The Year of the Puppy, page 13
What all the perfect-puppy books are selling really has nothing to do with perfection: it has to do with training a dog to be more like what we, in today’s culture, assume dogs should be like.
Happily, the method of training currently in vogue is based on positive reinforcement. What all training is intended to do is to get dogs to learn things of value to us—and to learn which of their behaviors we approve of, and which we do not. This form of learning is called “operant conditioning,” described by B. F. Skinner as he put innumerable pigeons and rats in boxes and trained them to perform specific actions, like pushing a button or a lever. Using this method he trained pigeons to play ping-pong—even to pilot a guided missile designed (but never deployed) for use in World War II. Operant conditioning is based on the notion that pigeons and rats—and dogs and people and everyone else—learn effectively by connecting what we do to the consequences of what we do. As we wander around the world behaving, we find that certain actions are followed by delightful consequences; others by nasty ones. Whether we do that action again, or don’t, depends on whether the result was something we wanted. Training, then, is creating a context in which a dog can naturally learn these associations.
Positive reinforcement training is the good guy of learning. I get to realize that something I do, intentional or not, leads to something super: a reinforcement, or reward. Imagine that I come across a vending machine with bananas inside and levers on the outside. I pull a lever, and a banana is released from its housing and drops down where I can take it. I quickly learn that lever-pulling is an excellent way to get bananas. That is positive reinforcement. I like bananas. I will doubtless try that lever again.
That is simple enough. To train a dog this way, you need to wait until they do a behavior you like, though—and catch them in the act, as it were, so that you can deliver a perfectly timed reward for that specific behavior. Every person you see congratulating their puppy for peeing on a patch of grass outside is doing this form of training: showing the dog that peeing here yields a reward (if not as persuasive a reward as a handful of freeze-dried salmon might be). Online you can watch video of Skinner training a pigeon in a minute flat to turn in a counterclockwise circle—simply by using positive reinforcement to shape each step along the way. It is not the only form of operant conditioning, though. If instead, when I pull a lever I get a shock, you can be sure I will be reluctant to do it again. That is called “positive punishment”: “positive” because something new happened—the shock—and “punishment” because it was, well, shocking, and done to reduce my rate of lever-pulling.
Positive punishment, though it sounds like something beneficial, is what most people mean when they say “punishment”: spanking, yelling, hitting. It is not positive-feeling, but it indicates an addition (plus, thus “positive”) of something to the dog’s world. There is also a method called “negative punishment,” which is taking away (minus, thus “negative”) something that is liked. If I am touching all the levers, getting all the bananas, and you don’t want me to, then you rig the machines so they no longer yield bananas. I will probably stop pulling the levers (eventually).
Rounding out the quartet is “negative reinforcement learning,” where you increase the rate of a behavior by taking away something bad. If the banana machine is buzzing loudly and I can fix it by banging on its side, I have learned by negative reinforcement that machine-banging miraculously makes things better. This form of learning is used quite a bit in horse training: by pulling on the reins to try to get a horse to slow down, the horse may learn that if they slow when they feel this unpleasant pressure on their face, the pressure will stop (if the rein-pulling is done right).
We—and dogs—learn from all of these methods in our ordinary lives. Stick your finger in a bottle and get it stuck (or, for dogs, your nose in a hole in the ground and get it bit), and you are less likely to do that again (positive punishment). Scream—or bark—and everyone comes running over to you to see what you need, and you are more likely to do that again (positive reinforcement). A dog who is able to chew through her crate to escape confinement becomes a crate chewer (negative reinforcement); one who finds that you put the tennis ball away when she brings it to you becomes less likely to bring it to you (negative punishment).
The great debate among trainers and in psychology concerns which is the most effective learning method. In terms of longevity of learning, training via positive reinforcement wins. Positive punishment—yelling “No!” at a child or puppy—can be effective in stopping a behavior, but it comes with lots of side effects: the punishment needs to be timed perfectly, or it is unclear what behavior to stop; its use can lead to the recipient becoming generally fearful, angry, or aggressive; and it gives no clue to what behavior would be good instead. Thus it can lead to learned helplessness, or feeling unable to act at all.
Learning via the good guy means that if your puppy is barking in another room in the middle of the night (say), you do not go in there and yell at her. Instead, when she is quiet, you sneak in and reward her with your presence. There, the behavior being reinforced is actually “not barking.” Since it can take some serious patience to wait until “not barking” occurs, the positive punishment move—yelling—is a common mistake. No one feels better after that—and the pup may still bark.
While positive-reinforcement training is popular now, it is not the only form of training used by dog trainers. In point of fact, negative punishment—ignoring a dog doing something you dislike—is quite often used with it. It is fairly benign. But if a trainer recommends an e-collar, which delivers a shock or stimulation, that is classic (positive) punishment. And in the past, methods using this form of punishment were much more common. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century training manuals were likely to use the word “correction,” and to talk about “cuffs on the nose” as part of the tool kit of the trainer—although it was classic positive punishment, through and through. When a dog makes a “mistake,” Blanche Saunders wrote in 1946, in Training You to Train Your Dog, “Take the puppy firmly by the collar to the spot where he has erred. Point to the place and shame him, saying ‘Did you do that? Bad dog.’ Give him a sharp cuff on his rump.” Her solution to stopping a dog from barking when left alone at night—or what she describes as “feeling very sorry for himself”? She “crept inside the kennel with a BB gun,” on the other side of the door from the dog. “[W]hen he decided it was time to begin again I pulled the trigger.” The explosive sound of the pellet hitting the door led to “perfect silence” for the rest of the night, she wrote. You better believe that the dog didn’t have a good night’s sleep, though.
Early training was also more likely to use hands-on methods for “shaping” a behavior. Instead of waiting around for a dog to sit, then rewarding them, trainers advised people, “Take hold of the skin under his throat with one hand and push down on his hindquarters with the other.” This is not a learning method at all; it is how you sculpt a bust of clay, but not how you encourage sitting. To stop a dog from barking, trainers advocated “holding his jaws together” (while shouting “no”); a handler of a working dog may “strike his dog in the windpipe with his hand or grasp it by the throat and apply pressure until the dog stops trying to make noise.” Then “as soon as the dog is quiet it should be praised.” Many of these antiquated manuals celebrated this perplexing mix of punishment and reward. “If he exhibit[s] symptoms of being refractory,” an 1814 manual on training hunting dogs to track and retrieve advised “showing him the whip, i.e., let it fall lightly over him”—but cautioned, “but no flogging.” This kind of training was sometimes called “breaking,” and no wonder. The “crack of the whip” is more than once wielded, as is the spiked collar, “a leathern strap, through which are inserted a dozen or more small nails” attached to a cord and used to rein in, say, a dog’s tendency to run away.
Not all training manuals were so dystopian in their treatment of dogs. Any dog can “learn all that it is necessary for him to know without a single blow being struck or a single harsh word being spoken,” Stephen Hammond wrote in 1882 in Practical Dog Training. “Do not fail to abundantly caress him and speak kindly words, and never under any circumstances, no matter what the provocation, allow yourself to scold or strike him.” His was not the prevailing view, to be sure, at a time when dogs were barely considered chattel.
The earliest training manuals focused on training for sport—as hunting companions. These trainers were not teaching “sit” or “shake.” But with the rise of purebred dog breeding and the increase in dog-keeping in the late nineteenth century, many more fanciful ideas about what a dog might be trained to do popped up. Dog shows and dogs in circuses were becoming popular: dogs as spectacle. Fittingly, this is when people began training dogs to lie down, beg, and leap on command. These have endured, sufficiently so that nearly any contemporary training guide will have a method for teaching one or more of these behaviors. Happily, some fell out of fashion, such as walking on stilts, dancing on hind legs, standing on their heads, jumping rope. Of another trick, having a dog grab his tail in his mouth, one doctor and trainer wrote, in 1881, “This trick is exceedingly funny, and is always hailed with roars of laughter.” He added, “To attain success at teaching this trick the dog must be gifted with a good deal of tail.”
I think training is mis-pitched: it should be called “teaching.” It is not about tricks; it is about a worldview. We encourage—even expect—some kind of teaching of children, and for a good reason: so that they can understand the world into which they have been born and the civilization in which they are going to be a participant. So, too, for dogs: teaching should be about what they need to know to live in the world of humans, and what they need to learn in order to more fully enjoy life. The behaviors taught today are a mash-up of those important for safety, important for the sanity of the human, totally unimportant for any reason, possibly offensive, and actually fun for dog and person. What I want to teach Quid, most of all, is how to be a dog in this family in this place in this time—while still letting her be her unruly self. Maybe that last part is something I have to learn.
Some things the puppy has eaten/chewed that are not for eating/chewing: an observational study
rocks
deer poop
stick bits
bit of fluff from my pocket
pants
cat’s ears
fingernails
my finger
human hair
her own paw
woodchuck (no woodchucks were harmed)
wall
windowsills
window handle
insect walking across the floor
moths
pencil tips
pencil erasers
black rollerball pens
dried leaves (after shredding them into a thousand slivery pieces first)
dirt
sofa arms
pillow
rug
dog crate
dog bed
her own leash
icicles
carrot ends, celery ends, asparagus ends, kale stalks, strawberry tops
string
flashlight
compass
dryer balls
vacuum hose
cover of paperback book
first thirty-one pages of book
bookmark in book
bottom edge of book
book
Ghosts
Im typing w left hand as rt hand is unfer pup cannot be bothterred to ck ctyps.
I am extracted from captivity by the puppy when someone opens a door downstairs; she beelines to see who. Three months old, Quid has slid neatly into the family. She has places she likes sleeping (head on our hands, head on our feet, head on dog rumps) and has routines with the dogs (evening play bouts); in the mornings she hops on the bed and counts each of us with her nose. We are now hers.
As she has relaxed into this space, her particular spirit is bubbling up. On a walk today she neatly leaps from the paved path onto the horizontal rail of the fence lining the path. It is like a bird alighting: without preamble, she just takes flight. Back on ground she finds a stick as wide as she is long and carries it neatly, head held high. With the stick in her mouth she whines continually, working through some inner conflict opaque to us. Once in a while she veers off-path, perhaps looking for a place to bury it, or chew it—then thinks better of her choice and continues to whine-carry it.
These glimpses of an inexplicable character are charming: we are seeing more of who she is. And at the same time, as with all young things, who she is is changing. Physically, she is bigger: still only twelve pounds, but her paws have begun looking pleasingly large compared to her body. Her ears continue skyward, and each day brings the game of Up or Down? as we chart their development into perked or folded. Today one is up and one is down. O. and A. find each variation cute; for me, a switch is turned when they are up (cute response off) or down (cute response on). She is overly cute, almost—like a stuffed toy that veers, uncanny valley–like, into the unsettling. Or maybe I am just wary of handing my heart to this young thing. I am waiting for the falling-in-love part to kick in.
After we adopted her, Amy began a Facebook group so that the siblings’ families could keep up with one another. I am not on Facebook—but Quid is. We spend evenings scrolling through the photos of her siblings, marveling at their increasingly visible differences and their notable similarities. The biggest males are a full 50 percent larger than Quid—how is there so much more of them already?—and we can see a division growing between the scruffy dogs and the smooth-coated, between the up-ears and down-ears. Some live in multi-dog families; others are singletons. Photos show a few suited up for hiking expeditions, or among horses or in lakes; others are mostly photographed lying in a curl on the couch or on their backs, legs in the air. People compare notes on the minutiae of new-dog-ness: what are they feeding, where did you get that harness, what are people doing about car sickness. They admire each new trick or look or curl. I find it comforting to see all of the puppies, even as they grow out of the familiar dumplings they were to me—and to glimpse inside the homes of their people. As millions of people who adopted a dog while quarantined from humanity are surely feeling, there is a surprising loneliness to raising a puppy in isolation. This is ironic in the extreme, as “companionship” is one of the primary reasons given for adopting a new dog.
But typically, life with a puppy is two-pronged: private and public. The struggles and pleasures of raising a wild animal—er, young dog—are mostly the former. Outside the house, though, being appended to a puppy is, in normal times, surprisingly transformative. For that private struggle is obliterated when that smol cute thing is sitting, puzzled, on the sidewalk. Puppies, like babies, are attractants: strangers pause at seeing them, veer to your side, coo and squeal. They want to touch, talk to, and know everything about the puppy. They comment on her beauty; they smile at the two of you. In just the way that strangers do not typically do with one another on the street, they provide affirmation of what a great choice you have made. Your puppy’s cuteness is an endorsement of your good judgment—maybe even evidence of your cuteness. It is affirmation of us by extension—and confirmation, that one is a participant in life.
In a pandemic this public dynamic is lost. No one approaches anyone within touching distance. Sequestered in a house a half mile from our nearest neighbors, we could go days without seeing anyone at all. On our first trip to the vet, I was startled to be greeted by a technician who said, clearly, “OOOOOOHH!” when she saw me. At first I was confused, forgetting that the puppy in my arms was so distinctive, a duckling appearing among ducks. For the moment, I reveled in the adulation and cooing that the staff showered on Quid. It was a reminder that, in addition to being a nonstop new presence in our house—a whirling biting machine, a thorn in the side of our dogs, a sleep-stealer—she is also a “cute puppy.”
At home, cute puppy is being put through a rigmarole of “exposures” while still in her socialization period. Each day, of course, she is exposed to new things not of our design: the thunderstorm transforming the air, the chipmunk racing by her feet, a visiting raccoon. She has been serenaded by gunshots in the distance, crashes in the kitchen, slamming doors, cars driving by, high winds, high wind chimes, and heavy rain. She has sauntered by tractors, faced down vacuums, heard a couple of sirens, a circular saw, an electric drill. She has taken it all in stride. So we add our own odd sensations to her sensorium: setting her on the sisal cat scratcher, or a sheet of aluminum foil, to feel that underfoot. We present a large box on its side; the dog bed, inverted; a yoga ball. When she touches any of them, we reward her, and soon she is touching the foil and box and bed and ball purposefully, looking at us for her medal. When we leave this household obstacle course in place, lo and behold, she finds herself walking over and into and through it all, making all sorts of ruckus. We reward her for that, too.
Outside, A. concocts a seesaw by nailing a plank to a stump on its side. We lure her close. Before I can encourage her onto it, she walks right up the down side unflinchingly. Flinches are for surprises; to the puppy, this is just the way the world is. Her easygoing nature allows her to take it in stride. She was less sanguine about the hammock, but with a treat she is soon the sphinx in netted canvas, being rocked by her minions. We check off items from trainer Sophia Yin’s list of ways one should gently handle a pup to acclimate her: we touch her feet and ears, pinch and poke her skin, tap her nose, turn her on her back, pull her to our laps; we turn her momentarily upside down. While we can’t expose her to a city’s worth of new people, we bring her out to visit any delivery people delivering. And we make ourselves into new people, pulling out hats, sunglasses, and a fake mustache to try to appear like strange strangers. We ride by on our bikes, don helmets and hoodies, carry umbrellas unnecessarily.
