UrbanUpdate

This story is part of Mind Yourself, a series on mental health—why so many men struggle with it, how institutions are addressing it, and practical ways to improve your own.

In early January of this year, my home state of North Carolina was averaging about 7,000 new cases of COVID-19 every day. The sun was setting before my partner and I had even finished work most days. We felt trapped, fearful of the outside world and sick of being stuck at home. We were restless and beginning to feel like this was just how life was always going to be, and despite our commitment to doing whatever we could to remain safe, our world had become so small that it had taken a genuine toll on our mental health.

It’s around this time that we let our dogs into a backyard that we share with our neighbors—and their dogs. Our 15-pound Pomeranian mix decided to attack the neighbors’ German shepherd out of nowhere, and wouldn't let up until we peeled her off. She’d known the shepherd since it was a puppy; they’d always gotten along even as it had become gigantic and rambunctious. But it seemed as if she’d grown as fearful and paranoid as we had during the pandemic. Was it possible that because my life had become more fearful and precarious on almost every level, I might have passed some of my own anxiety down to my dog?

Even before the pandemic allowed me to focus way too much of my time and energy on her, I was one of those people who, for better or worse, was obsessed with their dog. Her name is Nora Ephron—it was given to her by the place I adopted her from, but I kept it because she somehow seemed to have the exact right brassy personality. Over the last six years, we have crossed the country together by car and plane. We have walked very silently away from a copperhead snake we encountered on a walk. She has allowed me to dress her up in a dog-sized Hawaiian shirt because I thought it would make her look cool. I have given her haircuts, haphazardly snipping and buzzing away at her fur until I’ve accidentally made her tail look like Richard Hell in the ’70s, then watching with pride as she struts around the neighborhood, seemingly thinking her new haircut actually made her as cool as Richard Hell.

The point is, I coddle my dog, and my dog has always been kind of nuts, but usually in ways that were mostly endearing. But as the pandemic wore on, Nora’s behavior slowly got worse. She began to engage in a range of Machiavellian schemes, from faking being choked by her collar on walks (she wears a harness) to pretending she doesn’t know how to go down the stairs (she definitely knows). While she was once content with barking only whenever she thought a person and/or squirrel was trying to break into our house (false positives, all of them), she started barking at five in the morning, seemingly for the hell of it. Most alarmingly, she has continued trying to fight our neighbor’s dog, and has gotten so aggressive towards it that that they can no longer be in the backyard even if someone’s supervising them. The COVID crisis has brought out every-day bravery in many of us, and my tiny-ass dog was using hers to take on the world.

As much as I love her, I would be lying if I said that Nora came to me with a clean bill of mental health. Once upon a time, she lived under a house owned by a dog hoarder, i.e., a person who’d taken in more dogs than they were physically capable of caring for. These are never a great environment for a canine to be in, and thinking about what Nora went through before I got her makes me incalculably sad. Like humans, dogs are capable of experiencing PTSD because of past traumas, and a large part of me fears that these experiences gave Nora a rocky psychological foundation.

Even still, things were going pretty well until the pandemic. But COVID changed day-to-day life in America, which means it also changed day-to-day life for dogs. My partner and I have always worked from home, which both of our dogs love, but the pandemic quickly showed us that it was possible for us to spend even more time when them. Gone are the days of popping over to the coffee shop to get some work done, or leaving them alone in the evening while we attend a party. Walks became tense affairs, full of strategic maneuvering away from other pedestrians and sudden turns down less-crowded streets. We stopped taking them in public because we no longer had any opportunities to do so, and the idea of so much as signing for a package, let alone inviting a friend over for dinner, became terrifying. It felt like Nora, with her complicated past and quirky habits, had internalized our newfound sense of trepidation and allowed it to transform her into a loose cannon. Was that a thing? It seemed like a thing.

I am neither a psychologist nor an expert in relationships between humans and animals, and I am not qualified to perform an academically rigorous study of how humans can influence their dogs’ behavior over time. However, Dr. William Chopik of the University of Michigan is all of those things. He runs the Close Relationships Lab at the university, and in 2019 led a study—the first of its kind—examining the ways in which individual humans’ personalities can influence that of their dogs as both pet and human go through life. I turned to him in my time of need, and he kindly agreed to speak with me via Zoom about his research and to help me figure out if my own behavior may have caused Nora Ephron the dog to regress into insanity.

Chopik told me that he and his team were inspired to study the subject after one of his co-authors had just adopted a puppy and began to witness dramatic behavioral changes in a remarkably short period. “Dogs don’t get jobs, they don’t get married, but they’re exposed to humans all the time,” he said. “We had a sense that dogs might adapt to those things in really interesting ways, and we realized that people hadn’t really asked that before.”

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What they found was that yes, humans have a lot of influence over their dogs’ behavior and demeanor, and a key part of that has to do with the environments they create—especially emotional environments, i.e., providing love and attention as well as training—for their canine friends. When it comes to the pandemic, he said, “If you’re spending an additional eight hours a day together every day for what’s been 13 months, presumably that might make for more affectionate relationships.”

This is definitely true to an extent. My parents have been taking their dog on multiple walks a day, and he’s grown so dependent upon their physical proximity that he once slipped out of his harness and sprinted home when I tried to take him on a walk myself. But for every dog who has been loving the extra attention, there may very well be one who has had a more psychologically complex response to the pandemic. “It’s an incredibly stressful time, and it’s led to humans diverting their behavior a ton,” Chopik said. “There’s a sense in which people are a bit similar to their dog, and the anxiety of humans can make dogs more anxious.” As for whether or not my own increased anxiety could have rubbed off on Nora, “That’s an open question,” Chopik said. “But what you’re intuiting is possible. Dogs are extremely social creatures and can pick up on humans’ emotions.”

So, ugh. Maybe I was right: Me freaking out led to Nora freaking out which led to her raising all sorts of Hell. But, Chopik pointed out that given what Nora went through before I came into her life, it’s likely that I’ve been more of a positive influence on her than I’ve realized. “Think of this alternative reality where Nora had a different owner that wasn’t accommodating. Think about what her personality might have been like—probably a little less entitled, a bit more Machiavellian, a little meaner,” he said. “It’s very possible that you softened her. You socialized her and gave her a loving home, and not everybody could have done that.”

The idea that I may have helped Nora become a better version of herself, even if that better version of herself had been going buckwild over the past few months, soothed me. It helped me realize that I was trying my hardest with her, and that when it comes to dogs, the very act of trying your hardest can go a long way. I looked over to Nora, who’d sat in on our interview, popping in and out of Chopik’s view. She was flopped lazily on a couch behind me, half-asleep and seemingly without a care in the world. I felt relaxed and happy. I’d like to think Nora noticed.

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