Good for the people of Llanelli, South Wales. When I walked into my local newsagent the other morning, I was disgusted by the Sun's front page, and its headline: "Dog ate my baby's head." But the people of Llanelli went further, with newsagents refusing to sell that day's edition in response to public outrage, and Rebecca Evans, the Welsh assembly member for Mid and West Wales, declaring: "I am shocked and disgusted by the callous front cover of today's Sun newspaper … [it] has hit new depths in sensationalist reporting, paying no regard whatsoever to a family who have suffered a horrific loss and a community which has been left reeling."
Quite right. It is awful that a six-day-old baby, Eliza-Mae Mullane, was killed by a family pet. The fact that this dreadful thing happened so shortly after 11-month-old Ava-Jayne Corless was also killed by a dogonly serves to emphasise the fragility and unpredictability of the relationship between dog and family.
In the latter case, people did not hesitate to point the finger of blame. The man who owned the dog that killed Ava-Jayne – which was a banned pitbull – says he has been forced into hiding by the anger against him, including death threats. In the case of Eliza-Mae, it's the shock and horror of such a terrible thing being done by their own dog, with no outsider who flouted the law on dangerous dog ownership to blame.
Yet, I cannot be alone among dog-owners in having to admit that my sympathy for these families does not quite drown out a sympathy that is perhaps less natural. I feel for the dogs. There's even a germ of concern that these cases may injure the reputation of dogs generally. I know these are skewed priorities. But I'm not the only person who is a bit unhinged when it comes to dogs.
Neighbours report that in the few days that Eliza-Mae spent at home with her family, the dog, an Alaskan malamute, had been behaving oddly, running about in the streets and in and out of gardens, which he didn't usually do. Anyone who knows dogs will recognise this – or think they do – as frantic jealousy and insecurity, the behaviour of a dog who feels that his place in the family hierarchy has been suddenly and comprehensively usurped. Other children can feel this way, too, although parents generally are more careful about reassuring siblings than they are about reassuring dogs.
The Sun headline sensationalises the idea that dogs are savage, and dangerous to humans. But we all know that humans can be savage and dangerous, too, especially when they feel threatened. The long-standing symbiotic relationship between humans and dogs is more likely forged from similarity than from difference. Very often, when a dog displays surprising savagery, the problem is that its potential for emotional volatility has been overlooked. The fact that dogs seem to have emotions recognisable as similar to our own is one reason why dogs are our pets more often than they are our tools. New research from Hungary, reported on the Today programme this week, found that the response to human voices in the temporal lobes of dogs was pretty much the same as in the human brain. No surprises there.
It's daft, but I always like to see my dog sighing. It seems so human. But actually, we don't know very much about either the sighs of humans or the sighs of dogs. Some psychologists argue that sighing in humans is a learned behaviour, but that doesn't seem right, because animals sigh, too. And what's the difference between a negative sigh and a positive sigh – a sigh of contentment and a sigh of exasperation?
Is a sigh a non-verbal means of communication? Sometimes, perhaps. But researchers led by Karl Teigen at the University of Oslo found that people tend to sigh just as often when they are alone as when they are in company. The same research found that sighing is more often associated with a negative mood – disappointment, defeat, frustration, boredom or longing – than with a positive one. (Not so for my dog, who seems to sigh when he's warm and comfortable.)
Another piece of research, this time led by Elke Vlemincx at the the University of Leuven, suggests that sighing is a physical manifestation of a subtle change in breathing patterns, a kind of physical and mental reset. Here's Jordan Gaines, writing in Psychology Today: "By studying breathing patterns of participants for 20 minutes while sitting quietly, the authors found that during the time preceding a sigh, breathing begins to vary, changing in speed or shallowness."
"When breathing in one state for too long," Vlemincx says, "the lungs become stiffer and less efficient in gas exchange. Intermittently adding a sigh to the normal pattern, then, stretches the lung's air sacs (alveoli). This feeling may give one a sense of relief."
This suggests that what you're feeling affects your breathing, which we all know is true from experience of things such as panic attacks. The emphasis on breathing in yoga suggests that the calming effect created by "bringing your awareness of your breathing", as yoga teachers say, has long been recognised.
But what has this got to do with dogs, or other sighing animals? Simply that, as dog lovers insist, they are, like us, emotional, their emotions influencing their breathing and their sighs a natural regulator. Dog owners will also attest that dogs sometimes appear to feel emotions so strong that a great deal more than a sigh is necessary to provide relief.
When I was about 14, I went to a local farm to pet the horses. There, we found that the last of a litter of kittens was to be drowned, because a home could not be found for it. I called my mother, asked if we could have it, and she said yes. Joyfully taking the kitten home, I was devastated by the family dog's reaction.
It wasn't just that she snarled at the kitten in a most aggressive way, causing the kitten to spit and arch his back with equal aggression. It was the reproachful, hurt, betrayed looks the dog threw at me. She seemed to be communicating that she simply could not believe that I had done this to her, had introduced this clearly unwelcome interloper on to her territory. I went straight to the local vet and asked for the kitten to be humanely destroyed, which it was immediately – in retrospect, surprisingly, because I was only a kid. My mother, when she got home looking forward to seeing the new kitten, was absolutely amazed that I'd made this decision and acted on it so definitely and irreversibly, alone. I did it out of absolute love and sympathy for my grieving dog.
I'll always believe that the dog in the Eliza-Mae case acted out of a storm of emotional upset. The dog in the Ava-Jayne case – which wasn't part of that family hierarchy – may simply have acted out of aggression against a creature more vulnerable than himself. That may seem more like animal behaviour than human behaviour. But humans behave savagely to other creatures, and each other, all over the planet, every minute of the day.
In the end, the most frightening thing about dogs may not be how different to people they are, but how much they have in common with us. It's that which persuades us that the one in our family can be trusted, that it will understand how precious and vulnerable a baby is, just like the rest of that family. The sense of security is false, and one should no more leave a dog with a child than one would with an unvouched for, unknown stranger. Tragedies happen precisely because that's so easy to forget.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/21/dog-attacks-on-children-tragic-triggers
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