This Dog Will Change Your Life

The final section of the text explores the possibilities of Self-Discovery Through Animal Companionship. Throughout This Dog Will Change Your Life, Friedman highlights the many ways that dogs can rescue, redeem, heal, and connect people. In his third and final section, he underscores the ways that dogs might help the individual to find meaning and purpose, ushering them along their self-discovery journey and leading them to a more realized existence. He provides a series of anecdotes about dogs leading people to new jobs, dogs helping people to feel safer and more confident emotionally, dogs acquiring fighting and hunting skills, dogs offering people physical guidance, dogs offering people comfort, dogs saving people's lives, and dogs offering people hope. In all these ways, Friedman argues, dogs can validate a person’s sense of self. Some dogs facilitate vocational passions, while other dogs help people to remember the purpose, beauty, and wonder of being alive.

Friedman views his and his brothers’ dog-related careers as empirical proof that animal companionship can facilitate self-discovery. In Friedman’s personal experience, dogs have always been a central facet of how he’s understood himself. As a child, he learned how to communicate and relate to others via his relationships with his dogs. As an adult, he rediscovered the importance of dogs to his sense of self when he came up with the idea for The Dogist. Stuck in an unfulfilling, dead-end job, Friedman lacked a sense of direction in his life until he was laid off. Losing his job challenged him to identify what gave him meaning and to pursue this passion ardently. What resulted was The Dogist: “A parody site [of The Sartorialist] that [would] be its own content, obviously, but more than that—a new identity for [Friedman]” (201). Friedman’s Instagram page wasn’t an idle pastime, but a concrete way for him to solidify his authentic sense of self and to translate his identity to the world. 

Once Friedman followed this innate passion, he found a fulfilling vocational path, an authentic sense of self, and a hopeful and meaningful future, underscoring the Transformative Power of Human-Canine Bonds. As Friedman writes, “Dogs not only changed [his] life but changed what [he] thought of as life” (204). Discovering his true passion gave him a new perspective on his past endeavors that pushed him to take action and change his life for the better: “The fact that I failed at being premed and failed at my marketing job and survived gave me the courage to take a bigger risk.” To underscore the importance of prioritizing one’s passion, Friedman quotes comedian and actor Jim Carrey’s 2014 commencement speech at the Maharishi University of Management: “You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love” (204). For Friedman, what he loved was dogs. 

As Friedman rebuilt his life around this love, he experienced the benefits of this approach, garnering the knowledge and confidence to encourage his brother along a similar path. Henry’s experience emphasizes the benefits of Building Community Around a Shared Love of Dogs. With Friedman’s help, Henry also rediscovered his love for dogs. His online-documented travels with Finn have since afforded Henry a way to connect more people with more dogs, while giving him a fulfilling sense of self, too. In these ways, Friedman implies, dogs can inspire people to be as authentic as they are. Dogs’ guileless natures help people to perceive the world more openly and embrace their authentic dreams.

Friedman argues that dogs help their owners build confidence, which equips them to connect with others. No matter who the individual is, Friedman argues, dogs can “help people to define and then refine their identities while deepening and strengthening their relationships” (208). Friedman’s allusions to police dogs, hunting dogs, emotional support dogs, seeing-eye dogs, and facility dogs further exemplify how dogs can transform people’s lives and give them the love they need to be themselves. By sharing a varied set of examples, Friedman indicates that dogs are malleable and diverse creatures. There are so many dog breeds with so many innate temperaments and trainable skills that he believes every kind of human can find a dog who fits their personality and needs. 

For Friedman, dogs possess an inherent ability to promote both physical and emotional health in their human counterparts—spheres Friedman represents as equally important. He credits dogs’ inherently loving and loyal natures as the catalyst for the emotional growth owners experience from the human-canine bond:  “Being unconditionally loving and supportive, being unabashedly affectionate, being entirely present in the moment,” Friedman asserts, “is a job as central to survival as searching and rescuing” (241). Because love, support, and affection are essential to human survival, dogs allow humans to survive. While not grounded in hard data or scientific fact, Friedman’s sweeping array of experiential evidence allows the text to close on this hopeful, heartwarming note. The text offers the reader as much comfort as Friedman believes any live dog companion can.