InsideOut: Interview with John Katz

by Owen Lipstein September/October 2008


Jon Katz is just one of those guys. He’s been writing books and articles since the 1990s; while he used to focus on technology and the life of techies-his book Geeks was published in 2000 by Broadway Books-he is now a well-known and highly praised writer who focuses on the life of dogs. His latest book, Izzy and Lenore: Two Dogs, an Unexpected Journey and Me (Villard Books 2008), explores the experience of introducing two dogs to hospice training and what they taught him about compassion.



On top of all of that, Katz is a wonderful photographer. He lives with his dogs and other animals on a farm upstate. If he didn’t write for publication about how he has a tough time like the rest of us, we might think he lives a charmed life. Or maybe it’s his honesty that’s so charming.



Owen Lipstein: I feel I should premise this with the fact that I have four unruly golden retrievers of my own.



Jon Katz: Wow. Really. I hope you have a little bit of land.



OL: Yes, exactly. Anyway, I was very touched by your book. Tell us about the dog, the Border Collie Izzy, who had his own problems but through the process of healing himself, was able to heal people.



JK: Yes, that’s actually a good way of putting it. Izzy was abandoned on a farm near Cambridge, N.Y. Some people [took over] the farm and then got some Border Collies, and then they just moved away. So he was left there. There was a caretaker on the property who did feed him. But he was pretty much just on his own, and lived mostly outside, and had really never been in a house or with people. I kept getting messages from a woman who loves animals and does a lot of rescue work saying there’s this amazing Border Collie that just needs a home—you’ve got to come look at him. I get a lot of calls like that and I usually ignore them, because you could have, as you know, a hundred needy dogs in your back yard in a minute.



So one day she left a very insistent message saying the farm might be sold, and he just had to get out of there. I went over there to look at him and there was this big enclosure on a hill with this tiny, almost like a dollhouse, shed. There was this very beautiful male Border Collie just running and running and running around the fence perimeter, covered in burrs and crud and pretty wild-eyed, and he had actually dug a huge trench from running all day. It was actually hard to get his attention and to catch him and grab him, but I did. I expected to take him and find another home for him.



So we sort of tackled him and got him in the car. He’d never been in a car so there was much vomiting and freaking out and diarrhea. It was a nightmare. Then when he got to my place, he looked around at the donkeys and other animals, and he freaked and ran off. He was very frightened. He took off into the woods. So there was a huge chase after him. It went on for miles before I finally got him again and dragged him back. For a month or two, he was just like having a wild animal in the house. He destroyed several crates. He ate the paneling off the walls. He went under the fence and over the fence and through the fence. We had to electrify it. He was really wild, and then one day I took him to the vet and the vet said, “Look. This is going to be a great dog for you.”



“I’m about to look for a home for him,“ [I told him].



He said, “No, don’t do that.”



I said, “Why would you say that?”



And he said, “Because I can just see him making a decision to kind of be with you. I can just see it.” I didn’t see it. But the vet did, and one day Izzy decided to be my dog, and he was an incredibly empathetic creature. He just went from being this wild animal to this incredibly attentive, intuitive dog you could bring absolutely any place.



I’d been interested in hospice, but I never really had a dog who could do it; hospice work is very, very complex because the patient can almost never come to you. You always have to find a way to get to the patient, and they are in hospital beds or rooms with medical equipment. They are uncomfortable. [There are] oxygen pumps and respirators and all kinds of stuff around, and of course they are often in pain and distress, so it’s very tricky. But the hospice group here in Washington County said they always wanted to have a dog, and maybe if I volunteer[ed] I could try one of my dogs, and it sort of clicked.



Our first patient was up in the Adirondacks where we went into this logger’s house, and Izzy was just unbelievable. He just completely stunned me by going into this very tiny room. The man was dying of prostate cancer, and was very sensitive to pain and was bedridden. Izzy hopped up into the hospital bed and maneuvered around all this machinery, put his head on his shoulder and just lay there. The guy started to cry and talk about his dogs he had had, really opened up and really came to terms with his own death through this dog. We came every day, and we were with him when he died.



Then Izzy turned to members of the family. It was an amazing experience. I have never seen anything like it. Izzy was so distraught when this person died that he actually went into the bed where he had been and lay there for a couple of hours, and the family went and comforted him. That was just a mind-blower for me. I really wish I could take more credit for it. I did a bit of training and reinforced the notion of going to people, but I didn’t do much.



Since then, Izzy has gone on to incredibly complicated cases, people with all kinds of cancers. We do a lot of dementia work. People want him there. They ask for him when they die.



OL: It seems Izzy isn’t afraid of death and suffering.



JK: Not at all. One very interesting thing is the way that, toward the end of the process when the patients begin to gather themselves to die, they lose interest in him.



OL: We are interviewing you for our American Health column. Do you think people are waking up to the fact that dogs can really help us?



JK: I think that therapy dogs are a great opportunity for Americans and American health, because the working dog is always looking for work and we don’t have so much for them anymore. Dogs don’t really need to protect us that much; we have burglar alarms, and there aren’t many people with sheep. I think this is a great role for working dogs like retrievers, Labs and Border Collies because they have been bred for thousands of years to work with people. They are very tuned in to people. It’s very good for them.



OL: Tell us about Lenore.



JK: Lenore. I was having a rough winter. I was a little down and a little depressed. I got this Lab puppy, Lenore, who I immediately called “the love dog.” This is one of those dogs who had the opposite experience of Izzy. Lenore had been loved and attended to from the minute she came on to the Earth—she had a wonderful breeder—and I got her when she was eight weeks old. She came to my farm and has had a pretty glorious life, and has responded by being a creature of incredible affection and empathy. She is very funny, she has a lot of personality, and she is a very generous dog, very affectionate.



So when I was first working with Izzy, I [also] got Lenore into hospice work, and I was a little nervous about it. I didn’t think she could do it because she is big and blocky, and can’t quite maneuver into these delicate situations the way Izzy can. Then she did calm down quite a bit, and I started training her a little more assertively, and then I found out that the way Lenore could be effective was [in the way] everybody just laughed when they saw her. So I could bring her into a hospice family situation [and] everybody was in a better mood.



Members of the family attach to her and she cuddles with the patients. She doesn’t have quite the empathic quality that Izzy does, but she had a huge impact on my life. I think of Golden Retrievers as having that quality, too—you just look at them and you kind of smile.



OL: You do smile.



JK: That’s great. That really is the new work of dogs in many ways. Most of us don’t have these traditional situations where dogs serve people, so what they do for us is they make us feel better. They give us a lot of love and affection. That is their work as well. So Lenore got her hospice certificate and went through the temperament training. She is doing some great work too. She did eat one patient’s cheeseburger.



OL: Having had dogs all my life, one of the heartbreaking aspects is that you watch them go from being born to going through all the periods of adolescence, adulthood and middle age in a decade or so. You watch them age. What advice do you have?



JK: Yes, it’s a very important subject for me. I think that this grief over dogs is a public health issue for people. When dogs used to be in the background of people’s lives, dogs kind of came and went. They got hit by cars. They ran off. They died and people just got another dog. Now, to many people it is like losing a child. Of course it is not like losing a child, but it often feels like that. People have a lot of trouble with it. I think this has become a real public health issue because there’s 72 to 73 million owned dogs and they don’t live as long as people, so this kind of animal grief is going to be experienced by a lot of people.



OL: I've noticed that some of my older friends associate their own health and vitality with the relative health of their dogs.



JK: Yes, and sometimes mistakenly. Dogs do make us feel better, and they really do a lot for us, but we sometimes exaggerate that in our affection for them. We need unconditional love and we don’t get it many places, and we get it from dogs.



OL: I always tell my friends to mourn for a year and then get a new puppy. Do you have any other advice?



JK: I do, actually. What I do when a dog dies is I go out and get another dog. Period. Because dogs don’t live very long, and I think the nature of dogs is to serve people; prolonged and painful grieving is not serving people. So I think if dogs had a consciousness about this—I am sure they don’t, but if they did—they would want people to go get another dog.

It’s very painful and it’s too bad, but get another dog. There are millions of dogs out there, dogs from breeders, dogs in kennels, dogs in shelters, dogs all over the place.