Born to Bark (20 page)

Since Joan and I both worked fairly long hours away from home, we kept Flint confined by a baby gate in the kitchen during the day, although eventually, when he was housebroken, he would have the run of the house. I spread some newspapers near the door to the backyard. These were initially marked with a bit of Flint’s urine, to attract him to that spot if he had to go during the day. After a couple of weeks I would generally come home to dry newspapers. I believe that he learned to keep from messing inside because it was never rewarded. On the other hand, he knew that when I
arrived home, I would immediately rush him out to do his business and he would get a treat for doing it outside.

There were a couple of “accidents.” One weekend, both Joannie and I were at home but attending to household chores. Suddenly, I heard Joan’s voice raised in anger. I rushed to see what was wrong and found her bent over Flint. She had pushed his face down to the floor an inch or so from the edge of a suspicious puddle and was yelling “Bad dog!” at him.

“Joannie, just let him go. I’ll take care of it,” I said.

“He’s got to learn not to go in the house. He is so arrogant. He looked right at me and peed on the floor,” she replied angrily.

“Punishing him isn’t going to work. He’ll just learn that he can’t go in front of people, so he’ll find hidden places to mess. It might create other problems, like making him reluctant to go when he is being walked, because he feels he might get punished for being seen when he’s peeing.”

“Look,” she said, “this is the way people have house-trained dogs for centuries. If the dog makes a mess, you show it to him or push his nose in it, and punish him. That way he learns not to do it in the future.”

“Do you remember Anne—she works in the library on c
ampus?”
I asked. “She and her husband Angus have a Labrador retriever named Trixie. Anyway, I ran into her a while ago and she told me that she was having trouble with her dog. It started out as a simple housebreaking situation. If the pup peed on the floor, Angus would grab Trixie, shove her nose in the urine, yell at her, give her a swat on her rump, and then throw her out of the open kitchen window into their yard [which is where they want her to go when she needs to eliminate]. Angus is a big man and the whole procedure was probably pretty traumatic for the dog. So instead of sto
pping her from urinating, this procedure actually produced a different kind of urination. When Angus would first come into the house after being away for a while, Trixie would look at him, cringe down, and pee. Animal behaviorists call this submissive urination, and dogs sometimes do this when they are frightened by somebody or some situation. Angus insisted that he would solve her behavior problem the traditional way and continued his routine of yelling, slapping, shoving her nose in it, and then tossing her out the kitchen window.

“According to Anne, it really didn’t work at all and now they have a new problem. Whenever Angus enters the house now, Trixie runs over to him, pees on the floor, and then jumps out the kitchen window.”

Joannie looked at me as though I had been speaking a foreign language and replied, “I never even thought about throwing him out of the window!”

A couple of months after Flint had come home with us, he was on the window seat barking as quickly and as loudly as his puppy lungs would allow. The house must have been under attack from a breath of wind or some similar threat, and I was admiring this early display of watchdog instincts with some amusement.

Joan stopped her reading, looked up at the pup and then
back to me, and asked, “Isn’t it about time that you trained your dog how to live in harmony with a civilized society?”

“I’m working on it,” I replied.

“Really?”

“Sure. He’s already housebroken well enough to give him the run of the house, and I’ve already taught him some advanced first-grade material to take advantage of the early arithmetic ability that he’s shown. Watch.”

I called Flint’s name, and courtesy of his umbilical training, he immediately stopped barking and turned to look at me. I called him over and had him sit in front of me.

“Now watch this, Joannie. Flint, how much is two plus two minus four?”

The little gray dog sat looking at me not making a sound or a movement.

“That’s absolutely right! Nothing. What a clever and well-trained dog.”

I glanced in Joan’s direction and saw that she had pursed her mouth in a pained little smile and was shaking her head. “I’m living in a situation comedy program,” she sighed.

But she was right that it really was time to begin to train Flint for his life in a world of humans.

For someone who lives in North America it is often a revelation to see how well dogs behave in Europe, where they appear to be much better trained and under control. The truth of the matter is that the average European spends less time training his dog than does the average North American. The dogs in Europe are not better trained, but they are better socialized and thus have become much more civilized.

Consider the life of an average North American pet dog. His family awakens in the morning and, after a few moments
of greeting, they either put him out in the backyard or give him a 15- or 20-minute walk. Then back into the house while family members disperse to work, school, or to do chores. In the evening there might be a few minutes of play with the dog and another walk. Then, a few hours later, it is off to bed. The only time the dog may get any extended experience with the outside world and new people might be on weekends when the dog is taken to the park or on an outing with the family. Even then, his experience might include many hours of staying in the car while the family goes to a res
taurant, shopping, or to some public event simply because many public venues ban dogs from their premises. This means that the dog has limited experience with new people and with how to conduct himself in new places.

Europe places fewer restrictions on dogs. In many countries, a dog can accompany his family when they go downtown, on public transit, into cafés and shops, and to many different events and activities. Thus, from early puppyhood, the dog is constantly encountering new people and new places, so these events become more routine and less exciting or stressful. European dogs appear to be better trained simply because they are more self-controlled and more responsive to their masters under a broad variety of conditions.

If you look at the notebook of any dog behavioral consultant, you will see two large categories of difficulties that people have with their dogs. The first set has to d
o with fear-based problems. We can list these as something like “Lassie is____
_____” where the blank is filled in with “shy,” “timid,” “skittish,” “easily frightened,” “afraid of men with hats (or beards or glasses),” “frightened by the sound of trucks (or vacuums, thunder, or crowds),” “uneasy around children (or large dogs or flickering lights),” and so forth.

The second group of problems has to do wit
h aggression and runs something like “Rover is_________,” “dominant,” “pushy,”
“snappish,” “suspicious of men in raincoats (or dark-skinned
men or men smoking),” “aggressive toward children (or puppies or any other dogs),” “hard on the fingers when he takes treats,” “barks violently at everyone who enters the house (or is seen across the street),” “doesn’t tolerate being touched (or approached or even looked at),” “tends to frighten people with his jumping (or snarling or staring) behaviors.” While at first glance this looks like a mass of many different behavior problems, each of which must have a separate reason or cause, all of these difficulties can stem from a set of experiences that the dog had, or didn’t h
ave, well before he was 6 months of age. Most of these problems can be avoided with a little bit of work when you first get a puppy, namely, with “socialization.”

Socialization is the process by which a dog (or a person) learns what his “society” expects of him and learns the rules and behaviors that will allow him to become a functioning member of that society. For wild animals this is straightforward: a wolf pup only has to learn that he is a wolf and then to learn how to act around other wolves in a wolf society. Because dogs are domesticated, however, and live their lives with humans, their socialization is more complicated. A dog must socialize to dogs in order to learn that he is a dog and how to function in a canine society, but he must also l
earn how to act and behave in the society of people. Dogs must welcome both dogs and humans (and sometimes cats) as acceptable members of their family or pack.

The importance of socialization for dogs was first demonstrated by John Paul Scott and some of his associates, including John L. Fuller. Their research was done at the Jackson Memorial Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and continued for 13 years. It resulted in a book entitled
Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog
, which was written for a scientific audience and unfortunately is not an easy read for most dog owners.

Scott learned that there is a very early window of time during which it is vital for the puppy to have adequate contact with people and dogs. If there are not enough of these social interac
tions,
fear and aggression problems may develop that can be very difficult to correct later on. Similarly, part of the process of learning to adapt to the world involves exposure to different places, objects, and events.

Scott was the most significant twentieth-century researcher on dog behavior and deserves to be as well known to the public as Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner. His many discoveries include the difference between competitive aggression (over an item of value) and social dominance–based aggression in dogs (competing for a higher rank in the pack). He provided the first descriptions of a number of common canine behavioral problems, including separation anxiety. He even coined the term
sociobiology
to describe the field that he was opening up—namely the study of the social behavior of animals an
d humans and how this is related to genetics, early experience, and the survival of species.

Scott did not appear to be distressed by the lack of public recognition of his accomplishments. I once was with him at a meeting of the International Behavior Genetics Association in Boulder, Colorado, when somebody asked if he was bothered about his lack of renown outside of scientific circles. He casually explained, “So much of what I’ve done has become accepted as ‘common knowledge.’ No one realizes that someone had to document such basic facts as when puppies first open their eyes. Someone had to be the first to notice that the social behaviors of pups around people or other dogs don’t com
e fully packaged in their genes, but that the pups have to learn how to interact with others. It’s actually gratifying that so many people are familiar with my results today, even if they don’t know who first recorded them.”

That’s the way science works. Sometimes your name is lost if your results are too widely and well accepted. Usually, it is the people who are clever enough to apply fundamental research to common problems who tend to get most of the credit. The
best known name in dog socialization has become Ian Dunbar, a veterinarian with a doctorate in psychology, who has turned such research findings into practical procedures. While I chatted with Dunbar at a meeting in Saskatoon, he reminisced, “I can still picture myself sitting in the library at the Royal Veterinary College of London and reading
Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog
, by Scott and Fuller. It caught me and I thought, ‘That’s the kind of work that I want to do.’ I wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for Scott.”

Dunbar went on to establish guidelines for socializing puppies and to introduce the concept of puppy kindergarten classes, which are all about socializing rather than training very young dogs. He recommends that every puppy should meet at least 200 different people and be exposed to at least 50 distinct places by the time it is 6 months of age. I intended to follow his advice and intensively soci
alize Flint.