How dogs create a bond with the homeless.

How dogs create a bond with the homeless.
AS IT DOES IN many cities in the western world, there are thousands of homeless people living on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city in Brazil. They include families, children, lonely men and women, old and young. Many have been homeless for years with little prospect of leaving, especially now that the country faces increasing economic difficulties , met with often cruel austerity measures . Homeless people are abundant in most neighborhoods, including the more upscale ones frequented by tourists.
Homelessness in Rio is in many ways virtually identical to how it manifests itself in other major cities: it involves unimaginable material and emotional deprivation, hopelessness, social invisibility, and total isolation. But one aspect of Rio's homeless population stands out: a large number of them have dogs that previously lived desperate and unwanted lives on the streets.
Many have lived on the street with their dogs for years. They care for them just as well as, and in many cases better than, the average middle-class family with a pet. The deep bond that forms between them is unlike anything else you can find and is therefore deeply revealing.
Some of the homeless are couples who care for their dogs like their children. Still others are protected by their dogs while sleeping in dangerous areas, while some put their dogs to work with them while they beg for alms or put on shows for donations. But in all cases, the brutality of homelessness combines with the dogs' particular ways of relating to humans to create a remarkable emotional and psychological connection that often saves the lives of both.
Rio, of course, is not the only city where people living on the streets care for street dogs. Leslie Irvine is a sociology professor at the University of Colorado who has devoted much of her academic career to studying this unique relationship, including why so many homeless people credit their dogs with "changing or saving their lives." Her book on the subject, My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals ( just released in paperback ), documents how "homeless people report levels of attachment to their animals that may exceed those found among the domiciled public."
There is a US-based non-profit group "completely focused on feeding and providing emergency veterinary care to homeless pets," and estimates that at least between 5% and 10% of the US homeless population lives with pets; in some areas, as much as 25%. There are occasional U.S. media reports highlighting how many homeless people insist that "their animal companion is their best friend and oxygen without which life would not be worth living."
This issue also allows us to better understand the universal human need for love, companionship, and social integration; the destructively false nature of the stereotypes we implicitly embrace about humans living on the street; and the special ability of dogs to penetrate, touch, and fill the exact emotional and psychological realms that humans often more vigilantly protect.
It is common to see homeless people take plates of food that someone gives them and, despite being hungry, instantly split them in half and give them to their dogs (hence the name of Irvine's book: My Dog Always Eats First ). It is equally common to see homeless people in squalid clothing sitting next to their well-groomed canines. Many of their dogs stay awake while the human sleeps to protect themselves from thieves or other threats, something of great value in many parts of Rio. The homeless person and the homeless dog meet and bond in shared deprivation and self-sacrifice, meeting needs that would otherwise be completely neglected. Caregiving is not a one-way street; it is mutual.
When homeless people talk about their relationship with their dogs, they are very clear about their value. Many - probably most - identify the worst part of homelessness as not being the material struggle, but the invisibility and total social isolation. Most people, out of a combination of guilt and fear, simply pretend that the homeless are not there, passing them on the street without even registering their existence. This process is dehumanizing in the purest form: they are not even visible to other humans, much less worthy of communion. They have no social function or role; it is total detachment.
For sociologists like Irvine, dogs serve as a "social facilitator": bringing people together who would otherwise never interact. "When people talk about their dogs," she said, "all differences disappear and people are on equal footing. For a homeless person whose existence is almost always ignored, that has incomparable value."