I'm an intellectual historian by training (ok, so right now I'm stuck writing SAT questions for a living--hey, somebody's gotta do it--but I have in fact been assured by people who should know that, contrary to how it might appear, I am an intellectual historian and not an internet hacker, television watcher, novel reader, inveterate moviegoer, or mediocre dog trainer). So as an intellectual historian, I'm always particularly delighted when an older book is reissued; one occasionally needs an affirmation that the past is not some dead gray thing to be poked at solely by the pathologically nosy voyeurs whom most honest historians would admit to being, at least after they've had a stiff drink or two. The ideas of the past just may have something to say to those of us stumbling around in the present. Thus, I was extremely pleased to see Konrad Lorenz's 1948 classic Man Meets Dog offered as a 1994 paperback by Kodansha America (it's available in bookstores now; the ISBN is 1-56836-051-7 if you need to hunt it down), complete with a brand new introduction by Donald McCaig. I had never read Lorenz and immediately decided to devote my next column to considering his work. So if you're one of those who thinks everything written before 1980 is part of the dark ages of unenlightened dog training, well, as we say on the Internet--hit delete now!
Man Meets Dog has clearly been reissued for good capitalistic reasons rather than vague intellectual ones--it's obviously intended to piggyback upon the success of books such as Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Hidden Life of Dogs. The cover, in fact, is emblazoned with a gold seal that proudly proclaims, "The classic that inspired The Hidden Life of Dogs!" (and that gold seal, by the by, seems to have been welded on with crazy glue--none of my best efforts were able to remove it, and believe me, I tried!). Now, since any enjoyment of Man Meets Dog that I might have had would almost certainly have been tainted if it were genuinely linked with Thomas's travesty, I felt compelled to check it out. Thankfully, Thomas's bibliography teems with all of ten books and not one of them was written by Konrad Lorenz. To be strictly fair, the book's cover does contain a quotation by George Schaller to the effect that The Hidden Life of Dogs is the best dog book that he's read since Man Meets Dog was published forty years earlier, but the influence of a review blurb written after the book was published would be far too postmodern a sort of inspiration for us to puzzle over.
So it was that with renewed confidence and a less prejudiced eye I was able to approach Man Meets Dog. Donald McCaig's short (and somewhat ponderous) introduction contains a number of useful biographical facts about Lorenz. Lorenz was born in Vienna in 1903, studied medicine at Columbia University and the University of Vienna, from which he received a doctorate in zoology. His books have been translated into many languages, he was a member of fourteen scientific academies and societies, and he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his pioneering work in the study of animals in their native habitats. McCaig claims that Lorenz's theories, which started with the observation of complex animal behavior in situ, were in radical opposition to the operant conditioning methodology of academic psychologists and were thus dismissed as hopelessly anthropomorphic by everyone but practical dog trainers. Without doing some research, I suppose I'll have to take his word for it, but it's unclear to me why any dichotomy would have been necessary: Skinner sorts are exclusively interested in training theory, and Lorenz is fundamentally interested in observing the way animals behave naturally rather than in imposing behaviors upon them.
Much is often made over the fact that Konrad Lorenz joined the Nazi party in 1938 ("It is unfortunate--and, unfortunately, not unusual--that good men support odious political systems," intones McCaig). There are, of course, moral issues to be considered; Konrad Lorenz was a scientist whose work undoubtedly had some minute influence on Nazi theories of genetics. Donald McCaig--possibly rightly, certainly interestingly--links Lorenz's Nazism with his fascination with wolves and the northern dog breeds. McCaig argues that Lorenz feared degeneration, both of society and of domesticated animals, which he viewed in a deep sense as inferior to their wilder ancestors. Such speculation is indeed fascinating, but it has little to do with the substance of Lorenz's work as an observer of animals. Since entering a different cultural and historical period is impossible, and since none of us can truly know how we would behave if shaped by different circumstances than what have currently shaped us, it's best to suspend moral judgment when attempting to understand a text (and that, I promise, is the last pontificating statement of the philosophy of intellectual history that you'll hear from me today!).
Contemporary readers of Man Meets Dog will find a very different sort of book from most dog books that they encounter. Lorenz has been called anthropomorphic, but I think he's not that so much as unashamedly, blatantly self-indulgent. The book is highly anecdotal and often extremely charming, but it is fundamentally a book of Konrad Lorenz's musing about the dogs that he's known over the years. The illustrations, done primarily by the author, are one of the most delightful parts of the book: the margins are filled with extremely droll pencil drawings which sketch out many of the different points covered in the text. If there were nothing of substance in Man Meets Dog at all, these drawings would be reason enough to purchase and enjoy the book.
Fortunately, there is substance in the book. Lorenz propounds the thesis, which has been debated hotly, that some dogs are descended from jackals and some predominantly from wolves intermingled with the blood of jackals. The jackal descendants are extremely playful and remain dependent upon their masters; in extreme cases, they may lavish as much affection on the world at large as they do upon their own masters. The wolf dogs (the northern breeds), by contrast, recognize an exacting social organization and exhibit genuine loyalty to the pack leader. It is these northern breeds for whom Lorenz has the greatest respect and affection. He finds dogs which gaze at their masters for hours on end with blind devotion too sentimental for his own tastes. "Sycophancy is one of the worst faults a dog can have" (89).
Lorenz inhabits a world quite different from the world most of us know with our dogs, a world in which dogs waste away from sorrow when their masters leave, a world in which pets are given away to the zoo to share cages with wolves, a world in which newborn dingoes are taken to the funerals of former beloved professors. He avowedly believes in as little training as possible; his dogs, he admonishes, are to be kept in as natural a state as can easily be arranged. Yet the training advice that he does give is quite sensible and sounds oddly modern to those of us with an interest in shaping behaviors of our dogs. He writes, "In every kind of training which demands active cooperation on the part of the dog, as in jumping, retrieving, and other feats, we must not forget that even the best dog possesses no human sense of duty and, in sharp contrast to quite small children, will only collaborate as long as he is enjoying the work. Correspondingly, punishment is here not only incongruous but even harmful, since it is calculated to disgust the dog with this special activity, and to make him useless for it. It is only habit that causes a well-trained dog to retrieve a hare, follow a given trail or jump an obstacle if he is not `in the mood'; therefore, particularly at the beginning of such a training, when the dog is not yet in the habit of obeying certain orders, his lesson should be limited to a few minutes and immediately stopped if his enthusiasm shows signs of waning. At all costs we must make the animal feel that he is not obliged but permitted to carry out the exercise in question" (47). It is statements such as this one that make it starkly clear that, however much Lorenz enjoyed making detailed and complex observations about dogs, he was not one to anthropomorphize animals.
Lorenz was firmly convinced that the breeding of dogs according to a physical standard was incompatible with breeding for mental qualities. "Just as I am unable to think of any great intellectual who physically approaches anywhere near to an Adonis, or of a really beautiful woman who is even tolerably intelligent, in the same way I know of no `champion' of any dog breed which I would ever wish to own myself" (93). Dog shows, argues Lorenz, invariably involve dangers; competition among purebred dogs as conformation specimens will inevitably lead to a gross exaggeration of all those points which characterize the breed. He cites the chow, a breed which has evolved from its northern roots into little more than a stodgy teddy bear with an overgrown coat. Lorenz was proud that his own chows, crossbred to German shepherds, still preserved something of the original nature of the breed. Anybody who has followed the border collie wars of the last year will find his remarks echoed again and again by those who fear the fallout of a working breed's becoming another show dog.
Lorenz spent a great deal more time than most scientists do pondering intangible questions about the moral worth of human beings versus the moral worth of animals. He was troubled by an apparent contradiction. On the one hand, "the dog has no knowledge of the labyrinths of often opposing moral obligations, he only knows in minute measure the conflict between inclination and obligation. In other words, he is ignorant of all that leads us poor human beings into sin. Seen from the viewpoint of human responsibility, even the most faithful dog is to a large extent amoral" (72-73). On the other, "[w]e judge the moral worth of two human friends according to which of them is ready to make the greater sacrifice without thought of recompense. Nietzsche, who, unlike most people, wore brutality only as a mask to hide true warmness of heart, said the beautiful words, `Let it be your aim always to love more than the other, never to be the second.' With human beings, I am sometimes able to fulfill this commandment, but in relations with a faithful dog, I am always in second. What a strange and unique social relationship! Have you ever thought how extraordinary it all is? Man, endowed with reason and a highly developed sense of moral responsibility, whose finest and noblest belief is the religion of brotherly love, in this very respect falls far short of the carnivores" (150-51). He finds a reconciliation of sorts in the belief that human morality is as much a product of the instinctive feelings which animals possess even more keenly than human beings as it is in rationality. "True morality, in the highest human sense of the word, presupposes a mental capacity no animal possesses, and conversely, human responsibility would itself be impossible without a definite foundation of sentiment. Even in man, the feeling of responsibility has its roots in the deep instinctive `layers' of his mind and he may not do with impunity all that cold reason affirms" (195). His take on ethics, which builds upon hour upon hour of observing animals, is nothing short of fascinating.
So, after all, just who should read Man Meets Dog? It is certainly not for those who desire a practical guide to dog training. Nor is it for those who are impatient with Germanic sentence structure and somewhat convoluted prose. Nor is it quite as replete with insights into canine behavior as we've all been conditioned to suppose. But if you enjoy anecdotes, a certain old-world charm, cunning drawings, and an occasional really interesting insight about the relationship between dogs and human beings, it's not a book to be missed. Unlike The Hidden Life of Dogs, the book that it allegedly inspired, Man Meets Dog was written by a lifelong dog person who genuinely understood what he was looking at. That critical distinction makes all the difference in the world between the two books.