Can Dogs Ease Your ‘Species Loneliness?’

Hours before South Africa’s first COVID-19 lockdown began, I drove to the windswept industrial area of Cape Town, to the Animal Anti-Cruelty League, in order to “save” a dog. As I entered the rows of fenced cages, a fight broke out in one cage and a handler came out to separate the dogs. In the cage next to the fight a large black puppy had taken to a corner, pressing himself against the wire to get as far from the violence as possible. “What’s that one?” I asked the woman working there.

“He’s new here,” she said. “He came off the road. He has scars on the backs of his legs.”

She opened the cage. I approached him, and he responded by putting out his paw.

“This one. I’ll take this one,” I said.

I would later learn that many single people like myself took to the dog shelters when the pandemic began, in order to “save” the animals. In reality, the dogs saved us.

In her best-selling book “Braiding Sweetgrass, ” Robin Wall Kimmerer — Indigenous botanist, professor, author and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation — refers to the concept of “species loneliness.” She calls this “a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship.” In our modern world we often feel walled off from nature, says Kimmerer, and we may feel a sense of isolation that is rooted in unfamiliarity with, or fear of, the natural world. This, she says, is harming us. In her book she calls on readers to view nature not as a commodity but as a family elder.

In her research on chimpanzees, famed primatologist Jane Goodall discovered that chimps manufacture tools. This led her to question the idea that animals were distinctly different from humans, and to conclude that “we’re not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.” Goodall says that although there is a lot of doom and gloom in the world these days, she personally sees “animal and plant species being rescued from the brink of extinction, people tackling what seemed impossible and not giving up.” Interestingly, she has admitted that her favorite animals are not chimpanzees but dogs.

The sensation of feeling cut off from nature is not new. In the 18th century, the Romantics wrote about a desire to return to the natural world, and Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often credited with beginning a so-called cult of nature. Because he was an outspoken critic of what he saw as the corruption of European society, Rousseau was hounded from one country to another. He eventually found his way onto an island in a Swiss lake, where he had an almost mystical experience, feeling that he was truly a part of his natural surroundings. He believed many of the problems Europeans faced at the time were due to their “denaturalization.” Rousseau, with his ever-present dog Sultan, would go on to inspire people from Dorothy and William Wordsworth to Robert Frost.

Emily Dickinson remains one of America’s most unusual literary characters and one of its greatest poets. Dickinson lived reclusively in her father’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts until the day she died in 1866, aged 55. Soon after, it was discovered that she had left nearly 1,800 poems in a drawer; when published, they rocked the literary world. At the center of much of her poetry is the ineffable complexity of nature. Dickinson is known to have taken long walks with her faithful dog Carlo, a brown Newfoundland, whom she referred to as her “mute confederate.”

Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, is most famous for his dystopian novels about the horrors of authoritarian rule. What is less widely known is that Orwell felt a deep devotion to nature. In his essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” he wrote, “I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and [...] toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” In his 20s, Orwell worked as a tutor to younger boys and took them on long walks; one of those boys would write after Orwell’s death that the writer had been as comfortable with animals as he was with children. When they went out walking, the purpose was not to get “from A to B.” Rather, “it was like a voyage with Jules Verne beneath the ocean.” Orwell famously had a dog named Marx and a goat called Muriel.

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Today, our pets may be our best means of connection to nature. Jean Grenier is perhaps most famous for having been the philosophy professor of French Existentialist Albert Camus, yet he was also the author of one of the most unusual books about (hu)man’s best friend: “Considerations on the Death of a Dog, ” a series of essays on the loss of his beloved pet Taiaut. Toward the end of the book, Grenier notes that he sees no reason to separate dogs from people, arguing that qualities we think of as quintessentially human — such as tenderness or a desire for familiarity — are as much a part of a dog’s disposition as our own.

From “The Call of the Wild” to “Marley and Me,” the story of human-canine connection pulls at our heartstrings — and this sensation dates back at least as far back as ancient Greece. In Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Odysseus returns home in disguise after many years of war, and only his faithful dog, Argos, recognizes him. On seeing his master, Argos “dropped his ears and wagged his tail,” while Odysseus “dashed a tear from his eyes.” Yet Argos does not betray his master, who he understands does not wish to be recognized. Then Argos, having “fulfilled his destiny of faith,” lies down to die — causing readers to dash away a few tears of our own.

The love affair between legendary writer Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West was linked to their mutual love of dogs. The letters they wrote to each other are filled with affectionate canine references. In fact, Woolf went as far as to suggest that her love of Sackville-West was like that of a dog to its person. As she wrote, when Sackville-West came to visit, with her dog Grizzle she would “rush down to meet you.” Sackville-West also gave Woolf a spaniel she named Pinka. “Your puppy,” Woolf wrote back to her, “has destroyed, by eating holes, my skirt, ate L’s proofs, and done such damage as could be done to the carpet — But she is an angel of light.”

What advice would you give to someone who’s feeling lonely?

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