Divided by puppy love

By Lauren Slater

updated 9:51 a.m. ET Aug. 9, 2007

I am an animal lover. I don’t mean I enjoy animals or find them cute. What I mean is that animals — especially mammals — enchant me. I feel as strong a connection to them as I do to members of my own species. Over the years, I’ve discovered that whether animals can love, grieve or hope is far less important than that they elicit these emotions in us.

My husband, on the other hand, believes an animal’s worth is roughly equivalent to its edibility. If you can carve, slice or boil the beast, then it is generally welcome in our home. If not, then, in my husband’s mind, the being is an evolutionary glitch that serves no purpose except to clutter our planet.

I met my husband, Benjamin, before I met my dogs. Ben’s peaceful ways gave me no reason to think he viewed animals as inferior to humans; he is a kind man, elfin and full of endearing quirks. We married on December 21, 1997, on the winter solstice, the trees jeweled with icicles. Soon after that, I announced that we should get a pet. “What kind?” he asked.

“A monkey,” I said, stirring my coffee, thinking of the rhesus, how it sat hunched on human shoulders.

“An iguana,” he said to me.

“Cold-blooded,” I said. “Who wants cold blood?”

“Monkeys bite,” he said. “They’re not necessarily nice.”

“We could get a dog,” I said.

“Foul hounds,” he said. “Dogs have no dignity.”

“And people?” I said.

“The only animals I want in my home are those that can fit in a soup pot,” my husband said. “A beast must be fit to eat.” He smiled then and took a bite of his cinnamon toast.

I knew he was half joking, but I could also see something wicked in Benjamin’s smile. I could suddenly see that he had a second smile, different from his first, gentle one. This second smile, new to me, had a curve to it like the warning signs you see on mountain roads, when the slope gets suddenly steep.

Later in bed he said, “Let me offer you a few facts,” and from his tone, I could feel that we’d slipped into a new space; without warning, there it was. “Dogs bite millions of people a year, mostly children. They kill a few dozen every year, too. They deposit more than 300 tons of feces on our sidewalks and carry more E. coli on their tongues than an unflushed toilet bowl.” He paused, and the reddish hairs on his arms seemed to glow like iron filings strewn along his skin.

“Dogs are supposed to be protectors,” he continued, “but they’re more likely to bark at the mailman and sleep through a murder; they’re domesticated into dumbness.” (So he despised domestication. Where exactly did that leave us?) “They are,” he said, “a significant biological burden on humankind.”

“What’s up with you?” I said, and I heard a wrong tone creep into my voice. “Were you traumatized by a poodle or what?”

“Yes,” he said. “By a poodle.” Then he smiled at me, the old Benjamin again but not quite.

More than just puppy love
I have always known that my love of animals is extreme, but whether extremely good or extremely bad I can’t tell. And because love tends to override analysis, I didn’t much think about it when, a few days after this conversation, my husband away on a business trip, I brought home not one but two Shiba Inu puppies, a breed known to be smart, agile and slightly aloof, qualities that reminded me of my husband.

Interactive Dog breeds Learn which kinds of pooches are best suited to your lifestyle. msnbc.com

Two days later, I picked up Ben at the airport. “There’s a surprise for you when you get home,” I said.

“What?” he wanted to know.

“Guess,” I said.

“You got a dog,” he said, without even pausing to think.

“Jesus,” I said. “Musashi and Lila.”

“You named it Musashianlila? Cool,” he said. “Original.”

“Musashi and Lila,” I said.

“Two foul hounds? I knew you’d do something like that.”

“Are you mad?” I asked.

“I am,” he said, “a little.”

“All right. Aside from giving them back, what can I do to make this up to you?”

“You can stop at the next store,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“As soon as I buy two soup pots, everything will fall into place.” Then he smiled, and I figured we’d be fine.

‘You’re not their mother’
When we got home, the two precious pooches were at the door, their tiny tails jiggling so hard they looked like they might detach. “Benjamin, meet Musashi,” I said, picking up the larger male and giving Ben his penny-sized paw. Benjamin, good sport that he is (sometimes), shook it and doffed an imaginary hat. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said. We repeated the ritual with Lila, who, unlike her high-strung brother, is tough and flamboyant, a rock star of the dog world. Lila gave Ben a wet canine kiss that left a glistening trail on his face.

Before the dogs, we’d been a happy couple in a relatively uncomplicated way. It was therefore inevitable that something divisive would enter our lives, because marriage — like physics, literature and dance — is almost always synonymous with complexity. The dogs arrived the winter of our first married year, during a New England freeze so deep the snow was solid enough to stomp on. House-training the puppies required that I rise every three hours and head outside into the pitch-black coldness, parka wrapped around my nightgown, feet shoved sockless into big rubber boots. Midnight, 3 A.M., no one around but me and my pups, their urine steaming small holes through the snow, good boy, good girl. There were visits to the vet, the building of a fence and a miniature dog door. Musashi, we discovered, had an inexplicable fondness for my antidepressants; he cracked the bottles open with his teeth and chomped on pills he seemed to find strangely tasty. It was hard not to think he was purposefully self-medicating, or worse, trying to die. “My dog made his second suicide attempt last night,” I’d say to friends, as a way of explaining my exhaustion. Because there I was rushing Musashi to the hospital at all hours, the trips always accompanied by embarrassing explanations to the vet.

See readers’ photos of pets that have changed their lives.

“I don’t understand,” she said at our third visit. “The bottles are in a drawer, aren’t they?”

“Of course they’re in a drawer,” I said. “This dog can open drawers,” which was true, but the vet clearly thought I was delusional. I finally solved the problem by hiding my drugs on a shelf so high I now need a ladder to medicate myself.

And in the center of this new world was a little hole, like the ones the dogs left when they peed in the snow, a cold, steamy, smelly little hole in my heart because Benjamin participated in none of this. Once, in a fit of blind maternity, I said to the pups, “Mama’s here,” and my husband looked at me with scorn and horror. “You’re not their mother,” he said.

“I am,” I said. “They’re part of our family, aren’t they?”

“No,” he said. “These dogs are our roommates.”

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