A couple of years ago, on this very site, I related the legend of the Egg Dog — basically, how my beloved companion, Kit, had an uncanny predilection for finding and delivering the eggs laid by our neighborhood chickens. Since then, I’ve resisted the temptation to document all of Kitty’s exploits, which, believe me, are numerous and thrilling. Last month, though, she displayed a behavior that was so odd and revelatory that I just have to abuse my precious platform to describe it here.
In late August, I caught COVID and ended up bed-bound for a few days, coughing my lungs out and generally feeling like I’d been beaten with a two-by-four. (I’m fine now, thanks for asking.) A few hours after I fell ill, Kit did, too. Normally a frisky little critter with an unquenchable joie de vivre, she was now incapable of jumping onto the couch, tucked her tail between her legs, declined her food, and hid beneath the bed for hours. She looked to be in agony; she’d behaved the same way both when she was stung by a bee, and after a Rottweiler half-mauled her at daycare (a fight Kit had picked, lest you feel too sorry for her.) When I stumbled out of bed to use the bathroom, I often glimpsed her curled in a corner, staring blankly into space with glassy, unfocused eyes, like the victim of some canine trauma. We were profoundly worried about Kit — had she gotten COVID as well? — but, before we could take her to the vet, Elise had contracted the virus, too.
Our collective misery lasted for three days, until, one morning, I woke up feeling much improved (though it would take us two weeks to regain full health). I ventured from the guestroom where I’d been sequestered and went to the kitchen to forage. The moment I did, Kit burst into the room, tail raised and wagging, and pranced around with her usual deranged vigor. Then she wolfed down a bowl of food that had sat untouched for twenty-four hours and dashed outside to romp, instantly transformed back into her old self. She’s been fine ever since.
This raised a number of questions — most of all, had Kit suffered from something like sympathy COVID? I’d gotten sick, and so had she; then I’d gotten better, and she had too. (The fact that Kit seemed to respond more to my illness than my wife’s is, in my opinion, incontrovertible proof that she loves me more, and I’ll never let Elise forget it.) Kit, it seemed to me, had suffered a sort of psychosomatic illness linked to the illness of her favorite human.
Seeking an expert opinion, I sent a message describing the experience to Alexandra Horowitz, a dog cognition researcher and best-selling author who, on Twitter, goes by the delightful handle @DogUmwelt. Alexandra both sort of corroborated and sort of debunked my interpretation. “From what you say, it sounds like Kit was showing some quasi-empathetic behavior,” she wrote to me. True empathy, she added, “implies a complex understanding of what it’s like to be in the mind or body of another, and I don’t think we have a satisfying knowledge of if/how much dogs can do that” — hence the qualifying “quasi-.” Mostly, Alexandra observed, Kit’s behavior powerfully evinced dogs’ tendency to match and amplify the behaviors and emotional states of their human partners:
“Because you slowed down, took to your bed, and were very inactive, she slowed down, etc. Dogs do show a lot of contagious excitement, which you’ve seen if you try to excite a dog into a walk!, or if you try to get Kit to play by being playful yourself. Similarly, dogs can really slow down to match our slow-downs. If you’re not rallying to take her out, play with her, do the normal things you do, she accepts it and slows down too.”
This wasn’t surprising — Kit has always mirrored our own energy, and she can be coaxed into a wrestling match or a rainy-day #NetflixAndChill sesh with equal ease. Still, matching didn’t seem to completely explain the situation. After all, Kit hadn’t just been downbeat; she’d seemed actively miserable. “I think she could also have been worried, frankly,” Alexandra added. “Illness smells, literally, and she surely noticed your radical change in smell plus behavior.” Indeed, dogs are so good at sniffing out disease that they’ve been trained to detect COVID, bladder cancer, imminent seizures, and a host of other maladies.
This olfactory explanation also made sense to me. Thanks to her powerful snoot, Kit knew that we weren’t merely sluggish — we were sick. To me, it seems conceivable that she thus quasi-empathetically matched not only general malaise, but the experience of illness. Sickness is a mental state as well as a physical one, and the mind/body connection is so strong that it may be improper to separate them; if Kit portrayed our illness, can we really say that she wasn’t ill herself? “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,” Susan Sontag famously wrote, “in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Dogs are members of those dual kingdoms too, of course, but they may also be subjects in our kingdoms as well, their health dependent upon the health of their beloved humans.
This probably makes me sound like one of those annoying dog parents you get stuck talking to on airplanes and at parties: “She’s, like, so intuitive.” But I can’t help it. Living with a dog is just interesting — her mind is sufficiently like ours that it’s possible to interpret her behavior, or attempt to, and sufficiently different that her every action is something of a mystery. Kit isn’t that complicated; nine times out of ten, she wants food, walks, and, above all, cuddles. Still, to some extent, every dog-cohabitator (I hesitate to say owner) is like that guy in My Octopus Teacher, forever trying to fathom the mind of an intelligent, inscrutable Other.
Anyway, I’m probably not allowed to post about Kit on LWON for at least another year. But no promises. What if she catches a mouse using a particularly ingenious hunting strategy? (She cornered one in a recycling bin this spring.) Or nuzzles a small child in that tender way of hers? Or unnecessarily defends us from a pitbull with her typical suicidal bravado? Or just, like, wakes up on a Tuesday looking adorable? You should all be grateful I don’t yet have a human kid — then I’d really be insufferable.