Bad Dog (20 page)

Petra and Tyler proceed to pace through the English practice of heeling patterns at three different speeds—superslow, normal, and fast.

What am I seeing: a simple heeling pattern. Tyler trots off leash next to Petra with his head slightly in front of her left
knee, his eyes watching her face—purely the grace of the body, a tension of moving and forgetting, because at Crufts you can’t say a word to your dog during the entire five-minute heeling pattern: only hand cues are allowed.

The judge whispers instructions to Petra, who leads Tyler through the figures: “Left, right, halt, about, circle left, halt, straight.”

The ideal impression should be that the dog is attached to the handler by a magnet. An invisible line. Which, in a way, he is. The dog is so eager, yet calm, with no reinforcement at all. Doing what it has been trained to do, for years now. Just as athletic as Petra, just as focused on her as she is on him.

It will tell you something about how seriously I am taking this unbelievable showcase of human-canine teamwork that when they are done I wonder why it is my new glasses are so terrible and I realize that my eyes are filling up with tears.

S
HORTLY AFTER
Meet the Breeds, Petra Ford became the two-time winner of the AKC’s most prestigious competitive obedience event, the National Obedience Invitational, with her black Labrador retriever, NOC2 OTCh Count Tyler Show Me the Money UDX4 OM1, called Tyler. I spoke to her shortly after her historic second win.

“The invitational is a tough event. Day one each team does six rounds of Open and Utility,
*
plus the long stays. Second day it’s head-to-head elimination rounds. The final two teams do full rounds of Open and Utility. So you’re in the ring like twelve times over the two days. And if you make what’s called a substantial—a major error—you’re basically out. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure on the dog and the handler.

“Mentally, it’s very draining, stressful for the dog. They can totally descend to that environment. They pick up on everything; they’re dogs, you know. Tyler acts different there than he does anywhere else. He’s a different dog. It’s hard to relax, but also the waiting and going in again—start and stop. I didn’t really watch the other people. I don’t watch. The second day I
don’t talk to anybody really. We come out of the ring. I have my friend Stella there who helps me. She has Tyler’s favorite toy. We give it to him as a reward, and we go out into the hallway.

“We do a lot of physical work. Before 2008, I started Tyler on the treadmill, increasing the speed and the incline. We did about twenty minutes three times a week, tapering down before the competition. This year we also did it underwater. We conditioned longer this year. I had a lot of dog—maybe too much dog.

“What I like is a happy working dog. Where I train in New Jersey, we emphasize the importance of the dog being happy. A lot of trainers will just get caught up in drilling their dog. What’s the point of that, huh?”

“I got into the sport late. Didn’t have any pets as a kid. My mother would not let me get a dog. I was a professional cyclist. I did all right, I guess. My mental state was terrible, very bad. I was always down on myself, feeling like I was no good, that I wasn’t going to win.

“I started training for serious with my yellow Lab, Duncan. I wanted to do agility, but I went somewhere and it wasn’t motivating. I found this place in the phone book and drove out there. Started taking privates with a teacher there. I just retrained Duncan from the ground up. He really started liking it. Then I got Tyler. I know he’s my once-in-a-lifetime special dog.

“We keep the training interesting. Every day I have a couple things I want to accomplish. Specific goals for that day. As soon as he does them two or three times, we move on. Always end on a positive note. Every exercise is broken in little pieces. And I use rewards. When he does it right, he’ll get a reward, a toy, a game. I mix up the rewards.

“The big difference came because we did a huge amount of
mental work. I used to be just in a terrible place mentally. In the ring I was always nervous, always negative, not confident at all. Just like when I was cycling. I began to realize, if I was going to ask my dog to perform at an optimum level, I had to ask the same thing of myself. So I got that book
It’s Not Just About the Ribbons
.
*
Did the exercises in that book, the visualizations. I started to visualize us doing the perfect exercise, being calm, working together. It made a huge difference. I took that very seriously.

“I have to stay very still in the ring, very calm. Tyler will feed off the energy, and if I give him anything he’ll run with it. I have to stay totally focused and quiet. People can’t even hear me talking to him in the ring.
^†
But I do.”

P
ETRA
F
ORD OPENS A DOOR
in my heart: she shows me that dog training is a form of art and an act of love. I’ve never seen two beings listen so carefully to each other or care so much. I think of Gloria. I think of Hola.

Humility is not thinking less of myself. It is thinking of myself less.

Then I call the AKC and try to set up a real interview with Mary Burch. What I want is some inside help with item #10. Needless to say, the AKC, being practiced operant conditioners, do what trainers do when confronted with a behavior they want to go away: they ignore me. As Lorena said, ignoring attention seeking is the highest form of dominance.

As the silence from the organization whose slogan is “We’re more than champion dogs, we’re the dog’s champion” all but bites me in the leg, I focus on getting more of what trainers call “persistence, frequency, and duration” from my dog. At night, after our walk, I have her do sit-stays in front of our building. I choose a spot with maximum traffic, where we can test her ability to maintain the stay. Even when there is actual canine-human eye contact and—her aphrodisiac—a smile.

One night, a Friday, I am drilling her in the lobby as a stream of my neighbors surges past, returning from work.

“Hello,” I say. “Hello, hello.”

“She’s doing well,” they say. “Much better. Keep it up.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I pet her?” ask others, the ones who don’t know her well.

“We’re working on her manners.”

“Oh.”

Our doorman Jesus is standing at a respectful distance, sideways, like a real dog person, using a calming posture.

“Looks like she’s doing better,” he says, watching her sit. “Getting more consistent with the attention. You been working her a lot.”

“She’s a good girl,” I say.

“You should show Gloria.”

“She’s not around.”

“I know,” he says. Of course he knows; doormen in Manhattan co-ops know more than the tenants do about their lives. “You should show her. She’d be real impressed. We miss her around here.”

“Uh-huh,” I say. “Uh-huh.”

So the next morning, we rent yet another car and drive two hours west to the Rock House, and I don’t call ahead or alert the media, which for the entire duration of the drive, I am pretty sure is a stupid thing to do.

I can’t call my friend Clark, who is in a twenty-eight-day detox unit upstate, so I jingle his sponsor, Darryl, who is reliably more romantic than sensible.

“You’re surprising Gloria with a drive-by?” he says. “That’s actually kind of sweet.”

“Are you sure? Do you think she’ll think I’m checking up on her?”

“Hey, she’s your wife, right? You Catholics are married for life.”

“She’s not Catholic.”

“Pray for her.”

Some people call around to get the advice they’ve already given themselves. I don’t have to bother. I get it first time out.

Winter falls earlier in the high Catskills, which always seems to be about twenty degrees cooler and two centuries older than the city.

Vegetation thins as we plunge into Sullivan County, and, as if from a spring toy, billboards appear for well drillers, ambulance chasers, and the casinos and racetrack of Monticello. It’s a region that hasn’t been prosperous in half a century, since air-conditioning and affordable air travel to Florida destroyed the need for a nearby summer vacation place for the tristate middle class. It’s been reduced to a string of derelict towns and abandoned campgrounds that are rented by ultraorthodox Jews, the kind too strict to make eye contact with me.

Still, it’s very restful up there, maybe because nobody has any money and all the yards, and children, need a little work. Abandoned, empty shells of farmhouses push up against the road, on which every second vehicle is an eighteen-wheeler hauling a crane, a backhoe, or raw lumber for a building site.

I stop at the Mobil station at the intersection near our house, across from the decrepit motor lodge with the rusting wrecked cars, sitting like forgotten sculptures from some 1960s conceptual art show, in its weed-choked parking lot.

“Wait here, Hola,” I say, as I always do. “I’ll be right back.”

You got it
, she seems to say.
I’m in the zone
.

She’s been a good girl all the way up, not whining much since we crossed the G. W. Bridge, sleeping through most of New Jersey, later lustily eyeing the open fields and BBQ stands along the desolate expanse of Route 17B past the trotting track.

The guy behind the register at the Mobil Mini-Mart is an old,
bow-legged Pakistani named Prahad. I know him well from all the summer weekends I’ve spent out here over the years.

“Long time,” he says, ringing up my seltzer and Slim Jim.

“Yup.”

“Your wife is here. Came in a while ago.”

“How is she?”

He eyes me curiously; it is, I suppose, a puzzling question to come from a husband.

“Good,” he says. “Pretty happy.”

This is not music to my ears.

“Hola,” I say, as we drive the twisting half mile past the ice-cream-and-chicken stand to the house, “what if Mommy doesn’t want to see us.”

She’ll want to see me
, she says.
Everybody loves me
.

“Don’t count on it, girlfriend.”

Do you think she made crab cakes?

The Rock House sits on a massive boulder, the result of glacial runoff millennia ago, amid a thin forest of trees grown to extraordinary height to capture rare fingers of light. During any of the frequent rainstorms in the area, one of these trees often splits with a crack and topples, leaving us with a strange prehistoric backyard of dense rotting tree trunks and fungi that never see sun.

As Hola and I pull up the hill to the house, I see our blue Echo parked near the front door.

Fallen leaves are piled up on the hill next to the little shed and around the house, as though someone got tired of raking them up. I stop the car and study the house: the same white trim around a bright red door, the new shingled roof that never leaks, a polite stream of smoke coming out of the fireplace indicating the lady of the house is home.

“This was a mistake,” I say to Hola. “We should have called first.”

Well
, she says,
we’re here now. We own this place. Let’s go have some lunch
.

“Gloria’s gonna be mad.”

Maybe she cooked something nice. She’s an excellent chef. Chicken?

I open the back door of the rental car and let Hola out, snapping on her harness, just as Gloria emerges through the red door.

“W
ELL, HELLO,
” she says, without obvious signs of annoyance. “I didn’t know you two were coming.”

I look at her. She is more beautiful than I have been dreaming: well rested, calm, slim but not gaunt like she gets in the city, wearing her tan riding pants and a blue hunter vest buttoned neatly to her neck, her hair tied back in a pony tail. She looks wary, perhaps, but not clearly angry, holding her riding hat under her arm.

Now, we go into action.

“Okay, Hola,” I say. “Let’s show Gloria what we can do. Sit.”

I can see Hola’s mind moving: she wants badly to run to her mommy, but she hesitates long enough for me to
grrr
and snap the leash.

She sits, and I have her attention.

“Good girl,” I say.

I give her the signal to stay, flat palm down in front of her nose. Leaving Hola, I walk up to Gloria and say, “Hello.”

Watching the dog carefully, she takes my hand and shakes it.

“Hello,” she says. “What are you doing?”

“Watch this.”

I go back to Hola as calmly as I can and say her release word:
Okay
.

She stands, her head shifting rapidly back and forth between my face and Gloria’s. I need to keep her focused here.

“Heel,” I say, tucking my left arm at my side and walking straight ahead.

She follows me, looking up to see if I have anything for her.

“No treats,” I whisper. “Heel.”

We do a right turn, an about-turn, a left, and then I stop.

I say nothing.

She sits—the automatic sit so beloved of obedience types. Every time the handler stops, the dog sits without being asked, without a signal.

“Down,” I say, lifting my hand out in front of her, and she drops.

“Stay,” with the signal. I walk ten yards, twenty yards, without looking back. I know Gloria is thinking the same thing I am at that moment: there is a road at the end of our driveway, and nothing between Hola and it but her training.

I am not afraid, though; I feel in my heart she will stay, and she does.

“Hola, come,” I say, and she runs toward me, finishing with a sit in front of me, looking up.