The Weight of a Dog by Pippa Marland

On the Ring Road, I pass signs for a crematorium, and in the village of Pucklechurch I reach my destination. Down a lane there’s a green board announcing ‘Companions Haven’. I park the car, and, at a wooden gate between high hedges, I press a bell. Seconds later I’m buzzed through to what looks like the garden of a family home, but on the left as I walk up the path there’s a modern annexe – all glass doors and windows – and inside are display cases of shiny black paw-printed urns, wooden caskets, white lilies in a vase and a book of remembrance.

I’m here to collect the ashes of my dog Nina. It’s the first time I’ve had a pet put to sleep and the first time I’ve had one cremated. It feels sad and strange, and I don’t really know if I’m doing the right thing. Part of me, full of grief, is desperate for whatever comfort I can take from this ritual: from carrying her ashes away with me, some in a scatter-box and some swirled through a blue glass pendant I will wear against my skin. The other part of me is wondering how we got here, from wolves scavenging leftovers from the campsites of prehistoric nomads to a designated funeral parlour for dogs and other pets. I’m reminded of the meme doing the rounds on social media a while ago that has two photographs, one above the other. In the first, a wolf is considering whether to approach some humans for scraps of food and asking itself: ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ The picture below it, captioned ‘10 000 years later’, shows two miniature dachshunds wearing brightly coloured knitted balaclavas with integrated ear pockets. I’ve a nagging suspicion that my attempts to memorialise Nina are part of the same trajectory, and that somehow none of this is ‘natural’, though I struggle to say why.

Philosophers have explored the contradictions and excesses of human-pet relationships with scepticism over the years. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari speculate that our companion animals are victims of a narcissistic, oedipal urge – stand-ins for us to work through the psychodynamics of our troubled relationships with our human family members. Following these thinkers, and mindful of Jorge Luis Borges’ mock taxonomy of creatures in which the hierarchy peaks at ‘trained ones’, ‘embalmed ones’ and ‘those belonging to the Emperor’, the posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti ironically identifies three categories of animals: ‘those we watch television with, those we eat and those we are scared of’. It’s a classification that rings uncomfortably true. It signals the inescapably compromised nature of pet owning: the essential contradiction of living with an animal we train and pamper, welcome onto our sofa night after night, and memorialise in a shiny urn when it’s dead, while accepting (albeit with a deep-rooted sense of guilt) that other animals, with which we might well form a loving bond given half a chance, are slaughtered for their meat and skins, while others still gain mythical status as apex predators even as we drive them to extinction. My friend Chris Little, a vet of many years’ standing, calls it an example of cognitive dissonance. Owning a dog means inhabiting this dissonance.

But such knotty contradictions don’t diminish the real emotional charge of a human-dog relationship. I loved Nina and I think (not, I hope, in an entirely narcissistic way) that she loved me. And although the pet crematorium may be an invention of late modernity, the idea that we might mourn the death of our pets is nothing new. In fact, the practice of creating memorials for our companion animals was a feature of ancient human society. In 2011, the archaeozoologist Marta Osipyńska and her team from the Polish Academy of Sciences discovered an animal graveyard just beyond the walls of the Roman port of Berenice, on the Egyptian shores of the Red Sea. Excavating the site in the years that followed, the team concluded that the people burying their cats, dogs and monkeys over 2000 years ago had much in common with those of us who seek to honour the lives of our pets today. Though the archaeologists were careful not to assume that all the human-animal bonds evidenced there were loving ones, they established, with the help of veterinarians, that many of the animals had died of old age and had been nursed through earlier injuries from which they had recovered. The dogs, in particular, showed signs of ageing. Like Nina in her final years, they had suffered from periodontal disease and joint degeneration.

Closer to home in time and space, there is a ‘secret’ Pet Cemetery in London’s Hyde Park, the last resting place of over 1,000 animals, mostly dogs. The first pet burial there was of a Maltese Terrier called Cherry who died in 1881. Her owner – Israel Lewis-Barned – asked Mr Winbridge, the park Lodge Keeper at the time, if the dog could be buried in his garden. The next year Cherry was joined by Prince, a Yorkshire terrier owned by the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and thereafter by many others, commemorated with small gravestones bearing inscriptions such as: ‘In loving memory of Tim, the devoted friend of Frank, Harold and Hilda’; ‘My Ba-Ba never forgotten, never replaced’; and ‘Here lie two faithful creatures Snap and Peter: “we are only sleeping master”’. The internments on this site continued till after the Second World War, each one a testament to a bereavement for which traditional narratives of human loss have little to offer in the way of consolation. I visited the cemetery on a fine January day when the pale sunlight fell gently on rows of headstones so tightly packed that there was little garden left.

It can be complicated trying to memorialise a dog within religious traditions. The towering monument in the grounds of Newstead Abbey to Byron’s Newfoundland dog Botswain, who died from rabies in 1808, bears an engraving that compares dogs favourably to man but avers that they are not adequately noticed or honoured in death. Botswain’s epitaph complains:

But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Masters own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth.

The canine virtues are not invoked lightly here. According to Byron, Botswain was not just his firmest but his only friend: ‘To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; I never knew but one — and here he lies’. But even though the dog is possessed of such attributes as loyalty and, according to Byron, a soul, religious creed denies it its rightful entry into heaven. Historical archaeologist Eric Tourigny, who studies the commemoration of animals, noticed that the Victorian gravestones in Hyde Park only tentatively hinted at the idea of pets and their humans meeting again in the afterlife, though later in the 20^th century the memorials more confidently predicted a happy reunion beyond the grave. While this was apparently socially acceptable in London, he notes that in other areas of England the practice was curbed by local statutes forbidding the use of Christian symbols. According to Tourigny, in contemporary times the use of such religiously inflected wording in pet cemeteries has waned. Perhaps this reflects a more general move away from organised religion and a receding belief in life after death.

Nevertheless, that language of spiritual reunion is still prevalent in certain circles. When Nina was diagnosed with a chronic degenerative disease, I joined a Facebook group for concerned owners. Many of the posts, given the poor prognosis attached to this illness, were in memoriam. Dogs crossed, or were helped to cross, ‘the rainbow bridge’ and were now running free with those dog members of their extended family who had gone on ahead, waiting to meet their human people at the pearly gates when they themselves passed on. I don’t mention these sentiments to mock them. The group offers both practical advice and emotional support in the face of a distress that may be hard to articulate in conventional terms. The RSPCA website counsels bereaved pet owners that others may not understand the level of grief they are experiencing. They continue: ‘Grieving a pet can be similar to mourning the loss of a family member. Some owners experience feelings of deep loneliness and isolation. Please don’t worry or feel ashamed, these emotions are perfectly normal’. Richard Mercer, a grief therapist, calls this sorrow for the loss of an animal a form of ‘disenfranchised grief’. Maybe the pet crematorium is a way for people to legitimate their feelings, to stake their claim on the extraordinary rupture the death of a pet can represent.

If we are a lonely species, as John Berger argues and I believe him, then pets alleviate that loneliness just a little. Studies from Japan have shown that when we gaze into a dog’s eyes and it gazes shyly back, both species experience a flood of oxytocin, the same hormone that is produced when a human mother and baby look at each other or when a female dog nurses her puppies. For researcher Miho Nagasawa and her colleagues, the findings support the existence of ‘an interspecies oxytocin-mediated positive loop’. The same study did not find equivalent results with human-raised wolves, pointing instead to a unique human-dog bonding which has progressed as a result of ‘common mores of communicating and social attachment’. In other words, dogs and humans have co-evolved in a process that began thousands of years ago when a now-extinct ancient wolf species lingered by the nomads’ fire and began its evolutionary journey towards the domestic dog.

Even so, it’s impossible to think about pet dogs without an uncomfortable awareness of how we have shaped and abused them, in ways brought to light in reports of puppy farms, of beaten and abandoned animals, of brutalised fighting dogs, and of breeds with congenital problems whose lives are blighted by deliberately exaggerated features. The pet dogs we have today are vastly accentuated versions of those buried in the Hyde Park cemetery: the dachshund with its belly ever lower to the ground; the English bulldog muscle-bound to a degree unimaginable to the Victorians, even with their growing knowledge of selective breeding. It’s hard to resist the thought that the dogs of the 19^th century might find our contemporary companions as far removed from them as the bonneted dachshunds are from the wolves.

Owning and loving a pet dog places one at the crux of this problem. Evidence is building of the environmental impacts of pet food and pharmaceuticals, including the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide generated in the production of pet meat products and the flea treatments that have contaminated our rivers with neurotoxins. It’s difficult to tread lightly on the planet with a dog in tow. Still, for all the environmental concerns associated with dog owning, there are ways in which domestic dogs can help us to feel closer to nature, can keep the nonhuman world and our human involvement with it at the forefront of our minds. Chris the vet argues that dogs are ‘brilliant ambassadors’: ‘they get people out of doors and into the biosphere where we really belong’.

We were aware that Nina’s illness was likely to be terminal and this brought the added burden of knowing that we could decide to end her life early. The responsibility weighed heavily upon us; her last days were punctuated by anticipatory grief and an anxious wondering: Are we at that point? Is it time now? The received wisdom is that you’ll know when your dog is ready to go – from the look in her eyes or other signs by which she will communicate this to you. It wasn’t really like that for us, but a series of days arrived when we could see that, for all that we wanted her to live forever, Nina had travelled long and far enough. We sobbed in the car on the way to the surgery. My husband remembers watching Nina’s life slip away so calmly and quickly after the injection as terrible but also beautiful. And yet this management of death is something that still feels strange to me, as strange as the Pet Crematorium and the paw-printed urns. I think it has to do with a misplaced conviction that I have harboured my whole life that we should not meddle with nature.

But, of course, what dogs show us is that there is no ‘nature’ in the way that I have imagined it. Through dogs we experience a human-animal-environmental history so tangled that the only way to go is forwards, carrying its dilemmas with us. Ultimately, although living with a domestic dog implicates us in all the uncomfortable ethical contradictions and environmental compromises that characterise our times, it also opens avenues of communication with the nonhuman. Through our conversation with dogs we might know ourselves as animals, might see the grounds for a more extensive interspecies ethics of responsibility and care, not just for pets but for livestock and all the wild creatures with whom we share the planet. This is the best of it.

*

In the garden room at Companions Haven a woman with a professional manner and kind eyes takes my card payment and passes me a box wrapped in dark green paper with a gold sticker holding down the folds. In my hands it’s far heavier than I imagined it would be. The weight of a dog.

***

I am grateful to my friend, the vet Chris Little for our discussion about dog owning and euthanasia. I learned about the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery from an online talk by Jonathan Grun and Eric Tourigny , and Eric’s article ‘Do all dogs go to heaven? Tracking human-animal relationships through the archaeological survey of pet cemeteries’, Antiquity 2020: 94 (378,) pp. 1614-1629. I visited the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery thanks to a guided walk provided by The Royal Parks | London’s Royal Parks. Details of Marta Osipyńska’s discovery of the pet cemetery at Berenice were drawn from this article in Science, and I read about Miho Nagasawa and her team’s research in the article ‘Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds’ by Nagasawa et al, Science, 2015: 438 (6232), pp. 333-336.

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Nina (2006-2021).

Pippa Marland is a writer, musician and Lecturer in English and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. She is the co-editor of the nature writing collection Gifts of Gravity and Light, the co-author of Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2020: Land Lines and the author of Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago

Photographs courtesy of the author.