My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley

But Nature will not be cheated, fooled, bribed, fobbed off, shuffled out of the way. I still have to return in the evening, and, dodge it as I may, I know what I shall find, a burning creature burning with desire. "Heat" is the apt word; one can feel against one's hand without touching her the feverous radiations from her womb. A fire has been kindled in it, and no substitute pleasure can distract, no palliative soothe, no exertion tire, no cooling stream slake, for long the all-consuming need of her body. She is enslaved. She is possessed. Indeed, especially towards the peak--it is the strangest, the most pitiful thing--her very character is altered. This independent, unapproachable, dignified and single-hearted creature, my devoted bitch, becomes the meekest of beggars.

I've never had a dog. Not growing up and not now. Though I'd like one--or perhaps it might be better to say I am curious about having one--our lease disallows it. I've had cats, but the relationship between a cat and its owner is nothing like the bond one feels toward their dogs. J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, a memoir centered on his German Shepherd ("Alsatian") Tulip, is a testament to the devotion that dogs show their owners, and in turn, owners show their dogs. Ackerley, an English journalist and longtime editor, comes off in the memoir as a slightly lonely, befuddled bachelor, who takes on Tulip to fill the absence of companionship in his life. He finds that owning Tulip is not so simple, but from the very first visit to the vet--who tells Ackerley that Tulip's troublesome behavior in the examining room is not because of her own distress, but because she worries for his safety--it's clear that Tulip's devotion is stronger and more pure than any human creature's ever could be.

Interestingly, My Dog Tulip focuses largely on the dog's physical needs and bodily existence. First, the visits to the vet, then the problem of what to do with Tulip's poops, then the long and convoluted battle of breeding her and dealing with her yearly estrus. (I learned from My Dog Tulip that people used to not pick up after their dogs at all, and heated arguments would take place about whether dogs should be able to relieve themselves on the sidewalk or be forced into the dangerous street. I don't know when we started picking up the poop, but whoever invented those little biodegradable bags deserves more credit than they've ever gotten.) The breeding process, which takes up much of the book's second half, is a comedy of errors that involves introducing Tulip to a peanut gallery of German Shepherds with names like Gunner, Mountjoy, and Dusty, and Ackerley spares us none of the specific details of the physical act. (Before reading this, I never knew just how many specific kinds of excretions dogs had.)

What I got out of My Dog Tulip is this: there are a lot of abstract ideas that conglomerate around dogs, like loyalty and companionship, strength and beauty. And yet, to own a dog is to own a physical creature, and to attend to its physical needs, the ones that its own nature demands. The most heart-rending part of owning Tulip is knowing that nothing can be done about her yearly distress, when her body calls out for something Ackerley cannot provide. I don't know if people just didn't fix dogs back then, or we don't know how, or it was seen as sort of gauche, or what. Maybe Ackerley is right that all our modern veterinary medicine cannot "bribe" or "fob off" the nature of an animal that retains some of its wildness, whether we like to think so or not.

Other than that, the book was just fine. Long and descriptive passages about expressing Tulip's anal glands didn't make me want to get a dog any more, and the descriptions of Tulip's unruly behavior certainly didn't make me want to get a German Shepherd. So I'll stay dog-curious a little longer.