Chaser (5 page)

I wasn't ready to let go. So I decided to gingerly lock this pain into a black box inside me, where it would be safe until I could fully resolve it.

I went inside to call Sally and tell her what had happened.

3

I
N MY HEART
I knew that we needed to get another puppy and renew the life cycle of raising a dog as part of our family. But after sixteen years with Yasha almost always at my side, a voice in me said, “Hold off. Give yourself a little more time to enjoy your memories of Yasha.”

For now at any rate, I had to move forward. Spring semester was under way and I had classes to teach. And Sally and I still had dogs to take care of and love. Robin had acquired two purebred Siberian huskies as puppies. The first of them was a big handsome male she named Blue, for the hint of blue at the tips of his gleaming white fur. The second, a slightly smaller, no less handsome female, was Timber, named as much for how the sound of the word fit her easygoing disposition as for the tree-trunk gray in her fur.

Robin's primary occupation was as a head white-water rafting guide at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in western North Carolina. Nantahala is the largest white-water outpost in the eastern United States, and Robin's position was active for eight months of the year. During the winter months, Robin worked in New York as a photographer and lived in Brooklyn with Debbie and her husband, Jay. Because Jay is allergic to dogs, Blue and Timber came to live with Sally and me during these months. There were also times when Robin was working on the river many days in a row, or guiding trips on rivers in Tennessee and Georgia, and we were happy to babysit the dogs then too.

Blue and Timber were fabulous escape artists. Blue especially was an alert, inventive problem solver in that regard, whether it meant nudging a gate open or finding the best spot to dig under a fence. He got out of the yard, with Timber happily following his lead, on numerous occasions.

Although we generally discovered they were missing within minutes, there were many routes they could take through the neighborhood, and they ran like bullets. We were very fortunate that most strangers found the duo charming, and we usually tracked them down without the authorities getting involved. We knew that if we found Blue, Timber would be at his side. And the best place to find Blue was at a playground making friends with children. But on two occasions they were caught by the dogcatcher far on the other side of Spartanburg. We were enormously relieved to get the dogs back, of course, but we didn't like the fines, which doubled with each offense.

Blue and Timber became experimental subjects for students as Yasha and Grindle had before them. In coaching students to devise and carry out experiments with Blue and Timber, I emphasized that they needed to work with the dogs' defining characteristics as Siberian huskies and as individuals. As sled dogs, Siberian huskies have been bred to accentuate an unrelenting drive to run and chase down the miles even in the harshest winters. As individuals, Blue and Timber found food treats powerfully motivating. Of course, all dogs love treats, and they're often essential in training, especially in the early stages of shaping and reinforcing a behavior. But for some dogs the innate drive to herd or hunt can far outweigh food as motivation to practice and perform a behavior. However, Blue and Timber, like Yasha and Grindle, never found food treats boring.

Blue and Timber were the most laid-back dogs we ever had. They were also the most capable of pretending that they did not hear or understand a command. To some degree all dogs are liable to ignore commands they aren't ready to follow. Border collies who have been called off the livestock may be so determined to continue herding that the shepherd or trainer has to repeat the command several times. Blue and Timber were masters of pretended ignorance, however. If a student uttered a command that another student had recently taught them, they often acted as though they were deaf. Fortunately a yummy treat or a friendly but firm shake of neck fur instantly restored their hearing. Despite their escape behaviors, Blue and Timber were gentle, good-natured dogs, and students always enjoyed working with them.

Students came up with ingenious ways to shape the behavior of Blue and Timber, working with each dog separately. For example, two different groups of students trained Blue and Timber, respectively, to pull a light cart in a smooth sequence of gaits from a standing start to a slow walk, a fast walk, a trot, and a run, and then back through the gaits to a full stop. Another memorable experiment with Blue and Timber involved teaching them a complicated series of maneuvers—another of those chains of heterogeneous behaviors that I discussed in the last chapter—to reach some food on a high cabinet in my lab. To get the food, each of the dogs had to pick up a rope tied to a chair in its mouth, pull the chair into position next to the cabinet, climb up on the chair, and then stand on hind legs with front paws stretching up onto the front of the cabinet.

Given their experience with human subjects, students could see that they were using the same principles of reinforcement with the dogs. The learning might consist of very different responses of very different complexity. But reinforcement of a behavior increases the probability of the behavior. And nonreinforcement of a behavior, like not rewarding Grindle for picking up a ringing phone, decreases the probability of the behavior. In terms of the ABCs of behavior I mentioned earlier, consistent nonreinforcement motivates a long-term change in behavior by altering the consequences of the behavior rather than the antecedent situation.

I stress long-term change, because if a dog has been begging successfully at the dinner table, for example, and then people stop feeding the dog from the table, the dog will likely beg even more in the short term to try to get his or her message across. It's just like what happens when parents who have been providing candy bars in response to a child's tantrums in the grocery store start ignoring the tantrums. The child will likely throw the worst tantrums ever soon after that. Inexperienced trainers or parents often abandon nonreinforcement then, either by caving in and providing the treats or by resorting to punishment. Both approaches are doomed to fail.

However, the begging-food-from-the-table dog and the throwing-a-tantrum-to-get-a-candy-bar child both will respond to consistent nonreinforcement of those behaviors by experimenting with other behaviors, and some of the new behaviors will be positive and desirable. Amazing learning results when trainers, parents, and teachers reinforce such positive, desirable, freely chosen behaviors, because this motivates the learners to experiment with other new behaviors that might win reinforcement. I'll come back to this global principle of learning later in the book, because of how it animates creative learning.

I was sixty-six when Yasha died, but I put off retirement for two more years because I didn't know what I wanted to do next. Throughout my life I'd made a point of trying something new every five to ten years, whether it was a shift in my research and teaching or taking up new sports such as kayaking and windsurfing.

In my last several semesters of teaching, I changed things around as much as possible, seeking new perspectives for the students and myself. I even began holding discussion sessions in volunteers' dorm rooms. Cramming fifteen to twenty students together in a small dorm room made for intense conversation and offered wonderful opportunities to get to know each other better. The casual nature of the sessions encouraged even the shiest students to voice their opinions and challenge their peers.

I enjoyed breaking out of the confines of the classroom and traditional class structures, but I also remained restless to find a new focus for myself after I retired.

Somehow, putting off getting a puppy became part of that. I kept thinking I needed to find something entirely new to do, something I'd never done before and could become passionate in pursuing.

In the summer of 1996, at the age of sixty-eight, I finally launched myself into the abyss of retirement. I figured that once I was retired, something would jump up to grab my interest. Nothing did, or at least nothing that really excited me intellectually. I stepped up my windsurfing excursions to Charleston. And I became a regular up at Robin's house at the Nantahala, kayaking with her during her downtime.

I also stayed abreast of what was happening in animal behavior research. I continued to be fascinated by the intelligence and learning potential of dogs in general and Border collies in particular, especially with regard to possible language learning.

Because of the complex commands in herding livestock, herding dogs seemed the best possible canine candidates for language learning experiments. And Border collies struck me as the pinnacle of herding dogs.

My friend Wayne West did a lot to deepen my understanding of Border collies. Wayne was at that time a firefighter in Spartanburg, and he raised sheep and bred Border collies on a small ranch, Flint Hill Farm, that has been in his family since colonial days. A tall, burly man as comfortable on a cutting horse as most people are in their easy chairs, Wayne has a somewhat high-pitched twang and an infectious, rather dry sense of humor. Over the years I often took students on visits to Wayne's farm, or to the Border collie exhibitions he organized every two or three years at the Spartanburg County Fair in October. I never missed one of Wayne's exhibitions, which he also sometimes mounted in a smaller way on his farm.

Wayne taught me the fundamentals of herding. Farmers and ranchers like Wayne have been breeding Border collies for centuries, selecting dogs for their ability to keep their eyes on the sheep and listen to the farmers. If a farmer's dog didn't listen to the farmer, the farmer didn't breed the dog, and gradually Border collies gave greater and greater attention to the words of the farmer. Through one generation after another, the herding instinct was shaped in Border collies just as hunting instincts were shaped in hunting dogs. When Border collies are first introduced to a flock of sheep, by instinct they will move out to the opposite side of the sheep and begin trying to herd the sheep to the farmer without any training.

There are only a few herding commands that the dog needs to learn. “Go out” means take a wide arc out toward the sheep. “Come by” means go clockwise around to the other side of the sheep. “Way to me” means go counterclockwise. “There” means freeze instantly in a standing position. “Drop” means drop into a crouched position that enables immediate action. “Walk on” means walk toward the sheep to get them to move toward the farmer. For most situations the stern “eye” of the Border collie is sufficient to move the sheep. In those situations where a sheep refuses to be herded, a quick nip on the hind leg by the dog will elicit immediate cooperation.

In 2000 Wayne got several Border collie trainers to do an exhibition and judge herding trials at the county fair. I spent all day there, captivated by the joyful intensity of the dogs in their work and the closeness of their bonds with their trainers. That evening I had the privilege of sitting around the campfire with Wayne and the other trainers, breeders, and sheep farmers—and their dogs.

In the course of that evening I told them my research had never found any indication that dogs could learn the names of objects. In my lab at Wofford my students and I tested this with Yasha, Grindle, Blue, and Timber by asking them to fetch a particular item from one of a few different objects. The results were never better than pure chance.

Speaking to these expert trainers as if they were students in one of my classes, I described how dog owners insisted to me over the years that their dogs understood the independent meanings of “newspaper,” “ball,” and the names of other objects they could retrieve on command. I didn't see why dogs couldn't learn such things and I hoped these people were right, so I always invited them to bring their dogs into the lab for a test under controlled conditions. But as with my own dogs, the results were always negative. My conclusion was that in daily life, the situation guided dogs as to what to fetch. They were never really faced with a choice of what object to go pick up and bring back.

In telling Wayne and his friends about this, I added that as far as I knew, no other researchers had ever documented anything different. My research seemed to indicate that dogs didn't even understand their own names except as signals to pay attention.

They looked at me as if they thought I was nuts, but out of deference to Wayne they didn't say so. One crusty old farmer said, “So that's what science says, huh?”

Another sheep farmer said, “I'd appreciate it if you and the other scientists that have looked into this could explain something to me. If Rascal here”—he nodded at the mostly black Border collie lying at his feet—“doesn't understand any words or names, how come I can ask him to herd sheep out of the flock by their names and he'll do it without a hitch, and without my gesturing or even looking at the sheep?”

I heard assenting grunts and murmurs, and I saw Wayne look at me with the barest hint of a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes and turning up the edges of his mouth in his broad, good-natured face. The trainers' polite but emphatic reaction humbled me, and rightly so. It was one of a number of experiences, including reading books by Border collie trainers, that convinced me there was much I could learn from people who worked with dogs in traditional ways. It made me think once again that the failure of my experiments in trying to teach Yasha the names of objects probably had more to do with my flawed methods than with his learning abilities.

In 2000, Blue, then fourteen years old, developed cancer. Robin laid him to rest in the backyard near Yasha and Grindle.

Timber was really lost for a time without Blue. But she transferred her love and devotion to Sally. Every dog we had loved Sally, including Blue and Timber. But now Timber followed Sally throughout the house obsessively, as she had previously followed Blue. “Don't you get tired of having Timber under your feet?” I sometimes teased. Sally never shot back, as she might well have done, “Did you get tired of having Yasha under yours?”