What the Dog Knows Read Free

next chapter of our life with shepherds had finally arrived. I ran to find David, working on his logic courses in the study. I flitted around the living room. I landed in front of the computer to read the entire e-mail aloud to him. David patiently stood and listened as I made the words real. I waited for my euphoria to dissipate before I e-mailed Joan back, so my tone would be mature and balanced. All that planning and work and cost and emotional investment for one lone pup instead of a squiggling mass of them. Others on the waiting list would be so disappointed with the news. I knew all of that. Then I gave in to being overjoyed.
    I had fallen in love with this Ohio breeder’s line of shepherds, andthe idea of this pup, ten months before. Joan Andreasen-Webb bred and raised German shepherds from West German lines, nourishing her pups with goat milk, a raw-meat diet, and lots of early exposure to the world. Her adult dogs lay on the sidewalk under café tables; they attended children’s reading hour at the library; they herded sheep and starred in a ring sport called Schutzhund that I knew little about, except that it involved biting on command. A couple of her pups even became police K9s. As a reporter decades before, I had done a ride-along with a police K9 and been both impressed and horrified by the dog’s intensity and deep-throated bark. I didn’t want that in a German shepherd. This pup was destined for two jobs: to lie quietly beneath my desk while I worked, then leap up and reign supreme in the obedience ring, a hobby I’d abandoned when Zev became too sick to compete.
    I finally stopped daydreaming and looked up “singleton” on the web. In mathematics, a singleton is a set with exactly one element. In humans, it’s the way most of us arrive, as a single newborn. In dogs, “singleton” means exactly the same thing, only with horror stories attached. The web is like that, though. You can look up the common cold, and the symptoms read like it’s the plague.
    Pups in standard litters give and receive thousands of signals from each other daily, as they tumble over one another, licking and biting, squealing in pain, pissing and licking in apology, and then easing up on the bite. The scrum of a litter gets a pup ready for the rough-and-tumble of the dog park, the next-door neighbor’s snappy Chihuahua, and the chance encounters with weird people—and children. A singleton pup, though, lives in a universe of “yes.” They tend to lack “bite inhibition.” They have “touch sensitivity.” They are “unable to get out of trouble calmly and graciously.” (Although I wasn’t an only child, I related to that last one.) They have an “inability to handle frustration.” (That one, too.) Joan had told me about the potential upside, and I went on to read those sections with great relief. Singleton dogs can make extraordinary companions, as they bond closely to people. Sometimes.
    David and I avoided the what-ifs that night. We had named this pup even before Vita came into heat: Coda, literally “tail” in Italian, the musical movement at the end of a composition—a looking back, a thoughtful reflection, a summation. This pup was going to complement our academic and social lives, not disrupt them. I recently had been granted tenure at a good university and was finally building up a head of steam to chug through academic life like the little engine that could, producing research and fulfilling my destiny as a spunky and hip faculty administrator who wore cool black outfits and could speak truth to power without compromising my principles. Nothing would stop my momentum. Perhaps I wasn’t an academic superstar, but I was pretty darned good at what I did. A pup was a simple gift, my reward for that work, and a welcome distraction from what felt like an increasingly long university engagement.
    We were realistic, or at least