I grew up with dogs, no fewer than two at any one time. All the photos of me growing up, from Brillo pad-haired toddler, to teenager about to leave home, involve human limbs and furry legs intertwined in some way. Our first dog, Sniff, was the special one. A black whippet-labrador cross with a white diamond over her heart, she let me and my siblings ride her round the garden all day long and suffered the endless tugging and twirling of her ears, all with a stretchy smile on her face. She sat still as I put her in flowery dresses and tied tea towels round her head to make her look like an old Italian nonna. Silly girl.
Sniff wasn’t just a dog. They never are. There are those who balk at the idea of attaching such profound emotion to an often stinking animal (I know one person who says “all dogs are Tories”), but if you know, you know. When I think about my childhood, happy and bucolic but spliced with trauma, I remember above almost all else the weight of Sniff in bed with me, under the covers. She was mine and I told her things. When your world fills with pain as a child – family separation, infidelity, arguing, courts, protracted physical illness – throwing your small body over something unfalteringly loyal, warm and with a heart beating just like your own, drowns out all the noise. And when you wake up in the morning and they’re still there, looking at you, not getting up until you’re ready, you feel safe. Watched.
When Sniff died, my dad laid her out in a blanket on the back doorstep for us to say goodbye before he buried her. There was my best friend, lying stiff on her side with her tongue hanging out. She never let her tongue hang out but her heart wasn’t beating now, was it? She didn’t care about being graceful any more. Our other dog, Scruff, came and sniffed her up and down before running inside to hide. My own teenage heart was too heavy to keep me upright. I had two days off school and I’m not sure I’ve known grief like it since.
The things animals can do for mental health are well-documented. Across America, people are taking dogs, cats and llamas (really) everywhere with them for emotional support, as explored wonderfully in this New Yorker piece. Pet therapy is used widely in settings such as residential homes, children’s wards and psychiatric hospitals, particularly with dogs, because their presence is both calming and highly sensory. Dogs have been shown to reduce the agitation of dementia patients, for example, and increase pleasure just by being there. The patient may take the time to groom the animal, take it on a little walk or give it a treat, and with that comes a sense of purpose. In fact, there are studies that show significant reductions in anxiety scores after animal-assisted therapy sessions in hospitalised psychiatric patients.
I know first hand what dogs can do for an anxious mind. After an initial run of bewildering panic attacks at school, aged 17, anxiety would grow into something that would overshadow great blocks of my adult life. As a late teen, one of the only things that made me feel better when I got anxious at night was picking up my mum’s Jack Russell, Harry, when everyone had gone to sleep and taking him into bed with me. He wriggled and snored and dropped the kind of hot, meaty farts that can actually induce terror in a person, but it didn’t matter. Listening to his breathing as he lay there was the most soothing thing I knew.
All through my anxious years I’ve quietly craved a bit more than the shimmer of human contact. Love from a partner is essential and life-affirming, and with the patience and kindness of a few select people, I have reached a point where – touch wood, because anxiety can turn even the most positive of statements into a ruminative whirlpool – anxiety is still something I live with, but no longer defines my life to the extent it has in the past. But there’s always been space for something else.
In my bleakest of moments, I have found myself craving the company of a different four-legged friend. Not just for the comfort, but purpose and focus, too. A real reason to leave the house and make conversation.
Somewhere in my subconscious, memories have been built that associate pain relief with the presence of a dog. Four years ago, I became depressed as a result of unsustainable anxiety levels. This depression was defined by utter bewilderment and constant physical pain. It was the most intense pain I’ve ever known. During this time, I had a recurring daydream of lying on a sunny patio with a dog, stroking its hot belly, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that even the thought of it built a moat around my misery. My partner was heroic, utterly, but something in me regressed to craving the near-telepathic micro-ness that is holding a dog in your arms, telling it that it’s a good boy or girl while smoothing its ears down. Only, it was never the right time to get one, because of work and life.
This summer, I left my senior position at Vice to write a book about anxiety. Writing it has been very rewarding but also hard, because it involves re-visiting some of the most desperate times of my life, which triggers all sorts of anxious muscle memory. Writing is also, by its very nature, defined by long periods of isolation. That isolation and room for my thoughts run wild can be a trigger and, after an afternoon spent agonising over something or other, I thought: I’m going to do it.
Initially, I swore I’d get a rescue dog, but during an idle look online over breakfast one morning, there she was. A fuzzy picture of a three-month-old smooth-haired cockapoo, black as a crow, needing to be re-homed because her young owner was pregnant with her second child and didn’t think she could handle the puppy anymore. We sent a few emails and I went to see her in Essex the next day. It had been a bad week, anxiety-wise, but sitting on their kitchen floor as this Hairy Maclary ran rings around me, I clean forgot. The day after, we went to get her and bring her to London.
In the five weeks that she’s been with me, Pamela has injected more joy than I thought she could. Amid the turds (in their myriad consistencies), the biting, the tapeworm (long gone now) the digging, the following, the jumping, the goose shit eating, the farting, sweet jesus the farting, I feel different.
I’m not saying she’s taken away my anxiety, but she’s given me focus. It’s not just the bomb that goes off in my chest when she tries to get up on the bed in the morning, gruffly howling with her mouth in a perfect, tiny “o”, nor is it about losing the plot when she runs full pelt at me with her ever scruffier beard full of water and kibble bits. I have a lot of purpose these days, but she’s given me more, on the days I need it most.
A dog is better than any mindfulness app – it’s not a pre-recorded thing for everyone, it’s living and it’s for you. In the moment. They can sense when you need calm and they respond. CBT and medication might be the stalwarts for treating anxiety long-term, and both are part of my life, but in the day-to-day, moment-to-moment, sometimes we need something else, something tangible. I wish more anxious people had such immediate access to dogs, because they’re better than any benzodiazepine or beta-blocker out there.
