Every year when Christmas and Hanukkah wheel around, my Judeo-Christian family reminisces over yellowed photo albums and tells stories so familiar to everyone that it’s been suggested we refer to them by numbers: No. 3 for when Fuzzy’s barking saved Hank from a fire, No. 9 for the time Jenny fell on the ice—that sort of thing. It’s the bittersweet season of miracles and memories, when time touches eternity, and we revisit the vanished worlds of loved ones lost.
That includes dogs. Most recently, Obie, our flat-coated retriever. We put him down over the summer. At first, there was that raw stage, when you come home tired from work and turn the key, subconsciously expecting licks and tail-wags, and finding instead the pang of grief as you cross the threshold and once again encounter only absence.
Every loved one’s death affects us in its own way. The death of a child is a horrific tragedy, full of guilt and recrimination. The death of a friend leaves one feeling like an island sinking into the sea. A parent’s death removes some core part of your being. A departed dog sometimes noses its way into consciousness long after it passes on to the grassy fields of the hereafter.
To make sense of this experience, I have found it helpful to reflect on the words we use to talk about living beings. Forgive me: I’m a philosophy professor.
Ethology is the study of animal behavior or ethos, Greek for “habit.” When feeding, foraging, hunting, and sheltering, animals follow well-traveled paths. Paws and hooves that beat the earth day after day produce bear trails and goat tracks. Ethologists have a word for the accustomed ways of an animal, inscribed on the land itself: They call it a haunt.
We human beings have our own haunts. We are creatures of habit as much as any dog that sniffs the same bushes and marks the same territory on its daily walk around the neighborhood. We fill our days with the same activities, walk the same trails when we exercise, and take the same roads to go to work. The body’s memories—the physical imprint of habit—are powerful. In his old age, Obie liked to stretch out on the bed with us and snuggle. Lying down for a nap, I sometimes cradle a pillow, seized by nostalgia for the warmth and grassy perfume of his gorgeous coat.
Where we’ve lived hand-in-paw with animals, we are literally haunted.
Another nifty point about the Greek language: Whereas ethos is “habit,” ēthos—with a long e—is “character,” habit that over the years has deepened into settled disposition. If you do something often enough, it becomes part of who you are. If you live with someone day in and day out, they shape who you are. For many married men, that means having your rough edges rounded and smoothed—being tamed, domesticated, learning how to be a husband or a father.
Dogs reveal this connection between ethos and ēthos. For millennia, their habits and character have been molded by ours, and vice versa. More than 11,000 years of canine-human partnership were mysteriously encoded in Obie’s combination of wildness and tameness, savagery and gentleness. Who knows what playful and violent traits his ancestors exchanged with their owners over countless generations of hunting and tracking, chasing and guarding?
Given wide latitude to do what they will, our dogs have hounded us into conforming to them as much as they have, over time, conformed to us. This was especially true of Obie, a rambunctious companion and dedicated predator whose explosive energy we learned to manage, but whose will we could not bend. We soon understood that he was simply asserting the right to be the dog he was born and bred to be.
It was in the late fall of 2011 that our son, who lived in St. Paul, adopted a malnourished, jet-black puppy found walking along a road in rural Kentucky, its face scarred from human abuse and fights with other animals. Obie grew to be a 70-pound dynamo. At the dog park, which he entered by jumping over the fence, only the vizslas and Afghan hounds were faster. Our son took him on long runs and hikes in the Minnesota winter. He’d run off the leash across frozen lakes, wondering at the sound of the ice’s deep booms in the night.
A dog for all seasons, Obie came to live with us in Oklahoma in 2013. Our neighborhood was home to bald eagles, hawks, turkeys, and rabbits. Foxes and the occasional coyote dropped in. Woodpeckers frequented our bird feeders, which pole-climbing squirrels regularly raided. Obie turned our animal-friendly backyard, where hummingbirds darted about and squirrels lay spread-eagle on the cool ground in the midsummer heat, into a killing field.
He used the terrain strategically, like an assassin. Still and silent, black as night, he’d hide at the base of some thick fir trees at dusk and burst from his blind when prey came into range. (We took to rapping on the glass to warn them.) One day we found him and Ladd—a much older dog of shepherd extraction who never caught anything but crickets—sharing a freshly killed rabbit. Another time, Obie caught a bird on the wing. He’d snatch up squirrels and shake them to death in his jaws.
At first, Obie’s blank eyes registered feral coldness, and he seemed largely indifferent to the goings-on in our house. Walks were a nightmare. He pulled like a husky at the leash, and barked fiercely at every passing dog. But centuries of breeding had instilled a distant memory of retriever discipline, and he was always gentle with people. As he aged, he turned his attention toward us and spent most of his time indoors. Our relationship was one of mutual affection and accommodation, beyond which few human friendships progress.
But dogs are not human beings, and they remind us of that when they die. Ladd began to shake one evening, and he refused to come in from the backyard when we let him out to pee. We brought him in, and settled in to sleep, putting him in between us so we could pet him. But during the night, he crawled to the end of the bed and died. He wanted to be alone in his mortal agony, a desire foreign to human instinct.
And when it came time to put Obie down, we felt the weighty responsibility of taking his life. Strong medicines helped him to rebound in the days before his death. Were we acting too early? What would he want? There was no way to answer these questions. His soul and ours had expanded in 11 years of being together, guiding one another’s ethos, shaping one another’s ēthos. But nature maintained an unbridgeable barrier between us. We could do for him only what we hesitate to do for ourselves: round his little life with a sleep.
Jacob Howland is the dean of the Intellectual Foundations program at the University of Austin. He is the author of several books, including two on Plato’s Republic as well as studies of Søren Kierkegaard and the Talmud. Howland’s articles have appeared in The New Criterion, City Journal, and The Nation, among others.