Born to Bark (22 page)

Jean told me, “She was a great teacher and a real showman, but at the same time she was gentle and reserved. I remember that at one point she stopped and looked at us and said, ‘We know a lot more about dog behavior and dog training than has ever been known before—but we have only scratched the surface. I would like to come back in fifty years and see how much more we will have learned about dogs and training then.’”

Shirley Welsh, my first instructor in the club, was a nurse whose infectious humor and friendliness made her a valued asset in a clinical setting as well as in training classes. In another unexpected connection, I later learned that Shirley and my Joannie had been longtime friends and their children had grown up together.

Training an exuberant Cairn terrier pup can be exhausting and, if you lack a sense of humor, frustrating. For the first 2 weeks or so, Flint was a little whirlwind, twirling at the end of my leash. Being surrounded by so many dogs and so much activity revved him up. He wanted to touch noses and play with all the dogs in the class. One of his classmates, a large black Newfoundland dog named Admiral, generally ignored Flint until one day Flint walked under the big dog, looked up at his belly, and barked at him. Admiral’s response was to quickly drop into a down position. Flint was
not fast enough to get completely out of the way, so when Admiral hit the floor, he landed on Flint’s leash a short distance from where it attached to his collar. It pulled Flint to the floor where he lay flat, looking much like the pelt of an otter that had been stretched out to dry. Flint struggled for a moment to get up, but quickly gave up and lay there helplessly.

Shirley observed the scene and announced to me, “You might learn something from this. Admiral has no problem teaching Flint the down command.”

Actually, Admiral had taught Flint to go down very effectively. Now whenever Flint and Admiral would meet, Flint would automatically drop into a down position for a few moments and the cowardly lion voice would announce,
“Yes sir! If you want me down, I’m down,”
much to the class’s amusement.

I wanted to teach Flint the basic commands that would allow him to live in civilized society, but I also wanted to learn applied dog training. So I did not mention that I was a psychologist and a professor at the university because I did not want any of the instructors to be looking over their shoulders at the “professional.” I was at the club to learn from them.

My years as a researcher have taught me that many intelligent and well-educated specialists understand high-level theories but have great difficulty applying them to practical problems. The classic example is the brilliant mathematician Albert Einstein, whose checkbook was always out of balance because of simple addition and subtraction errors. A highly respected chemist I know can’t follow a recipe well enough to bake a cake. I also know a successful developmental psychologist whose young children are totally out of control, and there is another psychologist who specialized
in conflict resolution but who suffered the embarrassment of having his neighbors call the police because an argument with his wife had gotten too loud. Since I wanted to know the practical steps that brought the club’s dogs to their high levels of performance, and not a theoretical discourse on how they
should
be trained, I kept my mouth shut, observed, and followed instructions.

I was particularly interested in watching the two Barbaras, two senior instructors in the club, to see how they worked with different breeds of dogs. Barbara Baker seemed to have a magic touch when training terriers. She trained her Staffordshire bull terrier, Mori, to perform obedience exercises with such precision that she would ultimately rise to become the fifth-ranked dog in all of Canada, well ahead of many border collies and golden
retrievers who are acknowledged to be brighter, more trainable breeds. Barbara’s young Staffordshire puppy Nutmeg seemed to watch the proceedings as closely as I did. Nutmeg would later surpass her housemate by becoming the number-three dog in the country. Barbara Merkley worked with her little Shetland sheepdog Noel, who darted from one exercise to the next and seemed to have an almost psychic ability to divine exactly what Barb wanted her to do. These dogs worked with such a happy enthusiasm that I wanted them to be role models for Flint.

Since the early writings of Blanche Saunders, some advances had been made in training, but the dogs were still wearing metal slip collars that tightened around their throats when you pulled the leash, and dog training, especially for the basic commands, still involved physically manipulating the dogs into the required positions. The command to sit was followed by a tug up on the leash while you pushed down on the dog’s rear with your other hand. Once the dog was in a sitting position, you said, “Good dog,” which was supposed to be the reward. The wonder is that this actually worked—
at least for some dogs—but it was not working well with Flint. Practicing at home, I would try to place him into a sit and he would fight back, popping back into a standing position the moment my hand was off him. Watching me work with Flint looked more like a wrestling match than a training session.

This was before today’s era of positive dog training, which involves lots of food rewards, so it took me a while to stumble upon the real teaching value of food. Flint loved to eat and, if I had let him have all the food he wanted, he would have ballooned into a very chubby terrier. One day, I was offering h
im a treat and noticed that his head and body were following every movement of that treat and my hand. As an experiment, I passed
my hand and the treat over his head. In order to keep sight of it Flint raised his head, rocked backward, and assumed a sitting position. I had an epiphany! Instead of continuing the tug-and-pull technique, I could use food to lure Flint into a sit.

Quickly I grabbed another treat and said, “Flint, sit!” and moved my hand with the food over his head, toward his rear, and in a straight line between his ears. His eyes were glued to the treat in my hand, and as he tipped his head back to keep it in sight, he sat again. Yet another piece of treat and another perfect sit. After two more tries, I left the treat in my pocket and simply moved my hand in the same motion that I had used when holding the treat, and when I said “Flint, sit,” he sat. At that moment the voice of the cowardly lion announced,
“Hey, stupid, why didn’t you t
hink of this before? This is fun. We don’t need no wrestling match.”

I had inadvertently stumbled upon what is now called
lure training
, using food as the lure. People like Ian Dunbar would later independently formalize this concept and give it a name. With their insightful refinements, lure training became a mainstay in positive dog training methods. For me, however, it was a private miracle. I could easily lure Flint into a sit, a down, or a stand position by moving the food in an appropriate path. After the initial training, I could phase out the food lure and replace it with an occasional treat as a reward.

The following week, we showed up for our dog class and Flint was a star. Shirley came over and asked me what I had done to improve his behavior, and I explained my lure training to her, demonstrating the movements for each command.

“That’s just bribery!” she objected.

“I look at it as well-earned wages for doing the work that I want him to do,” I replied.

Later that same session, the lady with the Newfoundland, Admiral, was having trouble getting him to lie down on command. He was way too large and strong for this small woman to
simply push him down. Shirley walked over to me and, smiling, took Flint’s leash and said, “Show her how to use food to get him down.”

I did and Admiral followed the treat in my hand as I moved it in a downward arc toward the floor and said, “Admiral, down!” The moment that his belly touched the floor he got his reward and followed it with a large happy thump of his tail, that rang off the wood floor.

That interaction with Shirley really shows the essence of the club. I was there to learn how to train my dog, but the instructors were willing to watch and adopt any techniques that seemed to work well, without worrying about the theory behind them or who had first suggested them. They were always attending workshops and seminars from successful dog trainers to learn new methods. In this way, the world of dogs was very different from my academic life, where eminent colleagues would defend an abstract conjecture simply because it was their own personally derived theory, without much
concern for whether it worked in the practical world.

I don’t want you to misinterpret either my skill at training or the ease of training Flint—even with food and lots of positive rewards. Lure training has its limits, and I have never figured out how to use it to keep a dog in one place for a long time. The “stay” commands in obedience competitions require a dog to sit or lie down in a given place while his handler moves a distance away from him. The dog then has to remain sitting for a minute or remain in the down position for 3 minutes until the handler returns. At a distance of 40 feet or so, you can’t effectively use food
lures and rewards to keep the dog in place, especially if other interesting stuff is going on around him. So the training reverted back to the old-fashioned procedure o
f simply manipulating
the dog into position and correcting him every time he moved. I got a lot of exercise doing this.

“Flint, sit and stay!” I would command and then walk 40 feet away. When I turned, I would see him prancing over to April, a poodle he loved. Racing back 40 feet to retrieve my dog, I put him back in the starting place. “Flint, sit and stay!” Walked 40 feet. Turned to see him walking away to check out the Labrador retriever sitting next to him. Raced back 40 feet to retrieve my dog. Put him back in the starting place. “Flint, sit and stay!” more forcefully this time. Walked 40 feet. Turned to see him tentatively walking toward me. Raced back 40 feet and again, put him back in the starting
place. “Flint, sit and stay!” with the best imitation of a British sergeant major’s voice that I could muster. Walked 40 feet. And repeated these corrections until the instructor decided to move on to the next exercise.

Although I could get frustrated at times, I tried to keep my sense of humor, knowing that Flint would learn eventually. Not so for one woman in my class who had an Australian cattle dog named Mate. One evening when the dogs were in a long line practicing their sit-stay exercise, Flint and Mate were sitting next to each another. Flint got up and wandered over to say hello to Mate. The cattle dog also stood up in a friendly manner and wagged his tail. His owner shrieked at me, “Get your animal away from my dog!” Her loud shout startled Mate, who had been happily getting acquainted with Flint. He
slicked his ears down and raced to the far end of the room with his owner in hot pursuit, seething with anger. She dragged the dog back to his original position and continued ranting at me.

“You are ruining my dog’s training! Your dog should be expelled from this class! He’s a juvenile delinquent!” As her voice rose in anger, Mate cringed, obviously assuming that her hostile tone was aimed at him. From that moment on, the cattle dog, who had been working quite well, became unreliable in his sit-stay and down-stay exercises. He would watch his owner intently and,
whenever she became tense or upset, he would break from his position and run. There were lots of opportunities for this fearful behavior because his owner became hypervigilant. If Flint would simply look in Mate’s direction, without moving, she would raise her voice at me again, “Stop your dog now before he does it again!” which would cause Mate to break from his position, immediately followed by his owner chasing after him and grabbing his collar and dragging him back to his place.

Shirley decided to separate Flint and Mate to calm the situation. Flint was at one end of the line and Mate at the other with eight dogs between them. Nonetheless, when Flint would start to fidget or squirm, Mate’s owner would shout at Shirley, “Do something about that nasty dog! He’s making Mate nervous! Does he have to be in the same room with civilized dogs?” At the sound of his mistress’s angry voice, Mate would then break from position again.