What It Means to Love a Dog

My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.

Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred. He was a yellow Lab mix I had found as a puppy in the ditch in front of our house. We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.

By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog. If I could bring one back, I’d pick her 100 times out of 100. So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?

That was one of the many questions in the back of my mind as I began to explore a fascinating subculture in the dog world: the dog-show circuit that culminates in the biggest event of all, the Westminster Dog Show. I wanted to understand the dogs and their human caretakers, the bond between them, and, more broadly, why the loss of a dog can hit so hard—harder, sometimes, than the loss of a person.

I spent three years on the road with show dogs, handlers, judges, and other dog people who roam the country like Deadheads with hair spray. I came to think of the world of dog shows as a traveling theme park called Dogland. It has its own rules, its own language, its own blend of sights and sounds and scents. It is generally a pleasant place. But it is built on a foundation of loss. Because everybody involved knows the cruel math built into loving a pet: Chances are, it will die before you do.

[Read: Pets can really be like human family]

At a show near my home in Charlotte, I met a dog breeder and handler named Michelle Parris. Parris shows Italian greyhounds, known in Dogland as “IGs” or “iggies.” If a standard greyhound is a Dodge Charger, and a whippet is a Mustang, an iggie is a Mini Cooper. Regular greyhounds run 60 to 70 pounds, but a standard iggie weighs about 10. Parris loves iggies’ delicacy, their playfulness, the gorgeous S curves of their hind legs and back and belly. She used to show them frequently—even got one of her dogs into Westminster.

But in 2019, her life began to crumble. It started when she and her longtime partner, Mike, broke up. They split on good terms—he continued to back her dog-show dreams, emotionally and financially—but she decided to step away from the ring for a while.

In early 2020, COVID hit, and dog shows were canceled all over the United States. That fall, Mike died of heart failure. And the following March, one of Parris’s favorite dogs, Sky Guy, got sick. She drove him to a vet in West Virginia who is known in Dogland as an IG expert. He told her that Sky Guy had an incurable autoimmune disease. IGs usually live for 14 or 15 years. Sky Guy was not quite six.

Mike’s death had hurt Parris. But Sky Guy’s death nearly broke her. She had panic attacks. Friends came to help take care of her other dogs. Months passed before she was able to feel stable again. She told me this story in the middle of an arena lobby, with the general chaos of a dog show flowing all around us. It was a long, tearful conversation. But every so often, she would pause our chat to point out an especially beautiful dog walking by.

“We’re very passionate about our dogs,” she said.

Dogland is an odd place in that way. On the one hand, the dogs there are commodities—purebreds designed to draw top dollar for their “show quality,” the physical excellence and charisma required to become a champion show dog. The best of the best make money for their owners by delivering litters of other potential champions, or providing sperm that can be frozen indefinitely to create a lineage decades down the road. (A company called Infinity Canine sets up a tent at some big shows to collect semen from promising males. Their slogan: “Dogs love to come to us!”)

But dogs aren’t widgets. The people I met in Dogland had genuine affection for their animals, even when they were handlers who might be juggling 15 or 20 dogs at a single show. Most of the top handlers don’t own their dogs. The owners send them off to the handlers like parents might send a child who has a booming forehand off to a tennis academy. A show dog’s peak is four or five years at most. And then the handler, after bonding deeply with that dog, has to give it back to its owners. It is a rehearsal of sorts for the permanent parting.

Maybe the best way to illustrate the idea that people sometimes mourn harder for dogs than for humans is to tell the story of one grieving middle-aged retiree.

His wife, Helen, died after a long illness. Her death knocked him sideways. She left him a final gift and a note to go with it: John, I’m sorry I can’t be there for you. But you still need something, someone, to love, so start with this. John wept as he put down the note and looked at the crate that came with it. Inside was a beagle puppy named Daisy. John and Daisy bonded.

[Read: Too many people own dogs]

One day John was at a gas station, filling up his Mustang—a car his wife had bought him. Another car pulled up to the pumps. The men in the car turned out to be Russian-mob thugs. One of them, the mob boss’s son, admired John’s car. He asked John to name a price for it. John said it was not for sale. This upset the son.

That night, the thugs broke into John’s house, beat him senseless, and stole the car. During the beating, Daisy ran through the room whimpering. The mob boss’s son told one of the thugs to shut her up.

When John regained consciousness, he saw a trail of blood on the floor. Daisy had crawled to him and died by his side.

And that was the moment John Wick decided to come out of retirement and return to his life as the world’s most feared assassin.

I should probably be clear right here that John Wick is the fictional hero of the massively popular movie franchise starring Keanu Reeves. Just roll with the character for a moment. John Wick loved his wife more than anything. But the death of his dog released something deep inside him. He grieved hard. So damn hard. And the anger it released was a renewable resource: According to online body counts, during the course of four movies, John Wick kills more than 400 people—including those Russian-mob thugs.

At one point in the first movie, after Daisy is killed and John sets out to avenge her, the mob boss captures John and prepares to have him executed. The mob boss makes the fatal mistake of so many movie villains: First, he wants to talk. He has something to say: “It was just a fucking car. Just a fucking dog.”

“Just a dog,” John says, and lowers his head.

He goes on: “When Helen died, I lost everything, until that dog arrived on my doorstep. A final gift from my wife. In that moment, I received some semblance of hope. An opportunity to grieve unalone.”

Moments later, he escapes his captors and resumes his trail of vengeance.

You already know this story if you are one of the millions of people who have watched the John Wick movies. But some people know only one detail. Because, before deciding whether to see John Wick, they looked the movie up on a website created to answer a particular question about any movie. The question is embedded in the site’s name: doesthedogdie.com.

There, they discovered the answer was yes. And they decided they could not watch.

Of course, it’s not just the members of the Dogland road show or characters in movies who mourn their dogs deeply. One of the people I interviewed for the book was Scott Van Pelt, the anchor of the late-night SportsCenter broadcast on ESPN. In 2022, he gave a moving on-air eulogy for his family’s Rhodesian ridgeback, Otis. Van Pelt heard from thousands of viewers all over the world. I talked with him not long after about why Otis meant so much.

“There have been a couple of moments after he died that you just come in and sit there and know that he’s not coming and it’s just—”

“That absence, right?” I said.

“Oh God, it’s so heavy,” he said. “I’ve lost people. I’ve lost my dad and I’ve lost grandparents and it’s not comparative, but the difference is that this animal was with us every day of our life and in all ways of our life and was here every moment of our children’s lives. He’s the corner puzzle piece. So many things connect to that. You could put your whole puzzle together, and there’s that one corner that’s missing.”

[Read: What can having pets teach you about parenting?]

Van Pelt was pointing to a couple of the reasons I think the death of a pet can hit harder, in the moment, than the death of a human loved one. The simplest reason is that, as he said, a pet is around you all the time. Most people don’t spend as many continuous hours around their parents, other family members, friends, even their grown kids. In many cases, a pet lives with its owner nearly every minute of its life, from wriggling puppyhood to final sleep. Its absence is profound.

The deeper reason is that our relationships with humans are far more complicated. We argue even with the people we love, and sometimes the conflicts crack us wide open. Every birthday, every Thanksgiving, builds upon a long and sometimes fraught history. There are things we can’t forget, though they might be long forgiven. Loving another human being can leave bruises and scars, even if every single one is worth it.

Loving a pet is simpler. Dogs, especially, live to please us. It is the way they have made themselves essential to our lives. Dogs don’t fight at the dinner table or have obnoxious political viewpoints. They don’t slam the door when they leave the house. They don’t ask why you’re not married yet.

When we mourn a dog, we mourn a life we often witnessed in full, and a source of something close to an unadulterated good.

When we mourn a human, even one we love deeply, our emotions are messier. That does not make our grief lesser. It just makes it part of a bigger experience, like an egg mixed into batter. At some point, you can no longer separate it out.

After spending all that time in Dogland, I came to think of it this way: When a loved one dies, it matters more. But when a dog dies, sometimes we feel it more.

Why did I cry in the moment for my dog and not my mom? Maybe for all the reasons I’ve already talked about. But also, maybe, because I had cried for her, and with her, so many times already. I cried in her arms when I was a boy and fell in a patch of sandspurs. I cried on the phone when I got fired from my internship and had to slink back home. I cried when we argued about her smoking and my eating. I cried laughing when she would tell the story about the time the neighbor’s python got loose. I cried when we moved her out of her house and we both knew she was never coming back. I cried at her bedside in her final days when we said we loved each other. My grief for her was paid in full.

[Tommy Tomlinson: The weight I carry]

A dog might be able to sense those moments, but all we really have to go on is our own feelings. As close as humans are to dogs—a connection formed over thousands of years—parts of their world are still unknowable to us. That space between feeling and knowing—that’s where the tears live. But the people you love, if the connection is deep enough, become knowable in every dimension. And if you love someone enough, the tears don’t wait for death. They’re an essential part of life.

This article has been adapted from Tomlinson’s new book, Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show.