Before I begin
Before I begin, a clear disclaimer. What follows is written with my tongue firmly in my cheek. I have no wish to minimise human distress, to make light of clinical conditions that cause real suffering, or to suggest that the pain people carry is in any way comparable to the small puzzles of canine behaviour I am about to describe. I am a psychotherapist. I take psychological suffering very seriously. But I also live with two spaniels, and the longer I live with them, the more I find myself wondering, in a quiet and slightly ridiculous way, whether they are actually alright.
Here is the thing about spaniels
Here is the thing about spaniels. They are the most relentlessly affectionate dogs I have ever met. They love human contact in a way that is almost embarrassing. They bounce. They lean. They follow. They bring joy into a household at a volume other breeds simply cannot match.
And yet.
My older one, a chocolate brown beauty going elegantly grey around the muzzle, sometimes looks heartbreakingly serious. She will take herself off to her bed in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and lie there looking faintly miserable. When she fixes her eyes on me, there is a sadness in them I cannot quite explain. I know, rationally, that she is a happy dog. She has even suffered from “happy tail”, that well-documented spaniel injury where the tail wags so enthusiastically against walls and table legs that it splits and refuses to heal, because the dog will not stop wagging long enough for the wound to close. By any reasonable measure, this is the tail of a contented animal. And yet sometimes I look at her, and I wonder what she is trying to tell me through those mournful brown eyes. What if something is wrong, and I am simply failing to understand?
Then there is her daughter. A golden, bouncy, slightly anxious creature who has never lived a day apart from her mother and seems, at times, to be the canine equivalent of a people-pleaser. She walks so close to my heel that I trip over her. She brings me her favourite toy on a near-permanent loop. She is desperate to be stroked, almost vibrating with the need to be approved of. And she is submissive in ways that defy all logic. She recently submitted to a tiny chihuahua on a walk, much to the laughing astonishment of its owner. I am fairly sure she once submitted to a plastic bag.
I find myself thinking, only half-jokingly, about RSD. Rejection sensitivity. The terror of getting it wrong. The over-attunement to the moods of others. In a human client, I would have several careful questions to ask. In a spaniel, I have only her enormous trembling enthusiasm and her instinct to flatten herself before inanimate objects.
The serious thought underneath
The serious thought underneath all of this is the one I cannot quite let go of. If a dog is not psychologically well, how on earth would we know? And, more uncomfortably, how would we help? My children can tell me when something is wrong. They have words for it, eventually, even if those words come out sideways. My dogs have only their eyes, their bodies, their sudden retreats to bed, and their unfathomable willingness to defer to a chihuahua. And here I am, finding myself going down an online rabbit hole about dog psychology and dog psychologists.
I do not have an answer. But I do find myself looking at them more carefully these days, trying to read what I can.