A dogs purpose
I realize there’s been a whole movie on this topic, but I don’t really want to watch it. As far as I can figure from cultural osmosis, the film’s answer to its implied eponymous question was “dying, repeatedly.”
There are worse answers. If there’s one thing a dog is going to do, it’s die. Take Jackie, for example, the 12-year-old spaniel splayed out across my mother’s couch, slowly leaking urine, slowly feeling her heart enlarge with fluid until, someday in the very near future, it stops entirely.
Jackie’s first purpose was to entertain a child. I was sixteen when a family down the street bought her for their toddler. As the neighborhood dog sitter, I watched Jackie while her family traipsed to O’ahu or wherever. Apparently unaware that puppies have the annoying habits of pissing, shitting, and generally being alive, her owners started leaving her for weeks at a time, even when they were home. Within a few months, they sheepishly offered her to my mom, full time.
Jackie is, to be precise, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, a dog specifically engineered for the amusement of wealthy people. She has been bred to frolic, to cuddle, to gaze lovingly, et cetera. This is her purpose, and she has fulfilled it admirably.
My dog, by contrast, was the result of an accident, or at least of negligent decision making. Linus’s lower jaw protrudes about an inch in front of his nose, and a protruding lower canine lends him a decidedly orc-like demeanor. He’s mostly Rat Terrier, a breed designed to tear out the throats of vermin. Sadly, the rodents around our house are likely brimming with rabies and anticoagulants, plus it’s socially weird to encourage urban hunting. So his raison d'etre, genetically speaking, is one he’s been entirely unable to etre.
Linus does spend a lot of time gazing longingly at the squirrel in the tree by our house, as if she were a sweetheart on an outbound train. When she’s on the ground he’ll crouch and stalk her in a halting, animatronic gait. When she sees him and ascends, as she inevitably does, he doesn’t run or bark, just sits and inclines his head to watch her chatter and twitch her tail. I have a hard time wishing death on an innocent squirrel, but the look on his face makes me waver slightly.
We got Linus from a shelter, and for a lot of dog adopters, the entire framing of a dog as having a purpose is gauche — it is humans who have a purpose, that purpose being to rehabilitate, rescue and steward dogs. Maybe the better question then is What is the point of having a dog?
Dog rescuers— and I mean people who really identify as dog rescuers, who have the Who Rescued Who bumper sticker and celebrate Gotcha Day and tag #adoptnotshop on every dog-related post — are a pretty wacky bunch. I know the actual demographics must be wider, but it’s tempting to generalize them as lower-middle to upper-middle class white women with weapons-grade martyr complexes.
Too harsh? For what it’s worth I do consider myself adjacent to this demographic, if not part of it. And I do think people who adopt dogs, especially “problem” dogs, have a lot of love and compassion. But I think they would say the point of having a dog is to save an animal’s life, and I think they’d be lying. The point is to be loved.
I think about this as Linus presses his small body against my hip, or climbs up my chest to rest his head in the crook of my neck, or pushes himself into the space between me and my partner while we sleep. We purchased a little guy (he was adopted but a good chuck of money did change hands) so we could feel loved.
Another cringe demographic to which I arguably belong: the childless Millenial couple who treat their pets like children. I think we get a little leeway from being gay, but every time we sneak Linus into Target in his little bag (he has separation anxiety!) I feel a twinge of self-consciousness.
In my most cynical moments I wonder if we’re play-acting, taking the emotional experience of childrearing we’ve been denied by economic opportunity/ biological circumstance/ our own whims, and transposing it onto a safe vessel, one that will always love us and never outgrow us. Something like a sex doll, but for maternal instincts instead of libidinal ones.
The less cynical interpretation is that we are, as certain theory-brained people would say, making kin. We are creating cross-species networks of care, abolishing the nuclear family, queering parenthood, subverting hegemony, et cetera et cetera.
I don’t know about any of that. But I do like having a silly little guy around who shares my toast and sleeps in the crook of my neck. And if he doesn’t really have a purpose, well, neither do I.