War Dogs by Rebecca Frankel

extreme instances of purely utilitarian human-canine relationships, where the dog is stripped of his uniqueness and seen merely as an object, Bekoff believes people will distance themselves to the point where even the language they use provides a protective barrier. This is a defense mechanism that creates a necessary emotional separation. He cites the classic example of laboratory researchers who assign numbers to their animal subjects rather than name them, because “once you name an animal,” Bekoff tells me, “you’ve formed a bond with him.” 6
    Bekoff is not surprised when I tell him about Kevin Howard and his theory that dogs do not love their handlers. Bekoff reasons that militaryhandlers might adopt a psychological distancing mechanism, knowing that in sending an animal to war there is the danger of the dog getting hurt, maimed, or even killed. And this is when, he believes, the idea of loving an animal that you’re sending into war, and acknowledging that this animal loves you back, becomes very complicated.
    When I ask Gutierrez to pinpoint what it was that cemented his relationship with Bert, he refrains from implicating “love” as a mitigating factor. So, what would he call that intangible thing: Bonding? Closeness? Affection?
    â€œI guess you could say affection,” he says. “But I think it’s more of a, ‘I’m the pack leader, now you’re going to listen to me.’”
    But even after he gives the credit of Bert’s bonding to the “wolf pack,” Gutierrez says with a sheepish sigh, knowing that he’s about to contradict all he’s just said: “At the end of the day you do grow attached and the dog knows it.”
    While animals’ capacity for emotion might still be debated today, even Charles Darwin saw evidence to support the idea. A little more than a decade after he published The Origin of Species ,Darwin produced The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. The Father of Evolution’s intent with this work was to show that animals not only had emotions, but also expressions much as humans do, along with other perceptible physical gestures. There were, he believed, visible expressions in some animals that were rendered in the animal visage that mirrored those of humans. For Darwin this was only further proof of the connective link of shared ancestry between man and nonhuman mammals. 7
    Darwin made thorough study of his subjects by examining not only animal behavior but human as well before coming to this conclusion. He pored over piles of photographs of human facial expressions—examining
children, babies, people of many cultures, even traveling to an insane
asylum—to look closely at the similarities present when expressing fear, agony, and affection. He conducted this study and wrote this book containing his findings in part to prove “his underlying theory that humans are an extension of the animal continuum . . . to show that animals have many ofthe same ways of physically expressing emotions as humans.” 8 And though he may have had mostly anecdotal evidence to back up his theory, he was on the right track.
    But when it came to dogs, Darwin was also content to rely on what he saw with his own eyes as proof enough that our canine companions reveal their emotions to us. And he didn’t have to go further than his own backyard. One day while making his way through the yard, his dog trailed behind, fully expecting that they were on route to begin their lengthy walk, as it was part of their daily ritual. But Darwin had other plans and veered off to the greenhouse instead of following the path to the fence. The dog turned, and as Darwin wrote, “The instantaneous and complete change of expression which came over him, as soon as my body swerved in the least towards the path (and I sometimes tried this as an experiment) was laughable. His look of dejection was known to every member of