Anna Heyward got a dog named Freddie, and a week after he arrived, she realized she knew almost nothing about him. So she started a notebook called “Freddie Log” and began watching him the way early scientists watched animals in the wild. Her essay, “How I Learned to Love My Dog By Observing His Behavior,” traces how observation became her response to unease.
The piece, which draws on Darwin and the founders of ethology, is a story about learning to see another being on its own terms. It is also a story about what happens when a person suddenly becomes accountable for a life that is not their own.
Freddie Arrives
The trouble started a week after Freddie came home. Heyward and the dog had already taken two walks on a Sunday, and it was only 1 PM. She sat on the couch with her shoes on, and Freddie jumped up, put two feet on her shoulder, and watched her. He yawned, producing a breath cloud of warm stink.
She had no idea what he wanted. She had walked him, fed him, made sure he eliminated, and given him the one play activity he seemed to know. That was the end of her knowledge. Normally she would have opened her computer and spent hours doing something joyless, like opening emails and marking them as unread. Instead she sat with the dog, feeling the weight of his expectancy in the air.
“I turned and made eye contact with him, and his tail started wagging,” she writes. “I grew more uneasy. I was accountable, not alone, and I needed to do something more.”
The Freddie Log
To quell the uncertainty, Heyward found a notebook. On the cover she wrote “Freddie Log” in black pen, then listed the events of the week. The list shocked her. She had canceled plans, left events early, and skipped meals, appointments, and work tasks. She could not do basic things like grocery shopping.
She had also spent nearly five hundred dollars on supplies. The purchases included:
- Toys, food, treats, and beds
- Pheromone sprays
- Calming blankets
- Toys that emitted the sound of a heartbeat
None of it worked. The separation anxiety remained. She had spent the money on a credit card without thinking about it or planning to. And she still had not learned anything about managing the dog’s attention and energy.
“I knew, I realized, almost nothing about him,” she writes. “About how and why he did the things he did, what created or extinguished his responses to the world around him.”
Darwin Changes the Frame
Heyward found a way forward in an old science. In Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, there is a chapter on what he called “instinct,” or the “natural” behavior of animals. Darwin treated behavior as part of evolution, subject to heredity, fecundity, and variability.
Before Darwin, biological observation followed the taxonomy of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, which organized species by the hierarchical order in which God created them. Animal behavior was not a formal subject of scientific inquiry. Darwin changed that. His writing opened new possibilities for thinking about what animals did and why.
In the early twentieth century, a field called ethology coalesced around the Darwinian idea of natural behavior. Early ethologists went to an animal’s habitat, because that was where the animal and its behavior evolved.
| Darwin’s approach | Linnaeus’s approach |
|---|---|
| Behavior as part of evolution | Species as fixed, God-given forms |
| Subject to heredity and change | Organized by hierarchical creation order |
| Observation in natural habitats | Taxonomy by classification |
The Ethogram Method
Early ethologists did not work in laboratories. They watched animals in their natural habitats and created an ethogram, an inventory of typical behaviors broken down into classifications: standing, foraging, digging, bathing, and so on. These units allowed for measurements like frequency and duration.
The work did not necessarily lead to hypotheses or experiments. For early ethologists, pure observation and description were worthy on their own.
Heyward recognized this descriptive inventory-making approach as a way to demystify the world and detach it from Creationism. She found it in an unlikely source: The Gate of Angels, a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald set in 1912, around the same time the early ethologists were working.
A Novel About Belief
The novel pretends to be a love story, but it is really about metaphysics, belief, and the limits of both science and religion. One protagonist, Fred Fairly, is a young physicist with a fellowship at Cambridge. He is preparing to tell his father, a clergyman, that he is no longer a Christian.
Fred is done with the spiritual and with the “comforting unseen presences” of God. From now on, he plans to use only the handrail of material reality. He has become, in the novel’s words, “a man with a mind cleared and perpetually being recleared (because there was a constant need for that) of any idea that could not be tested through physical experience.”
The novel showed Heyward a way to think about the ethologists’ descriptive approach, one that detached the world from Creationism.
Learning From Lorenz and Tinbergen
Heyward also read the works of early European ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. Their writing is sometimes eccentric, sometimes outdated, and sometimes very sensitively prescient. What mattered was the approach.
Watch the animal where it lives. Describe what it does. Do not impose a theory before you have seen the behavior with your own eyes.
For Heyward, this became a way to be with Freddie. She could watch him and keep her log, open to what he might show her.
The essay’s promise is in its opening line: “If I watched and waited, open to what Freddie could show me, something would become clear.” That is the hope she carries into the work of attention, not a result she claims to have secured.
Source: lithub.com