Bad Dog, page 12
Well into the 1970s, drunks were routinely locked up in asylums, strapped to tables, force-fed belladonna, castor oil, and stewed tomatoes, and subjected to therapy sessions that were little more than moralistic bullying.
Clinical psychologists are still conducting experiments into modalities such as “emetic and electric shock alcohol aversion therapy”*—a Clockwork Orange-esque attempt to make them nauseous at the sight of alcohol.
Starting in the late 1970s—when, some might point out, former hippies started getting dogs for their kids—things shifted. “Like human therapies, for the most part dog training has undergone an evolution and moved toward a more positive approach,” write animal behaviorists Mary Burch and Jon Bailey in How Dogs Learn.
Positive methods include clicker training, promoted by the dolphin expert Karen Pryor, a more precise way to tell the animal which behavior you are actually rewarding. From what they’ve done wrong to what they’ve done right, it’s an approach that works well for most dogs, who are basically easygoing and eager to please, because that’s the kind of dog we humans have been selectively breeding for centuries.
But growling and snapping; lunging at other dogs; yanking us down the street; refusing to surrender things they’ve got in their mouth; tackling old ladies who smile in the elevator and breaking a hip, leading to lawsuits, evictions, homelessness, and jail … Even if it doesn’t go that far, there are limits to the power of a hot dog when some real dogs crave excitement in their lives.
The so-called click-and-treat method dominated dog training for a generation. And then came Cesar Millan. His TV show, The Dog Whisperer, has been seen by 50 million people on the National Geographic Channel—and there are only about 65 million dogs in the United States. This former illegal immigrant from Sinaloa, Mexico, is a $100 million industry, with leadership seminars, books, DVDs, and pet food.
He doesn’t use a clicker and rarely pulls out a treat. His credo is that dogs need a leader, the leader is you, and they must be given this information by any means necessary.
Anti–Cesar Millanism is epidemic in the pet dog training world, at least in the Northeast, and it comes out in ways that are sometimes pretty funny. My club, the Port Chester Obedience Training Club, gives all its students a recommended reading list. Along with books by Ian Dunbar and Karen Pryor are newer feel-good classics such as Andrea Arden’s Dog-Friendly Dog Training and Joel Walton’s Positive Puppy Training Works. And under a title by Paul Owens called The Dog Whisperer, they emphasize: “(NOT to be confused with the book with the same title written by Cesar Milan).”
Whom they hate too much even to spell his name right.
An op-ed columnist in the New York Times recently called Millan “a charming, one-man wrecking ball directed at 40 years of progress in understanding and shaping dog behavior.”
Millan talks about observing the dogs on his grandfather’s farm as a boy, how they would fight among themselves until a clear leader emerged, at which point peace reigned in the pack. He likens them to wild wolf packs, which were long thought to be held together by a dominant “alpha male.”
But as animal behaviorists have been quick to point out, our pet dogs are not wolves—far from it. Cats are behaviorally much closer to wild cats than domestic dogs are to wolves. Fifteen millennia of coevolution have changed dogs to such an extent that they cannot survive without us. We have turned them into our own better halves.
To take just one example, the reason dogs bark so much is because we talk. Wild animals rarely vocalize; their communication is visual and olfactory. But humans are verbal, and so we’ve proactively anthropomorphized this trait into our dogs. And dogs are the only animal that can naturally follow where a human is pointing or looking; even chimpanzees cannot do this.
Interestingly, aversive training methods do not work well on wild animals. A wild animal will literally fight a human to death rather than not do what we punish him for. Dogs are different: we have taught them to submit to pain.
And so on.
Dominance is a complicated topic, but more recent work on wolves in the wild, including a multiyear study by L. David Mech on northwestern Canada’s Ellesmere Island, seems to show that packs function more like families than conscripted armies: they accept roles rather than take them by force.
As animal behaviorist Temple Grandin says, “What dogs probably need isn’t a substitute pack leader but a substitute parent.” Either way, though, the human should be setting the tone.
Among serious dog trainers, as opposed to pet owners, the anti-Millan feeling is much less pronounced. “I’ve got to give Cesar credit,” Wendy Volhard told us at dog camp. “He takes on behavior problems that the rest of us wouldn’t touch.”
As Millan himself takes pains to point out, “I don’t ‘train’ dogs.” What he means is that he corrects behavior problems; if your dog isn’t having serious issues, Millan is not your man.
Having been primed for the worst, I was surprised as I made my way through Millan’s book, written with Melissa Jo Peltier, called Be the Pack Leader. It made a lot of sense: “We’ve gone from the old-fashioned authoritarian extreme—where animals existed only to do our bidding—to another unhealthy extreme—where animals are considered our equal partners in every area of our lives.”
I thought of dog writer Jon Katz’s observation that “as a Boomer parent in a child-centric town, I’d spent years watching people struggle to say no to their kids and their dogs.”
Millan talks less about forcing dogs to do our bidding than reshaping ourselves to be worthy of our dogs’ respect, by becoming confident people who exude what he calls “a calm-assertive energy.”
In an article about Millan a few years ago, writer Malcolm Gladwell quoted the well-known canine ethologist Patricia McConnell: “I believe [dogs] pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go.”
Or, as Millan himself says: “Dogs know how comfortable you are with yourself, how happy you are, how fearful you are, and what is missing inside of you.”
Putting down his book, I can only think: Oops.
*George Barton Cutten, The Psychology of Alcoholism.
*Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 49 (1981): 360–68.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Barkbuster
THE SMALL WOMAN in the camo T-shirt and parachute pants makes a quick scan of my battered chew-toy sofa and Hola’s worn-out chaise lounge from Domain.
“Obviously,” she says, “the dog has furniture privileges.”
“Don’t all dogs?” I ask her.
“No,” she sniffs. “They do not.”
Although I have her on leash, Hola is trying to catapult herself off her new friend’s breasts when the woman makes a sound I’ve never heard from a human being before: “Grrrrrggghhgg.”
Deep, guttural, sharp, disarming: the sound of a dog backing up against a flaming wall.
Like magic, Hola plants four on the floor, lowers her head and her tail, and steps back.
“Sit,” says the woman, calm-assertively.
Hola sits.
This, I’m thinking, has potential.
I’d found this woman, who changed my life, by asking the most dominant person I knew—namely, my boss—who had helped him train his dog. That his dog was a tiny dachshund just made his good manners more rare: these rodents are usually wretched because nobody fears them enough to even bother.
“Her name is Lorena,” he’d said. “She will change your life.”
“Does she use a clicker?”
“A what?”
Lorena has the kind of full-blooded New York accent—dawgs uv got they-uh own lang-wage—you don’t hear so much anymore, blunt-cut straight red hair and copious freckles on an open oval face like an overgrown kid’s. She’s not too clean-looking, like a woman who spends her time with canines and bad men. Of course, she’s chewing gum—or thumbtacks.
I’m sitting on my bomb-zone sofa with Hola at my side listening to her say:
“The problem is, people don’t know how to communicate with their dogs. We need to learn their language. See the world from their point of view. They have one job and that job is to train us. We’re a lot more important to them than they are to us, if you think about it. They don’t have a lot of other options.”
Regaining her charm after a temporary setback, Hola starts testing Lorena: poking, nuzzling at her, probing her knees.
“She does a lot of attention-seeking behavior,” Lorena points out. “Demands to get petted and so on. Does a whole lotta that.”
“ ’Cause she’s pretty,” she says, “she gets a lot of attention. It works for her. I bet it’s worse with men—big men, right?”
“How did you know?”
“That’s your fault; you trained her. She bats her eyes, rubs against you—you pet her and talk to her. She doesn’t really care if you yell at her or praise her. The point is she’s training you. Meaning she gives the cue, you do the thing.”
Hola rolls over onto her back.
Lorena smiles for the first time since she got here.
“This is her pulling out everything she’s got,” she says, BBing her eyes into mine. “You pet her right now, I’m gonna have to kill you.”
“Dogs need a boss,” she says after a second. “Somebody’s the leader. Most of them want it to be you. It’s like the military—if there’s no leader, people are going to die. That’s the way they think. It’s not like people—we talk; everybody contributes, you know. More like children—that’s their mentality. Think about two-year-olds—how they think. You can’t keep feeding them candy all the time, right? Don’t answer that.
“Dogs get dominance through height. Not necessarily taller breeds—within the breeds. That’s why she gets up on furniture. Why she jumps up on people. When she jumps up, she’s higher. Telling people she’s dominant from the beginning. Thought she was being friendly, right? Dogs may have a tendency but will go to both dominant and submissive from time to time. Your girl probably does both.”
Momentarily flummoxed, Hola heaves herself to standing and starts to oscillate slowly back and forth between us, like a furry washing machine.
“Hola, sit,” she says, and Hola does, skyrocketing right back up like the floor is on fire.
“I think she’s naturally submissive, believe it or not,” Lorena says, amazing me. “This is not a particularly dominant dog. I can tell. This dog should not be all that hard to train.”
Off my wilted-lettuce look: “Sorry, Marty. You thought you had a Bernese Marley, right—and what you really got here is a Taco Bell.”
My phone vibrates, and I check who it is. Not Gloria. I had caved in to Clark’s advice and set a date for our Canine Good Citizen test: December 19. Less than one month away. I had e-mailed the date, time, and place to Gloria, and she hadn’t responded. Now I feel like I’m sitting through a sad animal movie—which is basically every animal movie—and I don’t know why.
“We’re not going to use treats anymore for training,” Lorena says. “It doesn’t work for telling them what you don’t want them to do. Jumping on people is so much better than any treat. You have to keep raising the treat ante. So what are you, going to have a piece of filet mignon out there? Caviar?”
“So what do we do?” I ask her.
“It’s simple,” she says and proceeds to lay out our new method:
From now on, Hola doesn’t get anything she wants unless she does something in return.
First.
Not just food, but anything she wants: petting, a walk, dinner, furniture time. She sits before every door, every flight of stairs, every exit or entrance. She doesn’t move until I say, “Okay.”
“And how do I get her to do this?” I ask, getting testy.
“Just like this,” she says.
“Sit,” she says to Hola, and as Hola hesitates, she growls “Grrrrgggh!” and snaps gently on the leash.
Hola sits.
“Good dog!” she sings, happily. “Very good girl.”
“The thing most people forget,” says Lorena, “is to praise dogs when they do it right. No treat, just praise. You want voice control of your animal. It’s more important than the correction. Ideally, you want to get to a place where you’re praising all the time and don’t need the growl.”
“But for now …” I say.
“The growl.”
This new Lorena Method is certainly a lot easier than the Port Chester Obedience Training Club protocol, logistically. I don’t have to fumble with clickers and treats and so on, which I never quite mastered. As Lorena had said, a food-motivated dog will do anything for a treat. It’s a monologue, not a dialogue.
If I have a treat in my possession, Hola will go through a sit, down, stay, backflip, and tarot card reading—all before I have time to give her a command. It becomes: I’ll do everything till something works. A kind of Las Vegas school of human behavior modification.
“Our goal,” says Lorena, “should be to get them to do something because we asked them to. Good things happen when they do what we say. Annoying things happen to them when they don’t. It’s as simple as that.”
We go around Trinity Church Cemetery, the only active cemetery in Manhattan. It’s a Gothic slab of old New York, a steep and rocky lot of ornate gravesites climbing from the West Side Highway to upper Broadway, remnant of a time when Washington Heights looked more like Bern, Switzerland, than a burn ward.
Hola trots along between Lorena and me as we talk, and I’m holding the leash. She’s pretty well-behaved, by my standards, but Lorena works from a stricter rule book.
“She’s forging ahead,” she says. “Use the correction.”
“Grrr,” I say, self-consciously.
“Hola forges ahead—Grrr like a taser, okay?”
I pull Hola back and around until she’s at my side.
“There’s no sniffing, chewing, whatever, unless you say so,” says Lorena. “Her job on the walk is to walk next to you until you tell her to stop. That’s her job. Heel position. That’s it.”
We angle back down Broadway, within sight of the massive Episcopalian cathedral; as usual, as I’m walking Hola between the cemetery and the cathedral spires, I feel as though we are padding softly over a tapestry woven from the spirits of the dead.
Lorena says, “She picks stuff up fast. She obviously wants to please you.”
“What?”
“Yeah, that’s why she’s so fast. She has a lovely temperament. You’re lucky. She’s smart too.”
“We’re talking about Hola, right? This dog right down here?”
“What you need is to challenge her more.”
We navigate 156th Street past Boricua College and descend the slope to Riverside Drive, and I’m thinking that Hola seems to have mastered the heel: her nose at my kneecap, trotting with her tail a-wag and her head sweeping the antique-brick sidewalk for signs of chicken-related detritus.
Watching her, Lorena says, “This dog is not very dominant, Marty. Why did you say that when you called me?”
“I don’t know. I just assumed that was the problem—that she was dominant and she didn’t respect me enough.”
“She doesn’t respect you enough. But it’s not because she’s alpha.”
The Volhards convinced me that Hola was fearful. Now Lorena is saying she’s a natural follower. Fearful and submissive is surely not the dog I thought I knew.
Back in the apartment, I practice having her sit-stay while Lorena knocks on the door and comes in like a fake visitor.
This is very hard for Hola.
We break it down into pieces: the knock, turning the doorknob, opening a crack, opening more, Lorena coming in, Lorena saying hello, Lorena shaking my hand.
Each time, Hola’s corrected for breaking the stay without waiting for my signal.
“Don’t do too much at once,” Lorena says. “It’s important to make things easy for her. If all your sessions are about failure, it makes you seem weak. Success for her makes you strong. Leadership is about how the world is arranged. Well arranged means good leadership. Hola wants to be with the stronger leader. It’s natural. It’s just a lot less stress for her.”
“Do you like Cesar?” I ask her as she’s getting ready to leave.
Her moon-round eyes narrow slightly, as though she’s wary of the question, but she’s nodding her head.
“Problem with Cesar,” she says, “is people see the show, but they’re not him. They don’t see all the subtle things he’s doing—the body language, how he positions himself. Eye contact. It’s like a dance, you know. He looks like a magician, and they’re not seeing what he’s doing. They try it at home and get bit or whatever. But you know, man, it’s not the dog’s freaking fault.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Gift to the Dog
LORENA LEAVES ME with a handout titled “The Rules of Passive Dominance,” which begins: “Ignoring attention-seeking behaviors is the highest form of dominance.”
The highest form?
Attention seeking: Grabbing shoes and making you chase her. Soft sweet cries and I say, “What’s wrong, Hola, you hungry, doll?” Poke and pet, roll over and rub reflexively, even yelling “Drop!” when she’s got our neighbor’s kid’s sandal in her mouth, shaking it like a squirrel that’s dead enough already.
Negative or positive—it’s all attention seeking.
What she lives for.
“Her job is to train you,” Lorena had said. “She’s better at her job than you are because she is more focused. It’s all she thinks about.”
Hola’s toolbox consists of annoying me until I do what she wants.
Which I always do.
Why?
Because it’s annoying, that’s why.
And if I don’t?
Drama queen.
She’ll collapse on the floor like a character in Gossip Girl tossing her Fendi bag onto the davenport.
