Ask Murray

February 15, 2008 – Got a wonderful note from Megan, who works in theater development, and who is reading my book “The New Work of Dogs,” on attachment theory and the growing use of pets as emotional support for humans. “Like many of your readers,” she writes, “I get a kick out of your goats. I wonder, do goats have work for humans? Can you have a “lifetime goat” the way you might have  a
“lifetime dog?”
  What a great question. I have three “lifetime dogs” at the moment – Rose, Izzy and Lenore. I have a lifetime steer, Elvis, and a lifetime donkey, Lulu. Even a lifetime rooster, Winston. If you follow attachment theory, sure, any animal can tap into the emotional history and support system of a human being. Annie has a “lifetime” goat named Midas, who follows her around like a Lab. Goats are smart, and intuitive, and they can be affection. They also express a great deal of personality in their sounds and mannerisms, and they can be playful, curious and anxious.
  We – I — see them as funny, mischeivous and affectionately rebellious. Those are traits we humans tend to like. Mostly, the goats, like my other animals, are thinking food all the way.
  Generally, animals trick humans. By showing some human-like emotions, we assume they have all of our emotion, and we begin anthropomorphisizing, or attributing our thoughts and feelings to them. Behaviorists call this human tendency to give animals our thoughts and words “Theory of Mind.”
  It’s natural, almost unavoidable, especially if this meets our own emotional needs – loneliness, a desire for unconditional love, a need for affection. Animals are blank canvases, we can paint anything we want on them. A goat eating the bark off a tree becomes a rascal, outsmarting us.
  People are always telling me what their dogs are thinking, what their motives are. But dogs don’t have human thoughts and motives, so how could we know what they are? I love my dogs for their animal qualities – Rose’s astounding work ethic, Izzy’s intuitions and instincts about humans, Lenore’s infectious affection. I don’t want them to be like us – to write angry e-mails, sue each other and scream on cable talk shows. I want them to remain dogs, instinctive creatures, but animals still. My motto: let a dog be a dog.
     Does Izzy know someone is in need when we do hospice work? Or is he just modeling what I want him to do? Does Lenore know when I need cheering up, or do I need to see her in that way to feel better? Don’t know the answers to all of those questions.
     Any animal can be a “lifetime” animal for us if it comes at a certain point in time, and meets or frames a powerful need. Animals like goats, even dogs, have alien minds, and they don’t have language, so they can’t think and form narrative the way we can. This doesn’t make me love them any less, but I do work to remind myself all the time that we project what we want to project on animals whose lives generally center on basic needs – food, shelter, some attention and affection, if it helps them get food shelter.
    Attributing too many emotions to animals can be unhealthy for them – overfeeding, stress, behavioral problems, poor training and communications. If you raise a dog as if it were a child (or a child as if it were a dog) you will have trouble one way or the other.
  So yes, I think a goat could be a lifetime animal, for sure, if we needed a goat to be. The emotionalizing of animals is epidemic in our culture, and increasing. The very nature of the human-animal bond is being reshaped, especially as it relates to domestic animals like dogs and cats. Good time to be writing about it. And thanks for the question, much appreciated.