How To Write Dogs: The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make When They Write About Dogs: Inkprint Writers, #1

How To Write Dogs:

The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make When They Write About Dogs

AMY LAURENS

For Chloe, Mindy, Abbi, Laura and Max, and all the other dogs who have made a difference in somebody’s life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Maigen Turner for letting me use some of her stories. To Liana Brooks for reassurance through many drafts, both of this book and many others, and for being the one who makes me keep writing on the bad days. To Ada Hoffmann for help getting the science right (the remaining errors are, of course, all mine). To Michelle Davison Argyle for the photo editing. And finally, thanks to Daimien, for telling me I could do it.

Introduction

Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware,

Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

~Rudyard Kipling

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It’s a funny thing, writing a book about dogs. A huge percentage of the population has owned or currently owns   a dog, and it seems that as with children, everyone who   has a dog knows the best way to raise them. As a culture, we are pretty dog-savvy, and the dog’s position as   man’s best friend is well established in our arts and entertainment.

You might think, then, that a book on mistakes that writers make about dogs would be a slim volume indeed. In actual fact, the opposite is true. Writers – and people in general – make many of the mistakes they do about dogs not because they know nothing about them, but because so much of the cultural knowledge we possess is false. Myths about animals abound, and it seems the animal is to humanity, the more myths it will generate.

So what makes my perspective worthwhile? First of all, I’ve dealt with a wide variety of dogs in a wide variety of situations ever since I was little. I won my first obedience ribbon with a dog at age twelve, and saw puppies born in my own backyard when I was seven – and the very first puppy I bred myself became an Australian Champion at 14 months of age. I’ve done obedience trials and conformation showing, and started training dogs as all-purpose house assistants; I’m a registered Labrador Retriever breeder and have experienced the joys and woes of breeding and raising our own litters, and consequently the deep bond that develops when you own a dog from birth.

I’ve hit the training paddock in the deep, miserable wet of winter, and I’ve suffered through the consequences of no-dog-walks-for-a-month. If there’s a mistake to be made, I’m pretty sure by now that I’ve made it, and kicked myself in the rear end about it later. And because I’m a writer, I know how all of these things can impact the one most important thing in any writer’s life: story. I’ve seen people suffer from making the same mistakes over and over again, and in writing this book I want to offer you the opportunity to learn from my mistakes – to be not just the writer, but the dog-savvy real life citizen, who gets it right. I want to convince you that dogs have a place in fiction, and I want to help you to use these common mistakes and misconceptions to strengthen and deepen your characters – and your story. I want to answer the questions that people who have grown up around dogs and people who have never had a dog both forget to ask.

This book is divided into six core sections: People In Fur Coats, which establishes a baseline for interpreting and understanding canine behaviour; The Senses, which explores the various ways in which dogs receive information from their surroundings; Learning and Development, which delves into the way in which dogs learn; Communication, the section which contains perhaps the most common of all mistakes; Pedigrees and Breeding, which deals with common misconceptions about breeds, mongrels, and their associated bad habits; and finally, Relationships, discussing the various complexities that come with meshing the personality of a dog with that of a person.

I hope you enjoy it, and find it useful.

Section One: People In Fur Coats

In modern, westernised society, the assumed calling of the vast majority of dogs is ‘companion’. Dogs feature in our lives because we or people we know keep them as pets, and although occasionally people might move beyond companionship to exploring other things dogs are capable of, for the most part that’s the extent of our relationship.

Sadly, this leads to some of the most significant mistakes people make concerning dogs. We assume that because they are our companions – and because they seem to enjoy our companionship – that they are simply humans in a different form; people, if you will, in fur coats. But dogs are not people. They experience the world in different ways, and they process it differently, too. They are their own unique species, and to understand them as anything less is to do them a gross disservice.

mistake 1: we’re all in this together

One of the biggest challenges authors who write non-human characters face is that of making their non-human characters sympathetic; their readers are, after all, human, and have only a human experience to draw on. So even though dogs are decidedly non-human and have their own way of experiencing the world, it’s good to have a baseline understanding of the way in which we are the same - we are all mammals, and mammal brains share the fundamentals in terms of how we’re wired.

Mammal brains have four primary differences to the brains of other animals. 1) They are much larger, comparative to body weight [1]; 2) the hippocampus, responsible for spatial memory, navigation [2] and the conversion of short to long term memory, is larger and more developed [3]; 3) the amygdala is also more developed, taking on the additional role of processing and remembering emotions [4]; and 4) mammal brains have a neocortex, responsible for processing a lot of our sensory information as well as dealing with our working memory and social and emotional processing [5].

It’s easy to see what the key features are here: in general terms, mammals have better memories than non-mammals, as well as the ability to remember and process emotions. This makes us pretty social beings, something that we know instinctively – dogs form packs, horses form herds, and even usually-solitary animals like tigers have a set of social rules more complex than your average lizard or fish (though these too do have social rules!).

And besides – dogs are just