultivates; he has been “tamed” by the flower, because he organizes his behavior around it. He visits it, waters it, thinks about it—and, in his doing so, the flower has become essential to him. Now, when the prince looks at a field of a thousand roses, he notes that they are “beautiful” but “empty,” because he is not connected to them. Taming, and being tamed, transform the prince’s view of the world, and make him feel at home in new ways. But there’s a catch, the fox explains: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

Jack had many characteristics that made him suitable to cohabitation with me: a generally social nature, a small body proportional to my dwelling, roughly diurnal sleep patterns. He also had an ability to change his behavior in response to his environment, an ability geared to his survival. It was in this last sense that the human world perverted things. His learned hostility to humans made him ill-adapted. If a biologist were to tally the relationship between a twenty-nine-year-old woman and a special-needs dog, it would make little sense, in evolutionary terms, because of the behavioral modification Jack’s presence required of me, and the lack of benefit to me. What makes us tolerate relationships so parasitic and costly? The best scientific explanation can be found in the field of behavior. I saw Jack’s sweet laziness, his affection, his capacity to enjoy life. How he liked to play, and the toys that he hoarded. When I walked into a room, I saw him come alive—run busily in a pointless circle and then roll on his back on the rug. When I got home from work, he would greet me with unhinged excitement, eyes wild, ears back, face pointed upward and moving berserkly side to side, chest lowered, tail helicoptering. If I didn’t get my bag and coat off fast enough, he would lower his head and beat his two tiny front feet on the carpet, crying softly. I saw how soft, rank-smelling things were precious to him. A gym sock I had taken off, a dirty dish towel from the laundry hamper. Sometimes, as he was preparing to take a nap, he would retrieve one of these treasures and arrange it in his bed, laying it fastidiously alongside his head before he curled up to sleep. Even as a parasitic presence, the dog creates things that are hard to measure from an evolutionary point of view—love and delight. A helpful way to think of it is that to love another animal so different and useless is to remind ourselves of how strange, complex, and irresponsible our behavior as humans can be.

I have pictured Jack’s final moments many times. They were almost certainly desperate and combative. Much later, I got to talk to the girl who took over from me. “Was he scared?” I asked her. “Did he struggle?” “Yes,” she said, “and yes, a lot.” He was struggling too much for them to allow her into the room. I can see him now, snarling, his eyes blank, ferocious, his lips curled back, mouth open wide enough to bare his teeth, to snap at the hands grabbing him, adding to the sum total of the experiences closing in on him. This time, his response was correct. He was in danger. His last snatches of perception as the world slid out of his focus: the interior of a windowless exam room, a stab of pain—all of it intolerable, all of it confirming his worst suspicions about human intention toward him.