This Dog Will Change Your Life

Part 2 presents an array of personal and communal dog stories that emphasize the power of Building Community Around a Shared Love of Dogs. Preserving the formal and stylistic choices he uses in the Introduction and Part 1, Friedman grounds his arguments in Part 2 in his own experience. He first establishes how dogs have helped him create connections with other people, and then broadens this concept to the wider public. This formal approach implies that Friedman’s relationship with dogs is representative of dogs’ universal power and humans’ universal connection with the canine species.

According to Friedman’s experiential data, dogs offer the individual opportunities to overcome social anxiety and to make lasting forms of connection. He provides various examples from his own life—referencing stories from his childhood through his adulthood. As a self-proclaimed “textbook introvert,” Friedman emphasizes that his relationship with his dog Ruby taught him to communicate with and relate to others in important ways (105). At home, he “designed a kind of vaudeville act” with his dogs where he’d give voice to their feelings and narrate what he thought they’d say for his siblings (105). This seemingly innocuous childhood game was Friedman’s way of expressing himself via humor; it also helped him to bond with his loved ones in a way that felt comfortable for him. Walking Ruby around his childhood neighborhood “as a kid was like a dry run for [his] later life as The Dogist” (108). While Friedman tended to avoid human interaction and to clam up around people, with Ruby, he felt more comfortable engaging his neighbors and other local dog owners. Talking about Ruby and engaging in dog-based conversation helped Friedman feel more relaxed and more himself. These personal experiences capture how dogs might break down social barriers and allow people to connect in otherwise unnatural ways.

Friedman’s work as The Dogist further underscores the notion that dogs create community. In contemporary internet culture, Friedman holds that “[o]ur anonymity online” can make “us feel empowered to lob grenades at each other—to be ‘keyboard warriors’” (189). With The Dogist, Friedman seeks to promote a different online culture. Visiting The Dogist lets people communicate and “to genuinely connect” over their shared love for their pets (189). However, Friedman’s work with The Dogist translates to the real world, too. Friedman details many of the interactions, connections, and experiences he’s had since launching the online community in 2013. All of The Dogist’s posts originate from in-person encounters on the streets of the cities Friedman frequents or visits. When Friedman approaches people, he finds it both easy and fun to connect with strangers because they’re discussing a shared interest: dogs. These encounters have shown Friedman how lonely people are in contemporary society and how desperate they are for authentic connection. 

Friedman believes dogs, as inherently loving and authentic creatures, possess a unique ability to support and facilitate human connection in a culture that seems to quash it, underscoring the Transformative Power of Human-Canine Bonds. Therefore, dogs aren’t just an accessible conversation piece, but they’re temperaments offer humans important lessons about love and connection, too. For these reasons, The Dogist has become Friedman’s way of challenging the contemporary loneliness epidemic and offering people organic ways to meet and connect.

Friedman argues that dogs can facilitate communal communication and emotional vulnerability in the contexts of family, romance, and even grief, pointing to his thematic interest in Self-Discovery Through Animal Companionship. He writes, “Dogs teach sharing. Dogs teach coexistence. Dogs teach anger management and the importance of alone time. Dogs instill in children a profound awareness of a life that is not their own” (135). By way of example, Friedman references his clients’ shared love of dogs, his childhood dogs, the fur baby he shares with his fiancée, Sam, and the difficulties of saying goodbye to loved ones—human and canine alike. No matter how people acquire their pets, dogs consistently offer humans avenues to more effective relationships. 

To emphasize his point, Friedman invites the reader to visualize an example from their own experience, asking them to “Think back to your first puppy, or the first time you saw a kid with a puppy: snuggling up to it to feel its body heat, sensing its heart beating within, understanding that it is a living being with its own impulses and desires, its own emotions. […] dogs teach love” (135). In this passage, Friedman relies on pathos to facilitate his argument, appealing to his readers’ emotions to prove that dogs can facilitate empathy between humans and foster more sustainable human communities, allowing his formal technique to echo and enact his argument. By teaching individuals how to love, dogs resolve human conflict and compel care and connection. Friedman asserts that dogs are uniquely able to teach love and facilitate connection, but he doesn’t provide scientific data to prove this claim. Friedman’s reliance on the emotional over the logical (or scientific) reiterates his authorial desire to connect with his dog-loving audience in an uncomplicated way. His arguments are meant to resist divisiveness and facilitate togetherness—much like the very dogs he features in his work.