An Ode to My Intact Dog

We couldn’t take them from him.

No, we couldn’t do it. For Sonny the dog, castration was never an option. Nothing ideological about it—I know there are trainers and dog-types who will advocate for an “intact” animal, but this was a purely emotional analysis.

Sonny came to us from India, from the streets of Delhi, and the various ruptures and dislocations involved in getting him to our apartment had left him quivering, volatile, tender, spooked, curved in on himself, Ringo Starr–eyed, a little morbid and damp of soul. He arrived in January, in the glassy blue heart of a Massachusetts winter, and every cold-clarified sound on our street—cough/clunk of a car door closing, sharp tingle of keys—made him jump. My wife said that taking him for a walk in those early days was like tripping on LSD. If we removed his balls (we felt), that would be the end of his personality: He’d curl up and blow away like a dead leaf.

Like I said, emotional. Nonrational. We should have done it, but—we didn’t. So …

So he retains his testes. And because of them, he gets a lot of grief in the neighborhood. And I mean a lot. Male dogs, with rare and shining exceptions, are outraged by him. They just cannot believe it, his full-bollocked lifestyle. The effrontery of it. It drives them out of their minds. From behind the windows of houses and apartment buildings, they roar at him, scrabbling at the glass or throwing themselves against it with furry thumps; from porches and balconies, they shriek at him; on the street, they snuffle with fury, they stand on their hind legs and choke on their leashes, desperate to fight. They hate the sight of Sonny. They hate the sight of me, walking Sonny. So wherever we go, in addition to the squawks of the dog-detesting squirrels in their trees, we must suffer the heckling of extremist castrati. Hostile world.

Am I overstating it a bit? Subjectively speaking, not at all. Boston is a port city, with gulls in the air, and sometimes I think even they are against us—those wheeling, vituperating seagulls.

By breed, Sonny is a pariah, or desi, dog, slender, keen, and honey-coloured, about 35 pounds, with a narrow rib cage and flayed, Iggy Pop–like musculature. One of the ur-dogs of the planet, a dingo/jackal/hound, a traveler-in-packs, a sharp-witted middleweight, a superfast runner, beaky, brainy, built for the Great Unraveling, for broken cities and despairing populations. He is Canis canis, God’s mongrel and ultimately-boiled-down compound animal: If all the dogs in the world (I like saying this to fellow dog owners) had sex with all the other dogs, you’d end up with a dog like Sonny.

In his person he combines great elegance with something lowdown and trash-inflected and all-surviving. He has a dainty, floaty way of walking, a faunlike delicacy of limb, and an aesthetic approach to taking a shit. He has an affinity for ramps, alleys, doorways, neglected corners, loading bays, back areas: In these non-places, he looks very briefly at home. He is deeply suspicious, wildly alert, and absolutely reverent of reality. People who live on the street tend to greet him with a kind of recognition.

At first he wouldn’t even walk with me. On the sidewalk, mid-stride, he’d stop, stiffen his forelegs, dip his head, and glower at me with a combination of sunken defiance and great sadness. The leash did not connect us—no, it divided us cruelly. Once in the early days, I tried to take him to the liquor store (a man and his dog go to buy some whiskey—what could be nicer?) and he balked on the leash after half a block. Dug in, bunched up, wouldn’t move. The truculent stare. I cursed. I pulled. I wheedled. Nothing happened. We returned home, alienated (him) and furious (me). “Fuck it!” I said. “I can do without whiskey.” “You sure about that?” said my son (13 at the time).

It took a while to build trust. Months passed before Sonny would truly meet my eye. Long months for me: I’d stick my face hotly into his, looking for love. There’s a hormone released (or so I’d been reading) by the infatuated, beseeching gaze of one’s dog. I had to have it. Was it down there somewhere, deep in the seas of his eyeball, could I find it: Love? Love to twitch the neurochemical trigger and give me the juice? No chance. No love for me, or not yet. Sonny, with an oppressed air, would look steadily away. Neediness offends him.

It was in this era of our relationship that I would often despairingly, and to my wife’s mounting annoyance, quote a line from J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip: “Alas for the gulf that separates man and beast!”

Incidentally, if you’re picking up a note of strain or excess from my writing about Sonny, that’s because I’m having an Oedipal-style struggle with J. R. Ackerley. I confess it and I can’t help it. My Dog Tulip, in which Ackerley writes with mid-century mandarin coolness and finesse about dog shit, dog sex, dog blood, dog passion, dogs, really getting down in dogginess—“doggery,” he called it—while never losing his beautifully and ironically dissonant fastidious/hilarious highbrow tone, is pretty much the last word in dog writing. In its day it was rather shocking. “Meaningless filth about a dog,” pronounced Dame Edith Sitwell shortly after the book’s publication in 1956.

Here’s Tulip, a high-strung Alsatian, peeing: “In necessity she squats squarely and abruptly, right down on her shins, her hind legs forming a kind of dam against the stream that rushes out behind; her tail curves up like a scimitar; her expression is complacent.” Ackerley describes one of Tulip’s shits as “a lavish affair,” yells “Arseholes!” at a cyclist who is rude to her in the street, and watches fascinated as she goes into heat. “Her urine, in her present condition, appeared to provide her wooers with a most gratifying cordial, for they avidly lapped it up whenever she condescended to void it, which she frequently did. So heady was its effect that their jaws would at once start to drip and chatter together, not merely visibly but audibly.”

Ackerley was a London literary man, an editor of the BBC magazine The Listener, with a very active and racy homosexual life (“innumerable soldiers, sailors, waiters and so on” as Peter Parker puts it in his very good biography), and I have to think it was all that speculative prowling and cruising that he did, all that devotion to the feral side of Eros, that made him such a poet of the dog world. My Dog Tulip is a very lightly, you could almost say reluctantly, fictionalized account of his relationship with his real-life dog, Queenie, to whom he would apparently sing, on their walks together, a homemade song:

Piddle piddle seal and sign,
I’ll smell your arse, you smell mine.

Doggy doggerel, ha ha. Anyway … around the neighborhood we go, me and Sonny and Sonny’s balls. And the other dogs seethe and shout, and the squirrel upside down on the tree trunk stares at us in hateful fixity, etc., etc. Is Sonny an angel? By no means. Off the leash he can be a total menace. “Friendly?” asks the owner in the park, as her drugged-with-domesticity dog comes bumbling unsuspiciously toward us. “Uh, well, I never really know,” I say. “Which probably means ‘No’ …” And then watch in dismay as Sonny launches himself savagely, teeth bared, at the startled animal.

Ball-driven behavior, I suppose. Ball manners. Big dogs, little dogs, up-for-it scrappers and blameless cloudy-eyed seniors, he goes for them all. Or he doesn’t. Sometimes he makes a new friend, instantaneously, inexplicably, and they fly in zany euphoric circles. I truly never know.

More than once his balls have nearly gotten him killed. It was the aggression brewing down there, I must assume, that impelled him out of the park, on that narrowly nonfatal spring morning, to confront a dog on the other side of the street. That dog, for its own reasons, was wearing a muzzle—an unbearable provocation, apparently. So across the park went Sonny, clean through the psychic barrier of the little park entrance, and out into the road. I saw him do it, I saw my shouts going unheeded, I saw the car coming, I saw the great golden gears of the universe turning—not exactly in slow motion, but with terrible serenity.

The sound of impact was remarkable: a plasticky, irrevocable, cold-blooded, bad-news crump. And expensive-sounding, like a car hitting another car. “That’s it,” I thought. But no. Sonny, somehow, was unmaimed, unmarked, unbroken, okay. Mainly he looked embarrassed. Another time, on the same patch of road, he was rear-ended by a police cruiser, thumped in his hindquarters by the enormous bumper of the law—again harmlessly, although the look of weary disgust I got from the flat-nosed young cop at the wheel has stayed with me.

The other major consequence of my dog’s ball-havingness is the sniffing. All dogs do a bit of sniffing, of course—Ackerley again: “Dogs read the world through their noses and write their history in urine”—but dogs with balls are over the top.

Sonny sniffs feverishly, indecently, engrossed to a disturbing degree in whatever it is he’s smelling: a hydrant, a weed, a shoe, a bag, a patch of earth, some mystic gap of neglect now charged with desire. (Denise Levertov, in her wonderful doggy poem “The Rainwalkers,” alludes to “the imploring soul of the trashbasket.”) When he’s sniffing he looks slightly insane or accelerated; he looks like an addict. Everything noble and contemplative in his nature seems to have been consumed. His head is lowered, moving snakily back and forth across the ground; his upper lip quivers in a wet half sneer; his rib cage chugs; his body is humped and cur-like. He’s gone: deaf to my imprecations (“Come on, Sonny! Fuck’s sake!”), numb to the tugging leash. Massively irritating, if you’re trying to get somewhere.

But then again … am I going to stand here, all pissed off, swearing at my dog and telling him to hurry up? Or am I going to slow down, breathe, and try to accept this initiation into the sensorium of the dog world?

And am I going to accept myself as a fact in this dog world, no more or less complex than the other facts? Because that’s the other aspect of all this, the other dimension: being known by a dog. Known as a thing in time, a thing in the day, a thing that munches vacantly on toast, and brightens when it has an idea, and winds itself up before a phone call, and emits a particular sniffing sound when it rises from a chair with the intention of taking you (the dog) for a walk, and then another sound when it changes its mind and sits back down.

“Dogs are geniuses of pattern recognition,” a dog professional told the puppy-socialization class we attended—once—when Sonny was young. Your patterns, my God. The ones you’re barely aware of. The secret liturgy of your day. And your volatilities too: the mood swings, shifts in muscular tension. Your dog knows it all. As committed as you might be to the idea of your own fragmentedness, in your dog’s loving eye, it all adds up. You are a unified and very predictable being. Maybe. I wrote a poem about it. It’s called “The Dog’s Epitaph on His Master”:

You should have managed your moods, old bastard.
Your melancholia you should have mastered.
Sitting there blackly, stuck in a poem—
If we never go out, how can we
come home?

So let us extract the lesson. Reality is not static, not fixed, not separate from us, not over there. If you’re with a dog, and perhaps especially if your dog has his balls, you see—and are seen—doggily. And dog reality is nodding weeds and bleak ramps and gleaming incisors and shudderingly braking cop cars and you, standing there turning your head this way and that, being experienced on the dog level.

“Attention,” writes the philosopher Iain McGilchrist, “is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the very nature of the world in which those ‘functions’ would be carried out, and in which those ‘things’ would exist. Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: In that way, it changes the world.”

So Sonny’s balls have changed the world. Is that it? I think it is. Yes. It is.

This article has been adapted from James Parker’s book Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive.