Living for the pack
Lost Dogs: The Rupture of a 14 Thousand Year Relationship With Man’s Best Friend by Christopher Nicolov, with Jeff Gilhooley Freisenpress, 120 pages, $16.99
This is a different kind of book, a real hybrid. It’s not a dog-training manual, though it includes plenty of solid, seasoned advice. It’s not an anthropological study of millennia of human-canine interaction, although it contains many revealing insights on the topic. And it’s not a biography or autobiography of a dog trainer and groomer, although a subtitle could be: Dogs I have known (and how they affected my life). It’s a blend of all three, how-tos and field studies and life/dog stories, the text culled from a series of interview Jeff Gilhooly conducted with his friend Christopher Nicolov.
Gilhooly is a retired journalist, most recently familiar to Newfoundland and Labrador audiences as host of CBC Radio’s “On the Go.” He owns a dog, which brought him in contact with Nicolov, and more importantly here, made him part of a special tribe, dogkeeping humans. Nicolov knew and worked with all kinds of dogs and their owners, but came across the same problems, and proposed the same solutions, again and again: dogs have pack mentality, they need to know who is master, and at the same time they need and deserve to be treated with respect.
How Nicolov came to be working with dogs in St. John’s is a tale in itself. He was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, then under communist rule.
“Around the dinner table, as a child, the adults would freely talk about many things, but always cautioned that NOTHING was to be repeated outside the house.” His parents were white-collar professionals (an engineer and an accountant, respectively) and his grandfather, who’d been forced into early retirement, took him hiking in the mountains. It was there that Nicolov saw his first “working dogs,” huge Balkan sheepdogs like the Turkish Anatolian, who could fight off several wolves at once, and seemed to communicate almost telepathically with the shepherds.
Nicolov’s family expected him to pursue engineering, too, but he studied film and was hired into a film crew.
He was busy, and, unusually for his generation of Bulgarians, able to travel freely. But it was still state-sanctioned, ultimately stifling work (everything in Bulgaria was).
As an adult, divorced and the father of two daughters, Nicolov emigrates to Canada, suffers through a cycle of poverty, blizzards, isolation and under-employment, and ends up working at a dog kennel outside Toronto. He laboured through very long days, learned English (from Willie Nelson songs, he says), and then came to St. John’s in 1996. “I often joke there was only one Tim Hortons then. The dog industry wasn’t very sophisticated either and that was refreshing.”
The dog industry, from food to toys to pure-breeding kennels, is something he has strong opinions on, although he always cautioned that these are just that, his opinions. However they are based on observation and practical knowledge and resonate common sense.
“As humans we have many wants that influence our behaviour — dogs don’t. They are not looking to collect art or start a career or find a mutual fund to invest in.”
What do they want?
“Dogs don’t live for themselves, they live for the pack. The pack, and the security it gives, is paramount.” This is why dogs act the way they do, for good and bad. Actually Nicolov wouldn’t use “good” or “bad” to describe any dog’s actions. They all make sense to the dog. It’s humans who interpret them so, and reward or discipline accordingly. That confuses the dog and leads to disruption in the human/dog bond. And that is a mutually beneficial relationship thousands of years old (“there’s new evidence that dogs played a bigger part in human evolution that we ever thought possible”) that is based on dogs being dogs and people being people.
Nicolov is critical of people “humanizing” — anthropomorphizing — dogs. Dogs are not babies. Neither are they playthings. They’re not fashion accessories. Don’t have them dyed and groomed to resemble famous people or reflect your hairstyle.
The dog is there to help its owner — in all kinds of ways. “When I was in my twenties and had an artist friend who named his dog ‘Petrov’ after the local communist party official. He did this on purpose so he could go to the window whenever he wanted and call ‘Hey Petrov you son of a #X$%%XXC ...’ Whenever he was questioned about this, he said he was just yelling at his dog.” Another supportive act from a person’s best friend.