For the Love of a Dog (35 page)

I didn’t know much about Basenjis back then, but it was clear from the outset that the instructor had his hands full.
“Sit!”
he bellowed, as if the force of his voice alone could push the dog down toward the ground. The Basenji stood still, attending to a comely little Lhasa Apso across the room.
“I said sit!” the
instructor screamed, and after giving the dog less than a second to respond, jerked on the leash hard enough to whip him backward a couple of feet. Many of us gasped, the action seemed so aggressive, but the Basenji went still, and darted his head around to look the instructor full in the face.

If I’d known then what I know now, I would’ve seen it coming. Ignorant of the meaning of a stiffened body and a direct stare to the face, I was surprised by the growls that began deep inside the chest of the Basenji. The entire class heard the growls, and waited, breathless and still, to see what would happen next. We didn’t have to wait long. Now furious (and, I suspect, scared), the trainer jerked on the leash so hard he picked the dog up off the ground, all four feet dangling in the air. This was bad enough, but the dog had on the standard “training collar” used at the time, a slip collar that tightened continually as you pulled on it. The dog flailed in the air, strangling now as the collar got tighter and tighter, while the man continued to scream
“I said sit!”
I remember two things clearly: being appalled at what was happening in front of me while not knowing what to do about it, and being amazed at the athletic ability of the Basenji, who was somehow managing to
launch himself upward into the air, in an attempt to bite the instructor. This seemed to go on forever, as terrible things often do, until my own dog’s movements drew my attention off the center stage and onto him. Cosby had been sitting shoulder to shoulder with me, watching the drama unfold. He got up, turned his body away 180 degrees, lay down, and (I am not making this up), put his paws over his face. I took one look at him, the spell broken, and walked him to the car and drove home.

I called the instructor the next day, informing him I was dropping out of his class, even requesting my money back. I got the same response as did the Basenji, at least a verbal version of it. He explained to me, voice shaking, that I’d “better wise up, because the only way to get a dog to listen to you is to make them afraid of you.” What came across most clearly was his anger. He seemed to take any response other than the one he wanted as an intentional challenge to his authority, and it infuriated him.

Although few of us are that abusive, it is nonetheless very human to assume that a disobedient dog is willfully disrespecting us, when sometimes a dog is simply too afraid or confused to comply. This is an example of that “fundamental attribution error” we talked about in Chapter 1, in which we assume that the behavior of others is based more on their disposition (“He’s so stubborn!”) than on other factors (“He hasn’t learned to focus and he’s distracted by other things”).

It’s frustration that seems to be the cause of most of the anger directed toward dogs by their owners. The examples above may be extreme (although not as rare as one would wish), but who among us hasn’t been irritated by a dog who wouldn’t come when called, or by a pup who had yet another yucky messy accident in her crate? It’s human to be occasionally irritated with
anyone
we share our homes with, no matter how many legs they have. The question is, How do we handle that irritation and occasional anger? With patience, deep breaths, and a sense of humor, or with impatience and sparks of anger?

My concern about frequent expressions of anger is more than a politically correct fad. There is solid, scientific evidence that it elicits stress responses in animals who receive it, and stressed dogs are rarely well behaved. In a simple but elegant study, Amanda Jones showed that dogs who had been yelled at or pushed after running in an agility trial had
significantly higher cortisol levels than dogs who had been petted or played with. Cortisol is called the universal stress hormone, and its production is one of the results of an activated amygdala. High levels of cortisol not only ready the body for danger, they can overwhelm the body and brain and thus interfere with rational thinking. We’ve all had times we were so shook up we couldn’t think, when too much emotion simply shut down rational thought. A deeply scared dog, just like a scared person, is in no condition to be able to think clearly.

The handlers who pushed or yelled at their dogs after their agility run were only teaching their dogs to be stressed about what will happen the next time they leave the ring. The memories from the first run will increase the dogs’ cortisol production during the next one, causing overstimulation of the fear-driven amygdala, and making the dogs more likely to blunder the next time they compete. Don’t fool yourself: if you yell at your dog for something he did twenty seconds ago, you’re not training him; you’re merely expressing your own anger.

But we are all human, and few of us always react to our dogs as we wish we would every minute of every day. Just recently I yelled in frustration at wobbly, fifteen-year-old Pip. I wish I hadn’t. I had been bottle-feeding a lamb whose ancient momma didn’t have enough milk for him, and when the lamb finished the bottle, he looked up to discover that all the other sheep had disappeared. Panicked at having lost his flock, he began running haphazardly around the high pasture in an ovine version of hysteria. I sent Lassie to herd him down a narrow path through the woods toward his mother, but Pip stood dead center in the lamb’s way. I wasn’t worried about the lamb, I was worried about Pip. The lamb weighed far more than Pip and was on a path that guaranteed he’d slam into her full tilt in his dash down the hill to his momma. Worried about my old dog’s safety, I called Pip to come toward me so she’d be out of the lamb’s way. Pip was immobile, already nervous about the commotion in the pasture and wanting more than anything to walk away and go down the path toward home. I asked her again, confident that her aging ears still worked well enough to hear me. No response. Pip continued to stand stock-still while the lamb bounded
toward her like a huge, wooly soccer ball headed for the net. Frightened for her safety, and frustrated by my lack of influence, I finally screamed, in a nasty voice full of fear and anger,
“Pip [insert words better left un-written], get over here!”

Pip is the most sound-sensitive dog I’ve ever had, and as soon as I yelled at her, she began to trot away from me, still on the path, still directly in the lamb’s line of fire. Lassie saved the day by stopping the lamb before he barreled into Pip, and I eventually managed to catch up with Pip and escort her down the hill. She cheered up after we played her favorite ball game, and I assuaged my conscience by giving her an extra-long belly rub that night, but I still felt bad about yelling at her in anger. I’d done it because my own fear and frustration had resulted in a lost temper, and as soon as I did it, I knew it would only make her more scared than she already was.

It would have been easy to interpret Pip’s behavior as “disobedience.” I called her to come, and she didn’t. Some trainers would have told me to go to Pip and smack her for being so disobedient. “Do it or I’ll hurt you” is still a common philosophy in many areas of the world, including here in the United States. What’s seen as a dog’s blatant disregard of an owner’s wishes is considered a serious offense that deserves swift and decisive punishment. Some trainers will emphasize that punishment should never be done in anger, but the reality is that it usually is. In that sense, we’re not so different from dogs—combine emotional arousal with anger born of frustration, and the result isn’t pretty.

Certainly, Pip has had her moments of being stubborn over the years, but in this case she was truly and deeply scared. She’s fifteen, for heaven’s sake, and increasingly unsteady on her feet. Physically punishing her wouldn’t have made her more obedient, it would have made her more afraid than she already was. Even as a young dog, Pip was terrified of getting hurt, and no amount of force would ever have made her into a bold, gutsy dog; she was never any more capable of forcing an angry ram into the truck than she was of doing my taxes.

If Pip had lived her life in a home in which people had routinely responded to her “disobedience” with anger, I’d bet big money on what would have happened. She’d have turned into one of those pathetic dogs who hides under the porch whenever they can, or who ended up
“euthanized” for defensive aggression. As it is, she’s known far and wide as a sweet, loving dog who adores people and dogs, and whose gentle nature has rehabilitated scores of formerly aggressive dogs whose own fears got the better of them. Pip calmly and patiently brought these dogs out of their shells, becoming an invaluable worker in my consultation business. I bought her to be a herding dog, and I was sorely disappointed when she turned out to be worthless at the task. Little did I know then that Pip was designed for more valuable work, and that the time would come when I couldn’t imagine living without her.

I tell you this story because I think we need to be honest about our emotions around dogs, and acknowledge that they aren’t always what we aspire to. I’m as dewy-eyed as anyone about the relationship between people and dogs, but we must acknowledge that dogs can bring out the worst in us. Again, we are all human, so don’t lose sleep over an occasional outburst of anger when you were tired, scared, or just plain sick of cleaning up diarrhea on the oriental rug. An expression of anger is just that—an expression of a primal emotion ultimately necessary for survival. However, unless you happen to be fighting for your life, it’s rarely useful or effective when you’re training your dog.

I think what’s most important about anger and our relationship with dogs is to remember two things. First, remember the effect of emotional arousal on both you and your dog. You can train yourself, as experts in anger management will tell you, to stop and take a few breaths to lower your body’s overall arousal level. Keep in mind that the word “emotion” is just “motion” with another letter added on. Remember those cases in which police officers lost control only after long, highly arousing chases? If you start to feel yourself spiraling up into real anger, you can help calm yourself by slowing your body down. Stop moving, take some breaths, and, if you can, sit down for a second or two. There’s a reason that cops tell everyone to sit down when they enter the scene of a skirmish; sitting acts to deescalate emotions, and decreases the chance that arousal is going to turn into aggression.

The last thing you want to do if you think your dog is angry is to feed the fire with your own emotional arousal. If you’re faced with a dog who looks angry, or who is threatening you with a stiff body and an offensive pucker, it’s critical to stay calm yourself. I won’t say that yelling at your dog never works in a case like this; just about anything
works some of the time. I expect people could chant medieval incantations in hopes of putting a spell on their dog and, in some cases, somewhere, they would get the desired effect. However, most dogs are going to respond to yelling by increasing their own level of emotional arousal, and that’s not going to be to your advantage. Your best bet is to stay calm, move slowly and deliberately, and finesse your way out of the situation. If, for example, your dog has stolen your daughter’s favorite sweater and is now snarling and growling at you while he hovers over it, the last thing you want to do is start yelling “Bad dog!” while you get increasingly frantic about recovering it. You’re much better off staying calm, walking to the kitchen, getting an irresistible piece of food, and tossing treats across the room to get the dog away from the sweater. This won’t solve the problem, but it might prevent a bite. Then I’d review the family’s policy of preventing such problems, and learn how to teach my dog to drop an object when asked. Don’t try to solve the problem during the crisis; find a way to finesse yourself out of it. Child psychologists tell parents to work on their children’s problem behaviors when they’re not in the thick of things, and it’s invaluable advice for dog owners as well. Once dog and sweater are separated, sit down and figure out how to prevent that kind of problem in the future.

The second important lesson about anger and our relationship with dogs is that it is often born of frustration, and the less you know about dog training, the more likely you are to be frustrated by your dog. It’s amazing how we expect ourselves to be able to train dogs with virtually no training ourselves, but people do it all the time. No one blinks at sending their child to practice a sport three times a week, or is surprised when adults hire a coach to help them perfect their golf swing. And yet we expect that, without any prior knowledge or training, we can get individuals of another species to do whatever we want, whenever we ask. Given that we can’t come close to accomplishing that even within our species, it’s a mind-boggling assumption.

Perhaps we make that assumption because most of us expect our dogs to do what we ask, whether they’ve had any training or not. Many people seem to believe that dogs come to us able to read our minds and to translate whatever language we happen to be speaking in. Even worse is the cherished belief that dogs inherently want to “please” us. If that’s what you think, then you’re guaranteed to be frustrated if you expect
your dog to come when called, or to not jump up on visitors, without any training or practice. The good news is that dog training has evolved, and is full of humane and effective techniques that are as enjoyable for your dog as they are for you. In the References, I’ve listed a number of good resources that base their training on positive methods and that focus on teaching dogs what we want them to do, rather than punishing them for what we don’t. Many trainers now use food, play, and petting to condition dogs to do what we ask, and the difference between that and punishment-based training is like night and day. I can’t encourage you enough to learn how to use positive reinforcement to teach your dog to listen. It creates a relationship based on mutual enjoyment and trust, rather than one based on fear and intimidation. This isn’t touchy-feely New Age babble, as one trainer described it to me. It’s good psychology. All animals tend to act in ways that make them feel good. Once you learn to tap into that, you’ve learned to take advantage of animal behavior’s most basic and universal principle.