When I was quite young, we had a dog named King. My father picked him up at a shelter, he paid a $5 fee.

King had a very different life than our dogs have. He slept in the basement, and never set foot in the main house. My father let hm out in the morning, and then let him in the basement at night, if King was home by then. If we were already asleep, he slept in the garage or on the front porch.

Mostly, King wreaked havoc on the neighborhood all day.

He fought with other dogs,  chased and bit the mailman and came home with  some postal uniform pants in his mouth. The milk man ran for his life in order to drop off milk in the morning and  make it back to his truck. There were no complaints,  no talk of lawsuits or loss of service.

During the day, King found female dogs to have sex with – there were little Kings all over Providence – and ate as much of the neighbor’s garbage as he could get. He was a strong dog and could knock cans over and tear them all over other lawns.

He ran back and forth across busy streets all day. We had no fence, it never occurred to my father to contain him.

One of my tasks was clean-up, I was dispatched with a trash can when the neighbors called. My father did not follow King around with a plastic bag to clean up his poop,  nor did he ever walk him on a leash or take him to a vet. He was never fed dog food, vaccinations, never came on vacations or rode along in the car.

King ate what we left behind for dinner if he was lucky. We would put a plate of scraps in the basement at night In cold weather, on holidays my father gave him a bone in the basement, you could buy them at the butchers.

He was on his own for water, there were streams nearby.

King would never have been given a human name, that would have horrified my parents as disrespectful to people.

One day King  didn’t come home, we heard later that he was  killed by a garbage truck, and the trash men tossed him in with the garbage and took him to the dump, his final resting place, a gift to the crows. My mother wondered for a day or so where he was, and I pestered my father about it, but he said he didn’t know and we never spoke about it again.

Some days later, my father went to the shelter and paid another $5 – he grumbled about it – and brought home a beat-up Bassett Hound already named Sam. He wasn’t “adopted” and we never  heard the term “rescue” ever applied to a dog. No one ever suggested that he was abused.

Sam was an ill-tempered dog, who was allowed in the house, but not on the sofa.

He was always on the sofa looking out the window when my mother came home from work, and she would whale on him with a newspaper, to which he paid little or no attention. Sometimes at night, he would climb into bed with me and push me out onto the floor so he could stretch out. If I tried to get back into bed, he would growl at me.

My mother loved him, even when he grabbed a turkey or roast right off the table and ran off with it. I loved him for that. Today, of course, my father would probably have been arrested for animal cruelty, threatened by the postal service, sued by neighbors and milk men and few shelters would have given him a dog.

King lived an independent life, he knew where he lived, and I think he might have loved us, but he lived the life of a dog, and we were only a  part of it.

Until fairly recently – around the 1950’s and 60’s when dog food became popular, and dogs became profitable, they lived on the periphery of our lives, in the background. They weren’t the center of our emotional lives, they usually weren’t even part of our emotional lives. People still thought of them in terms of their usefulness, they barked at strangers and played with the kids.

They didn’t sleep in our beds or get human names or cost much. The people who loved them and pampered them were considered to be crazy – poodle people, we called them  –  and nobody had small dogs except for lonely older women, the rich, and royalty.

Times have, of course, changed. In his ground-breaking book “Pets And Human Development,” psychologist Boris Levinson predicted in the early 1960’s that Americans would be turning more and more towards pets for comfort and emotional support as they became disconnected from one another by new technologies like TV, new highways that pulled people away from their families, the decline of religion as a moral force, the breakup of families by divorce, the growing disenchantment with the political system.

As Americans no longer drew comfort and connection from the institutions that had always sustained them, they fulfilled Levinson’s prophecy and the new work of dogs became the emotional support of people. Few dogs had any real work to do any longer, their work was now us. American society was becoming fragmented and polarized, a sad reality that has worsened in the last couple of generations.

Dogs have little, if any, interactions with the wider world. People think they are evolving becoming more like us all the time, but the truth, as biologists know, is that they are getting dumber all the time, they have decisions to make, no need to think. We do their thinking for them.

One reasons border collies seem so smart is that they have to make their own decisions every day, they are out there with the sheep and they have a lot of thinking to do

But few dogs get that chance. They have adapted. They are here to minister to us.

The news might be horrid, and we can hardly agree on anything, but when we come home, a dog will be there to love us and help us to feel grounded and smile. That is no small thing.

Our dogs no longer have an independent life, they are depending on us for everything.

We love our dogs more than ever, and for all kinds of reasons, most of them to do with what we need. A friend of mind assured me over the weekend that dogs think much like we do, grieve like we do, think much like we do. Only clueless people doubted it. She is offended at the very suggestion that they are different from us.

I hear it all the time. We get the dogs we need, and we project what we need onto them.

Dogs are no longer simply acquired, they are either purchased or “rescued,” and something that is “rescued” rather than purchased has a whole different emotional context. As you know, our dog Gus died on Monday, and once again, I had the opportunity to consider how dogs do or don’t grieve. People are always insisting that their dogs grieve when other dogs die.

Why have I never seen it? I’ve lost a lot of dogs, and I’m sure they notice the absence of one of their pack. But I’ve never seen one so much as skip a meal.

Red does not seem to have noticed, and Fate, who played with Gus all the time, didn’t skip a beat either. She is simply playing with his toys by herself, flipping them up in the air, chewing on them, running around the yard,  having a jolly good time, lapping up more attention.

We see what we need to see. I think of the hundreds of thousands of Katrina and other disaster dogs, all re-homed, and not a single one is known to have perished from grief or ever missed a meal over grief.

This is, in fact, why I love dogs, because they are so different from neurotic humans. They are practicable and adaptable, and they don’t waste their time in sorrow or lament. They get on with life. My heroes.

Unlike King, who had a very happy life while it lasted, our dogs never get to run free, are legally bound to be on leashes most of the time, and they are very expensive to keep. Shelters charged $400 or $500 now, and it’s a rare vet visit that doesn’t cost a few hundred dollars.

Dogs are a multi-billion industry, and very few dogs live on scraps. Dog food costs on average $45 a bag, and the new ethos around dogs is that we are bound morally to keep them alive by any means at all costs.  Many people measure love by how much money they spend. For me, love is often just the opposite.

The death of any dog is often considered a social crime. Someone is always to blame. It’s a good thing God isn’t sensitive, if he exists.  People are proud to have abused dogs and eager to identity them that way. People put “rescue dog” stickers on their cars. I do worry sometimes that the “rescue” is more important than the dog.

I can’t imagine anyone telling my father how to get a dog, people tell me all the time.

It is actually considered controversial now to buy a dog, even from a good breeder striving to preserve their best traits in body and temperament. Within minutes of Gus’s death, I got my first e-mail begging me to “rescue” a dog rather than pay for one, a staggering cultural evolution just a generation or two removed from King. Is this really anyone’s business, I wonder? Is it everyone’s? Could it possibly be true that there is only one way to get a dog?

I know of many.

Poor and elderly people are routinely declined dogs from  shelters because they don’t have a tall fence or work a lot, or can’t run after them. And many poor people can’t afford rescue dogs any longer, they cost a lot of money. No one ever asked my father if we had a fence. The dog was his problem, his business.

Getting a dog is an emotional experience now, for many people our only source of trust, emotional support and unconditional love. Speaking for myself, I don’t care for unconditional love. I want it to be conditional. I want  my dogs to love me because I am  a conscientious steward of their lives, not just because I want them to.

This journey of mine with  the dogs of today requires that I ask the hard questions of myself.  My father had a very different idea of stewardship. He offered King scraps and a dry basement at night. The rest was up to him. He did not grieve for King when he vanished, he just went out and got a dog.

So why did I love Gus so much, he was an ugly little thing with no work ethic at all, and no purpose other than to eat, love, cuddle and commit mayhem? He was no bigger than a full-grown rabbit, and of no practical use at all. But that’s my short-sightedness, this has become central to people in our times. Including, I guess, me.

Small dogs like Gus replicate the experience of having a baby, they are tiny and adorable and can be held and rocked and cuddled like a baby. Being so small, they draw out our nurturing and protective instincts, and as dogs do, they have figured out how to  push the right buttons. That’s why they get to sleep inside and raccoons don’t.

I loved to play with Gus, and he figured this out in minutes and every morning, when I came downstairs, he was on top of the sofa, waiting for me to play tug-of-war with his teddy  bear. I laughed the whole time.

So looking in the mirror, what can I learn about myself and my own need of dogs? I am a nurturer, I need to do that, and acknowledge it, and  have had little chance in my life, either to nurture or be nurtured. I rarely laugh out loud, and I laughed out loud a dozen times a day with Gus.

It feels good to laugh. It was missing from my life.

Gus was a character, a gift to a writer, and he always gave me stories to write about and photos to take, important gifts for a writer and photographer and blogger. Lots of people loved him who had never met him.

Like many men, I sometimes take this tough and detached stance. I was a reporter, I know how to do it. Smug men have this holier-than-though stance they take when it comes to admitting emotion. They think they are above it. For many men, emotion is the province of women. Gus called me out and exposed me, the people who read my blog saw it right away.

it seems those big men in trucks with dogs are not so tough after all.

I need love and I need nurture, coming and going. This is another stance to drop in the search for authenticity. I never seem to run out of things I must learn about myself, and it is rarely me who does the teaching or learning by myself.

So I will continue to think about me and Gus, and why he was here, and what he means to me. The border collies live to work and love the person who brings them to work, it’s as simple as that. Their hearts and souls are outside of the house, not inside its walls.

The small dog is something else, he cuts to the core of the emotional experience of dog love. His work is people, and he has no great desire to run around all day in nasty weather. Or to work.  The house is his palace. He brightens it up.

We are far from King, and I often think we are going to some extreme and unhealthy places with dogs, for them and for us. I try to keep perspective. The leading cause of death for dogs is over-feeding, not abuse.

It is not enough to “rescue” a dog, or “buy” a good one, or dote or project our needs onto them.

A good steward must look at  himself as well as the dog, and ask, “why do I love this dog?,” and what, exactly, do I need from him or her?

The good steward must also ask, and what it is that he needs from me?