Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (3 page)

A black dog's prayers
With an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the iife of things.
william wordsworth

I believe that I have seen dogs praying to whatever
gods dogs pray to, their
prayers as silent but surely as heartfelt as our
own. And this dog was praying for the leash to break. He
did not strain against the tether that bound him to his owner
but sat quietly as far away as the long tracking
lead allowed. He sat with his back to us, a gleaming
black stillness of dog against the lush green field.
As he stared intently across the pasture and beyond, I
had no doubts that should the leash break, his escape
route was already plotted. The pasture fence that stood
between him and freedom served more as a reminder than a
meaningful barrier, meant to contain only content dogs
who did not pray such prayers and my
gentle, elderly horses, who obeyed even a thin
string as a boundary. In my mind's eye, this dog would
clear the sagging wire fence with one effortless bound and be
gone, a black arrow moving quickly away from us
to somewhere more interesting. But his prayers went
unanswered, and so he sat, the uninterested blankness
of his back a clear message to us as we watched
him.
If dogs do pray, it may be that they pray as we
do, for what we long for, for what we need, and for
solutions to situations they can neither solve nor
escape. Not all dog prayers are serious ones.
My husband's Golden Retriever, Molson,
prays frequently and gleefully while we are
cooking. As far as we can tell, she prays for us
to drop entire cartons of eggs (which we sometimes do),
to lose control of whatever is on the cutting board
(which happens frequently),
and for us to turn our attention away from fresh bread
cooling on the counter (we are slow learners).
Molson sometimes smiles in her sleep, and we
suspect that she is remembering our wedding day, a
day when her prayers were answered in a way that may
well rank as one of the greatest moments of her
life.
The wedding cake had been carefully transported
home to the farm, where we were to be married, and placed
in the cool of the basement, an area unavailable to the
dogs. The cake's arrival and resting place did
not escape Molson's notice. Ever watchful,
she waited for her opportunity amidst the chaos of
preparations for an at-home wedding and reception.
Inevitably, someone left a door open, and without
drawing any attention to herself, Molson seized the
moment and disappeared.
I had finished bathing the horses so that they looked
beautiful for their part in the ceremony, and as I
stepped into the basement to put away the bucket and
sponge, I was surprised to be greeted
by Molson. The ecstatic look on her face was
quickly explained by the mound of icing on her nose.
Groaning with disbelief, I looked at the cake, which
now read, "Congratulations Suzanne and-"The
entire corner of the cake with John's name had been
eaten. For a long superstitious moment, I stood
wondering if this was an omen to be heeded or some form of
canine commentary on our wedding plans. (our
guests, when served the mutilated cake, also
ventured a few interpretations, but they
nonetheless ate the cake without hesitation.) Never before
or since have Molson's food prayers been
answered in such a spectacular way. But she
continues to pray, and sometimes, the kitchen gods
answer.
Molson's prayers are simple ones, easy
to interpret. But this black dog's prayers were
complicated ones, filled with sorrow and anger and
love and pain. To step into a dog's mind requires
that you step into his paws and see the world through his eyes.
To understand his prayers, you must look for what lights his
entire being with joy, and look also for what dims that
light. As I talked with Wendy, the dog's owner,
I was searching for an understanding of what might make a
dog hold himself apart from us. He was clearly loved
and cared forwith meticulous attention come inch of his body
glowed with well-being, and there was no evidence of his
past, when he wandered a city's street, unloved and
fending for himself. The intervening years of good food and
love had polished this nameless street urchin into a
handsome, funny and intelligent dog named Chance. And
yet there he sat, removed from us, his mind
distant and uninterested. Something had gone wrong; why
else would a dog pray as he did for the leash to break
so that he might gallop away?
Any relationship is a complicated thing at best,
springing as it does from an intersection of two
lives; two sets of desires, interests and
fears; two different perspectives and understandings of the
shared world. In our relationships with animals, we
find additional mysteries of other languages and
cultures quite unlike our own. While the differences
between us and animals both charm and attract, they also
serve to complicate the whole affair. I am quite
certain that every dog on earth goes to his grave
mystified by certain human behaviors. My own
dogs adore water in any form except that which is
found in a bathtub accompanied by dog shampoo. As
a result, they are very often wet, especially in the
summer when their wading pool is constantly available
to them. While on most nights I welcome the comfort
of their warm bodies as I sleep, there is something
less than delightful about snuggling up to hot, wet
dogs. As I shoo them from bed for reasons they cannot
comprehend, they throw themselves on the floor with
dramatic sighs and expressions that reveal the truth
of John Steinbeck's comment, "I have seen
a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look
of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that dogs think
humans are nuts."
Whatever dogs may think of us, it is also true that
it is no easy matter to have an intimate
relationship with an animal who communicates in
variations on a theme of ears and tail, who mutters
under his breath in dark rumbles when displeased, and who
enjoys rolling in decomposing creatures. But for
all the difficulties and differences that lie between us and
our dogs, we love them, and we want to understand them.
We look at our dogs and they look back, and the
sense that our dogs are trying to speak to us is
unshakable. Equally unshakable is the nagging feeling
that we often fail to understand what they have to say. We
are right on both counts. But what we long for is not
necessarily what we get, at least not without having
to learn some hard lessons along the way.
What Wendy wanted from Chance was companionship and more
of the joyful connection she had shared with her first dog,
Mel. What she
got were knots in her stomach and a very complex
relationship with a dog she loved but did not understand. This
was not Wendy's first experience in dog ownership. Her
first dog, Mel, had died at the grand age
of nearly seventeen years old, every one of those years
spent as Wendy's constant companion through troubled
teenage years and into young adulthood. Confident,
gentle, intelligent, Mel was easily trained, and
her excellent manners-no matter what the
situation-made her welcome everywhere. Whether on the
leash or off, Mel was never far from Wendy, quick
to respond to any command. Wendy had only to ask, and
Mel gave all that was in her power to give. In
everything she did, this dog lived as if she had but one
purpose in life: to be with the person she loved most
and make her happy.
When Mel died, Wendy's grief was immense; she
had truly lost her best friend. She did not want
another dog-somehow, this seemed disloyal to Mel. But
as her grief became unmanageable, and the emptiness
left by Mel's death became more insistent, she began
to consider another dog. One morning, on impulse,
she drove to the county animal shelter, hoping to find
a dog who needed a second chance at life. And
there he was, his face so much like Mel's that she
knew instantly that this dog was coming home with her. But
from the very first moments, Chance made it clear that he was
not Mel; he was a decidedly different dog.
Ten months old, Chance had already spent
six of those months in the shelter, surrounded by the
chaos and sadness of so many unwanted animals, his
world limited to what he could see from the confines of the
narrow kennel run. Set free in Wendy's living
room that first day, he was overwhelmed and could only
spin in circles, the same behavior he had used
in the kennel to entertain himself, the only game he
knew. For hours, Wendy watched in amazement and
then growing dismay as he paced and circled, unable
to relax until she put him in a crate where he
promptly fell asleep, exhausted. He did not
understand this new freedom; he only understood the
limited world of confinement. Nothing in Wendy's
experience prepared her for this challenge. As she lay
in bed after the first exhausting day of trying to help
Chance learn about the newer, larger world she could offer
him, she wearily asked herself, "Who knew dogs were
so much work?" Looking back, she says now that if
Chance had been her first dog, she probably would have
returned him to the shelter. But she did not take him back to that
terrible place. Mel had taught her what was
possible, and Wendy was determined to find a
way to help Chance enjoy the same life and the same
freedoms that Mel had enjoyed.

For all his problems, Chance blossomed under
Wendy's patient care. In their first obedience
class, he proved himself a quick learner, and they
graduated at the top of their class. At the next
level of training, problems began to appear. Though
extraordinarily precise and happy in their
practice at home, Chance seemed capable of
only three responses in class: He performed
well, he lay down as if in complete surrender,
or-given the opportunity-he bolted away. This
puzzled Wendy. How could a dog who worked so well
at home be such a problem in training class?
Trying to understand his paradoxical behavior, she
received a bewildering array of assessments. One
trainer informed her that his problems were the result of a
nervous system that didn't develop correctly
due to having spent six months in the shelter.
While she agreed that perhaps he had missed
important puppyhood experiences, Wendy could not
understand how this explained why his behavior was so
different outside of class. Surely if this was a
lack of proper development, the behavior would
appear in many contexts. Another trainer,
pointing to Chance as he lay on the floor, labeled
him "fearful and submissive." Yet another
trainer claimed Chance's frustrating behavior
sprang directly from his "will to displease"-that while the
dog knew what he was supposed to do, he was
deliberately choosing to be obstinate. And each
offered different solutions for the problem, none of which
made sense to Wendy and none of which ultimately
made any difference in her dog's behavior.
It seemed to Wendy that she owned two dogs-the
exasperating dog she had in training class and the
funny, intelligent dog who lived with her. She
desperately wanted to understand Chance and to give him the
life and freedoms she wanted him to have. Like countless
dog owners trying to understand their dogs, Wendy asked
every question she could think of. She asked about the dog's
health (he had a few allergies and she adjusted his
diet), tried to figure out how his mind worked (were
food or toys or some reward the best way
to restore his enthusiasm for working with her?], considered
his puppyhood and everything he had missed while
living at the shelter. She even tried to figure out
what breed characteristics might be floating around in his Heinz
57 background-was his behavior in part a genetic
legacy? And like so many determined, loving owners,
Wendy tried different training methods and training
equipment, hoping to find the magic technique or
perfect collar that would resolve the conflicts.
Telling herself that these were the experts who knew more than
she did (or why would she be having these problems?)
she ignored the uneasiness in her heart when trainers
recommended techniques that seemed harsh to her. But
no matter what book she read or what trainer she
turned to, no matter how many questions she asked, the
answers were not what she was hoping to find. Though she
did not know it yet, the answer was always right in front
of her, clearly written in her dog's eyes. She
simply didn't know what the question was.
In Douglas Adams'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
series, there is a running gag where the characters are
reminded, "The answer is forty- two." What no
one knows, of course, is what the question is to which that is
the answer. Not surprisingly, whatever questions are
proposed turn out to be the wrong ones. The people who
come to me or any other trainer are looking for
answers. But sometimes, even though the answer
is right before them, they are asking the wrong questions.

magic knots
At a seminar years ago, I was asked to work with a
difficult and very powerful dog. After perhaps half an
hour, I had him sitting quietly beside me, able
to control himself no matter who ran in or out of the
door or who walked by with another dog. This was
tremendous progress for a dog who earlier that day
had literally blown the door off a crate and bounded
across the room to grab another dog. We had started
our work with the dog wearing his usual leash, a massive
thing that would have been entirely appropriate for
restraining an elephant. As the dog had relaxed
and learned some self-control, I had switched
to lighter and softer leads, first a sturdy but light
canvas lead and, finally, dredged up from the bottom
of my bag, a thin leather lead with many knots. I
remember being surprised when someone handed me this
lead-it was my "show" lead, used only when showing my
German Shepherds, the knots useful
in maintaining a grip on the lead. But it was suitable
for my use with this dog, and I thought nothing more about
it-all I really wanted was the lightness in
my hand.
The dog's progress was remarkable, and I could see
wheels turning in many audience members' heads.
Mentally, I thanked the dog for having given such a
lovely demonstration of how quickly simple concepts
could translate into changes in a dog's behavior
without the need for force or punishment. "Any questions?"
I asked the audience. A woman raised her hand,
frowning a bit as she said, "I can see that really
made a difference. But I'm not sure how to apply
that to my own dog." Before I could shape an answer,
she continued, "Where exactly do you tie the knots?"
The knots? I stared stupidly at her, completely
stumped, unable to answer her at all. She leaned
forward and pointed at the dog. "He got much better
after you used the leash with the knots. What I want
to know is exactly where I should tie the knots in my
leash. Is there a specific formula you use
depending on the dog's size?"
My husband later pointed out that I should not have laughed
while trying to explain that it was only an accident that
my show lead was even in my training equipment bag.
Right then and there, he noted with a Barnumesque side
I hadn't seen before, I might have sold her (at a
hefty price no doubt) a "Magical
Knots" lead, or at least have offered to customize
a Magical Knots lead for her and her own dogs.
Even though she had watched me at every step as the dog
progressed, she had latched onto the lead as the
key ingredient in my success with the dog and so had
been stuck in the wrong question, "Where exactly do you
tie the knots?"
All of us, at some time or another, in a variety
of ways, ask about the magic knots. What we
really want to know is how to deepen and enhance the
connection between ourselves and our dogs, how to encourage the
moments where we and our dogs move together through life in
harmony and mutual understanding. Books and videos can
tell us how to teach them tricks or how to stop our
dogs from digging in the garden or can help us care for
them throughout their lives. And we read all that and
impatiently shake our heads, because there's something
else we want, something else we're actually
trying to ask when we ask about magic knots. Though
we may not be able to articulate it, what we want
is what Antoine de Saint-Exupery described in
Wind, Sand and Stars:
"Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in
looking outward together in the same direction."