The Titanic Challenge: What Can We Do About Dogs?

You can take my dog when you pry him from my frozen dead body in the icy North Atlantic.

There were 12 dogs aboard the Titanic. Three of them, two Pomeranians and a Pekingese, survived. Fifty-year-old Ann Isham refused to get into a lifeboat without her large dog (possibly a Great Dane). Passengers on the German liner Bremen later saw a woman in a lifejacket with her frozen arms wrapped around a large dog bobbing in the waves but neither were recovered. Elizabeth Barrett Rothschild was able to save her Pomeranian but lost her husband, a Rothschild heir and garment industry founder in New York City. It is said that the Pomeranian jumped from Elizabeth’s arms after disembarking Carpathia in New York and was run over by a carriage, which conjures images of A Fish Called Wanda.

Our relationship with our pets, and particularly dogs, is a difficult one to unwind.

I’d call it a form of the solastalgia described in my 1990 book, Climate in Crisis. Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by rapid and uncontrollable environmental change. We quietly grieve for the loss of the natural world. We’ve feel a connection deep in our genetic makeup — a broken strand of an inner web. Restoring a connection to animals — a different kind of intelligence than our own — mends our link to the wild.

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Many of us are in a love-hate relationship with nature. Those who enjoy hiking, camping, and wilderness outings relate to the natural world in one way or perhaps along a spectrum of emotions, from deep respect and reverence to challenging adrenalin-pumping risk-taking. Others regard the wild world as antiquated at best, or a nostalgic fiction at worst.

Nature may inspire in some of us a measure of fear. In others, a healthy respect for the dangers of the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.