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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Ex-Psychotherapist Muses About Dogs’ Attraction To Us

Kerry Fried Special To Newsday

“Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs” By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Crown, 274 pp., $24)

Have dogs become our platonic ideal?

Loyal, heroic, compassionate and needy, their variety seems infinite, their love total. Leaving aside the more problematic breeds (it’s not as if a puppy symposium dreamed up the pit bull or the Doberman pinscher), beast for beast, canines probably come off far better than most masters.

In fact, to judge from the litter of worshipful, serious books that have come out in the past several years, the ‘90s might well be the Puppy Decade (with several nods to their friend and foe, the kitty).

First there was the grande dame of them all, “The Hidden Life of Dogs” (1993), in which Elizabeth Marshall Thomas tried to see and feel through a dog’s eyes and senses. Asking herself what dogs wanted, the answer seemed simple: not their self-styled best friends, but one another.

“Dogs who live in each other’s company are calm and pragmatic, never showing the desperate need to make known their needs and feelings or to communicate their observations, as some hysterical dogs who know only the company of our species are likely to do,” Thomas writes. “Dogs who live in each other’s company know they are understood.”

Fortunately or not, after thousands of years of domestication, they may want one another, but they need us. Thomas writes: “So as we need God more than he needs us, dogs need us more than we need them, and they know it.”

Some years ago, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson abandoned Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory and turned to children and beasts, coming out with a book on the inarticulate, innocent Kaspar Hauser - who emerged into society after having been kept in a dungeon for most of his childhood - and co-writing a passionate exploration of animal emotions. With a combination of observation and imaginative sympathy, his last book, “When Elephants Weep,” sets out to undermine scientists’ smug insistence that anthropomorphism is intellectual blasphemy.

It also refutes the Descartean tradition that animals are “thoughtless brutes” - mere machines who “do not speak as we do” because “they have no thoughts.”

Throughout, there are compelling passages on animals’ anger, shame, loneliness, compassion, love, cruelty, their sense of wonder and beauty, their fears. Masson’s speculations are powered by striking anecdotes.

It’s difficult to ever forget Alex the African Grey Parrot begging not to be left at the vet: “Come here. I love you. I’m sorry. I want to go back.”

Masson and his co-author, Susan McCarthy, again and again turn the intellectual tables on scientists and philosophers, noting, for instance, that human articulation of anguish is no more valid than an animal’s cry of pain.

Masson’s lucid new book, “Dogs Never Lie About Love,” seems more modest and personal. Again, he makes clear his debt to Thomas’ “Hidden Life,” which he calls “the best book about dogs I have read. It got me thinking about that other hidden life, what they feel.”

Oddly, he had no dogs when he was thinking about writing about them, so he quickly acquired not one, or two, but three (a purebred and two mongrels) and a couple of kittens to boot. (Masson’s final acknowledgment in “When Elephants Weep” sounds somewhat threatening out of context: “As for Kitty, only Kitty knows what Kitty is owed.” We’ll never know either, since she doesn’t figure at all in “Dogs Never Lie.”)

Masson, in fact, finds plenty of new things to say about pups, or easily articulates what some of us might think: “Dogs feel more than I do (I am not prepared to speak for other people). They feel more, and they feel more purely and more intensely.” Often, however, he seems to be writing less about animals than humans: “In searching for why we are so inhibited compared with dogs, perhaps we can learn to be as direct, as honest, as straightforward, and especially as intense in our feelings as dogs are.”

He also offers what some might think a contradiction to Thomas. Dogs love us not just because they depend on us, “but because we are fun. How astonishing!”

Though not all dog owners are fun, Masson (whom a critic once compared to “Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog pumped up on steroids”) emerges as a winning companion. In many respects, “Dogs Never Lie” is a none-too-concealed autobiography, offering statements such as, “The fact that Sasha is happier not being a guide dog does not mean that some other dog would not be thrilled to be so useful. I was a pretty useless psychotherapist, but friends of mine seem predestined for it.”

But the book is far from a cozy domestic romp. Masson offers several proofs that dogs have the moral high ground, including a police dog that refused to acknowledge its handler’s attack command (a good thing, too, since Masson himself would have been the victim!).

The title, “Dogs Never Lie About Love,” might initially seem too touchy-feely, but the author’s lessons from life and literature are enough to convince us he’s barking up exactly the right tree.