‘This Dog Will Change Your Life’ Review: Our Pooches, Ourselves

Table of Contents

Turns out it’s true that dogs look like their owners. One 2009 study, conducted at Japan’s Kwansei Gakuin University, found that 80% of the time participants could match humans to their pets on headshots alone. The dogs we choose, or feel drawn to without understanding why, are, on some level, a reflection of our selves or how we see ourselves—whether as imposing Huskies or spoiled Pomeranians. Indeed, suggests Elias Weiss Friedman, the writer and canine photographer better known, on social media and elsewhere, as The Dogist, part of what makes domesticated dogs so fascinating is the way in which they’re simultaneously completely, unfathomably other, capable of loving and experiencing the world with an unselfconsciousness no human could achieve, and also utterly man-made: both genetically and behaviorally creatures that belong to a social order we shape.

At its best, Mr. Friedman’s “This Dog Will Change Your Life” is an exploration of how human dogs really are. We domesticated dogs; we bred them for certain qualities—from biddability to just plain cuteness—and now we live alongside them, at times incorporating them not only into our household but also, more intimately, into our families. “People,” the author reminds us early on, “are the answer to any question about dog breeding.” We developed domesticated breeds, he goes on, “out of a need for human order and classification,” shaping the primordial wolf into a Shih Tzu or a Chow Chow.

One of Mr. Friedman’s most striking chapters, on adoption and dog shelters, deals with the elements that make a shelter dog more likely to stand out—a creative name, say (Kerrica, Bonquiqui, Snugzz), or an engaging shelter-staff-composed description. One behaviorally challenged Dachshund-mix named Eddie, for example, failed to find a home when he was advertised as “a little nervous to be in the shelter.” Then the shelter changed tactics. “Eddie is a —,” the revised introduction humorously read, using the comical emoji for excrement. “We want Eddie out of here because he scares our big dogs.” The pup found an owner “within hours.” Beyond companionship, cuddles, face-licks and runs along the beach, we want dogs to tell us about who we really are.

It’s a pity, therefore, that much of Mr. Friedman’s book meanders away from this central and provocative throughline. “This Dog Will Change Your Life” often feels like an unnecessary gloss upon the author’s otherwise engaging photographic work. Passages about, say, helping young dog-loving couples stage their proposals or reminiscences about the woman who would become Mr. Friedman’s wife read like extended interviews: interesting if you’re already a fan but less illuminating of Mr. Friedman’s central point.

Distracting, too, is Mr. Friedman’s too-cute insistence on avoiding academic research or jargon. After intriguing us with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s contention that some animals, such as dogs, become symbolically important “not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think,’” Mr. Friedman apologizes for daring to challenge the reader. (“Every time I quote a high-end academic thinker or author, I’ll try within a few paragraphs to quote a comedian.”) A few pages later, he obstructs his own brief history of human-canine domestication to remind the reader that he is “not a dog academic” and does not “have an advanced degree in dog.”

This lack of focus makes it impossible to tell what kind of book “This Dog Will Change Your Life” is supposed to be—beyond, one supposes, a requisite extension of an established brand. Is it, like Mark Rowlands’s “The Word of Dog,” an exploration of the philosophical and moral problems that dogs can better help us see? A feel-good narrative about the good that dogs can do for us? A walk through the latest research on canine psychology? Explorations about the potential of therapeutic canine interaction for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder? Or is it, as it inevitably becomes, a seemingly by-the-numbers attempt to nod to each of these possibilities?

This vagueness is a shame because Mr. Friedman does, it seems, have a book’s worth of worthwhile things to say. When he gives himself the freedom to write with greater detail and precision about his own artistic process—the act of photographing dogs and how it differs from photographing human subjects—we get a glimpse of the book that might have been. When Mr. Friedman writes, for example, about wearing kneepads to help get to “dog level” easily for a shot, or the difficulty of making eye contact with a dog in the way you might with a human subject (treats help), the specificity of his approach helps illuminate the paradox of dogs as both social and nonhuman animal to an extent dozens of pages of more anodyne memoir never could. Likewise, another section about the internet—and Mr. Friedman’s life negotiating comment-section flame wars, even on a subject as seemingly anodyne as puppies—helps us think through the utterly animalistic nature of our own herd instinct.

In one of the most striking passages in “This Dog Will Change Your Life,” Mr. Friedman investigates the consumerist nature of dog-owner identity, meditating on one of his most controversial posts on social media: Some men pushing three puppies down Madison Avenue in a stroller. The men turned out to be dog breeders trying to get publicity for their litters, complete with a T-shirt advertising their business. These breeders, Mr. Friedman’s followers pointed out, “encouraged people to go about getting a dog in the same way you’d go about getting a fake Gucci bag.” (Mr. Friedman agreed, and took the post down). It’s a point the author frequently highlights well.

All too often, alas, the unfocused nature of “This Dog Will Change Your Life” makes the book feel like a requisite gift for self-identified dog-lovers, or The Dogist fans, rather than a book intended to be read.

Ms. Burton is the author of the novel “Here in Avalon.”