A Good Dog

by Jon Katz

  And so, two weeks later we drove to a white farmhouse in Manchester, Vermont, where we met Dr. Valerie Gurstein, a vet specializing in holistic care, including acupuncture, chiropractic, and herbal remedies.

  Dr. Gurstein’s office was different from conventional vets’ facilities, which tend to be cramped, crowded, and noisy. Dogs pick up on all sorts of smells and sounds in those situations and often tense up, get fearful or aggressive. “Oh, he knows where he is,” people tell me all the time, as even the boldest pets tremble and whine in the vet’s waiting room. I have no idea what my dogs think or know, but I see few dogs at ease in such places. Rose gets the shivers the minute we pull into our vets’ parking lot, and Orson grows vigilant and anxious. (Clem, the slut, on the other hand, is delighted to be there and wags all the way from the front door to the examining room, happily greeting her many friends and admirers.)

  Dr. Gurstein’s office was different. We arrived early, but the doctor—soft-spoken and warm—waved us right in. I’d brought Rose along for moral support.

  Orson scampered up the porch stairs into the reception area, where something soothing and New Age was wafting from stereo speakers. Dr. Gurstein obviously scheduled visits to avoid tense canine encounters, and allowed plenty of time for each dog, more than an hour. So the atmosphere was altogether relaxed, unhurried.

  The examining room felt more like a living room than a medical facility—carpeted, with soft colors and framed art on the walls. The examining table itself was a low carpeted platform less than a foot from the ground. Orson hopped onto it without being asked, showing none of the uneasiness he often demonstrated in conventional veterinary offices.

  Dr. Gurstein spoke directly to him in a measured, soothing voice. Trainers often caution that it’s unwise to look a dog directly in the eye—many take it as a challenge—but Orson loves people who look squarely at him and say his name; he loves attention in general.

  A dog who seems to expect to get into trouble, Orson almost visibly relaxes when he is praised and soothed. He appeared to react to Dr. Gurstein’s calm, quiet manner by calming down himself. She let him sniff her hands and check out the room, then sat down next to him on the platform.

  “I have to be honest: I’m a bit skeptical about this whole holistic idea,” I said. “It’s a first for me.” She nodded and said she’d heard similar sentiments before. Often, I suspected.

  “Before I examine Orson, I’d like to talk to you,” she said. “Tell me about your history with him, your experience. I’ve talked to your vet, but I’d like to know from you why you’re here. What do you want for him?”

  I was surprised by the question, and more surprised by my response.

  My normal vets were great, but decidedly pragmatic. They wanted to identify a problem and fix it, ordering tests as warranted, prescribing medicine when appropriate. They were efficient and highly competent, but the office atmosphere in their busy practice was often chaotic. It was not a place you wanted to linger and schmooze, nor a place where anyone would want you to, since there were always people and patients waiting.

  This place was different, and Orson was picking up on it, watching Dr. Gurstein carefully, but at ease, his ears up, his tail wagging, his breathing normal. I was feeling the difference, too. No vet had ever really asked me much about my history with Orson. We usually got right down to symptoms and solutions.

  So I told her about how Orson had come to me almost out of the blue, about our difficult first year, about how Orson had led me to sheepherding, which had led me to Bedlam Farm, to donkeys and sheep, and then to Rose and Clementine. I explained what an enormous gift he’d turned out to be. How he’d rescued me from a place I felt estranged from, work I was wearying of, a lifetime without many close friends. How he’d brought me to this life of challenge, beauty, nature, and animals. He had saved me in so many of the ways a person can be saved.

  I owed him much, and I felt I needed to take his care and welfare as far as I reasonably could, without offending common sense and perspective. I’d grown very concerned about what could happen if his unpredictable behavior continued. Like it or not—and most of the time I didn’t—my farm had become a more public place, with people often streaming through. I had to try harder to calm him.

  “A part of him is broken,” I said, recounting what little I knew of his early years. “And I can’t reach it.” My eyes welled up, something that’s never happened in all the many times I’d talked about this dog. I’d written reams about Orson; we’d appeared on television and radio; I’d talked about him at readings and lectures—yet I don’t think anybody had really asked me how I felt about him, what I wanted for him.

  Nor had I really stopped to look back at all the exhausting hours of training, calming, worrying, shouting, soothing, herding, all the work we’d done together. I’d tried so hard to keep faith with this dog, and talking about that with her, the intensity of the experience seemed to seep out. I stopped, took a deep breath, regained control. I didn’t particularly like the idea of bawling in a holistic vet’s office.

  Still, the emotion her question elicited was powerful, and it reminded me just how much I loved this creature, how much he meant to me, how much I wanted to reach and heal that broken part, what was at stake if I couldn’t.

  The doctor, who suggested I call her Valerie, nodded and listened. Then she spent a long time carefully examining his back, legs, shoulders, and neck for orthopedic problems. Trained as a conventional vet, she was familiar with bone structure and musculoskeletal problems, and quickly found some.

  After Orson was hit by that car years ago, he’d rolled to his feet, apparently unhurt, and had shown no damage or injuries when our New Jersey vet checked him over. Nor had the recent battery of tests turned up any orthopedic problems. Now Valerie’s exam found extreme sensitivity to being touched along parts of the spine. I could see Orson—the most stoic of dogs—wince sharply, even yelp, when touched in a certain spot.

  His spine was seriously out of alignment, she told me; he must be uncomfortable much of the time. That nobody, including me, had noticed this sensitivity in all our time together amazed me. I was suddenly grateful to my vet for suggesting this visit.

  I also told Valerie about Orson’s arousal problems, how everyday sounds could make him crazy, sometimes even dangerous; how he could switch from placid to furious in seconds, sometimes for no discernible reason. As a demonstration, I clapped my hands. Valerie was startled to see him launch into furious barking, nipping at the air, charging suddenly toward the window, out of control. It was worse around doors and gates and delivery people, I said.

  Completing her exam, she suggested Shen calming herbs from China, and recommended acupuncture. I was doubtful about the first idea, bemused by the second. Acupuncture for a dog? That seemed a stretch. Though it had often been suggested for me, for my own bad leg, I always resisted. It seemed somehow fitting that my dog would get acupuncture, but not me. But the measure of this experience, I’d reminded myself, would be simple: Either it helped the dog or it didn’t. And we wouldn’t know for a while.

  Valerie took out a plastic container of acupuncture needles and removed one. Rose, who’d been lying quietly on the floor, watching, suddenly leaped onto the platform over the startled Orson and growled, showing Valerie her teeth. This, too, amazed me: Rose barks at strangers, but has never bared her teeth to anyone. “Easy, Rose,” I said sharply.

  But I was impressed by the way Valerie handled the confrontation. Instead of trying to placate Rose or scold her, she paused, took one of her needles and held it out for Rose to sniff.

  “Rose,” she said in that same low, steady voice, “I’m not going to hurt Orson. I’m going to put this needle in him. Watch.” Her calm was infectious. She moved the needle to Orson, who was lying peaceably on his side, watching, then back to Rose so she could sniff it again, then back to Orson. Rose, whose studious, problem-solving nature has mesmerized me more than once, followed the needle with her eyes, head tilted. Va
lerie waited a few seconds while Rose considered.

  Rose seemed satisfied by this and hopped off the table and resettled herself on the floor, watchful but willing to let things proceed.

  That first day, Valerie inserted eight or nine needles into Orson’s back, neck, and shoulders. At first he tensed. Then, needle by needle, he seemed to steadily relax.

  I was stunned, after ten minutes or so, to see him lying on his side, sound asleep, snoring loudly, his tongue hanging from one side of his mouth while needles protruded from various parts of him. My dog, usually so intense, anxious, and alert, was barely conscious, practically comatose.

  At the end of the session, Valerie removed the needles and turned to a cabinet stocked with treats. Orson came to, but was as relaxed as I could remember ever seeing him outside my own office. After the first visit, Orson learned to step off the platform and sit by the cabinet.

  We came every two or three weeks for a chiropractic adjustment and acupuncture; in between, I administered calming herbs, mixing a teaspoonful or so into his food each day.

  Orson seemed eager for his treatment. When we arrived at Valerie’s office, he dashed out of the truck to her door, ran inside, and jumped onto the examining table, usually lying down before he was asked. At times, the needles made him uncomfortable and he squirmed. Valerie, seeing things I never could, adjusted the needles until he slowly closed his eyes, sighed deeply, and conked out.

  Usually Orson is a pain when we drive, rushing from one window to the other as cars and trucks whiz by. But when we left Valerie’s, he went out like a light and slept all the way home.

  Almost everybody who knew this dog—especially the guys still working on the wall and Dog Room—volunteered that Orson had changed, that he seemed easier, less frantic. He still got excited at the gate, and still took the occasional nip at somebody carrying a power tool, but it seemed an almost halfhearted gesture.

  “Knock it off, Orson,” Chris or Anthony or Kathan would say, and he would. Sometimes when somebody came to the door, he didn’t even get up—this from a dog who once crashed through a Plexiglas-braced leaded-glass window.

  I judged that he was about 30 percent calmer, 90 percent of the time, the most dramatic behavioral change I had witnessed in the last few years.

  If the gauge of holistic care was whether or not the dog did better, my first encounter with alternative medicine was a success. I was happy that I’d tried it. Clearly there’s a point where conventional veterinary care—as good as it is, as happy as I’ve been with it—has nothing much to offer and another realm of medicine begins.

  Still, I was unprepared when Valerie, after several months, suggested I speak with an animal communicator. “I’m not ready for that,” I protested.

  Acupuncture? Some herbs? A dose of Enya, followed by some sweet talk, a soothing massage, and some hypoallergenic treats? So far, so good—but no farther.

  Valerie said she understood.

  But she didn’t give up. A couple of weeks later, Valerie suggested I give her a picture of Orson to pass along to a shamanic soul retriever, a woman who’d studied the ancient Chinese notion that when animals are damaged, parts of their souls break off and can, under certain circumstances, be retrieved and returned to them. This retriever had a solid reputation for helping animals; Valerie recommended her enthusiastically. She’d intended to return to the subject of an animal communicator, but was waiting until she sensed my “resistance” had lowered.

  My discomfort, in fact, remained high; this seemed a trek deeper into la-la land. But I agreed to think about it. If I were seriously exploring alternative care for Orson, shouldn’t I go all the way? The point of any potential treatment isn’t whether I “believed” in it. If Orson got better, then it worked—at least for him. If he didn’t, it didn’t.

  Pieces of soul break off from a dog when he or she suffers? I just can’t put together how that would work. But I’d also observed how conventional training and veterinary medicine weren’t working for him, either.

  On top of that, a friend in Vermont called to say that a well-known horse communicator—someone with decades of experience around racetracks and horse breeders, with many stellar references—was branching out into dogs and other animals. She wanted to come to the farm and see Orson and the donkeys. She was also, my friend added, picking up signals from Winston, the differently abled rooster.

  Well, I told Paula, the same test applies. If the dog got better, it was worth the shot. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

  Lesley, the shamanic healer, called first. All she needed to begin with was a picture of the dog, she said. She might or might not need to visit the farm and see Orson after that. She didn’t even mention payment until I did. When I pressed her, she said she charged very little—thirty-five dollars for the “retrieval,” another thirty or so if a visit was necessary. Obviously, she wasn’t driven by money.

  Then Donna, the horse communicator, e-mailed me from Virginia. She seemed bright and direct, and a lot more expensive: $400 to communicate with Orson, Rose, and Clementine, plus the three donkeys. She’d throw in the rooster for free.

  Donna pulled into the driveway in her SUV a couple of weeks later. Tall, blond, and lean, she had the look of a horse person, that ruddy complexion, that confidence around animals. She’d been doing this for twenty years, she told me, shaking hands firmly, and then following me out to the yard. There seemed nothing woo-woo about her.

  She stood over Orson and waved one hand over his back. “He’s telling me he’s frightened,” she announced. “He thinks you might give him away, like you did the other dog”—evidently a reference to Homer, now resettled with my neighbor back in New Jersey.

  She walked around a bit with Orson, and then told me that Orson was a border collie in need of a job. “He is confused. He wants to work, and you are his work. He is very upset at all the people coming here. He wants to protect you, and he thinks that he’s failing whenever somebody comes in.”

  I didn’t say much as she visited with the other dogs. Clementine kept bringing her bones and treats; I could hardly wait to hear what was going on inside that head. “Clementine is upset when Rose gets on the couch and takes her spot,” she said, picking up nothing further. It made sense that this sweet and uncomplicated creature had no bigger complaints.

  Out by the barn, Donna met Winston, who was, she said, one “irritated” bird, the Rodney Dangerfield of roosters. He got no respect. Rose was always plowing over him to reach the sheep, Clementine would steal the chicken feed from under his beak.

  “Has a hen died or left?” Donna asked. Yes, I said, I’d returned one to the friend who’d given her to me; I didn’t need so many eggs.

  “Well, next time tell Winston,” she advised. “He is looking for her and is distressed that he can’t find her.” Tell him? I wondered. Did we speak the same language?

  I appreciated Donna’s perceptive readings; she picked up on some important stuff. I’d long known that one of Orson’s elemental dramas was that he was a border collie without work. That I had become his work was likely true, and many people would find it touching, but I was more ambivalent. Hanging out with a human isn’t the natural task of a border collie. Her perceptions of Orson were useful and reinforcing to hear. And while I didn’t particularly care if I’d annoyed Winston, who had quite a nice rooster life, Donna did know and understand animals, I concluded.

  At the same time, hers were ideas that plenty of good trainers or behaviorists—or farmers, for that matter—might have come up with. I was fuzzy about the difference between what was observed and what was “communicated.”

  And I found it off-putting when Donna paused, closed her eyes, and received supposed messages from the dogs: “Orson is telling me his shoulder hurts.” Was she receiving literal words, in English, from these animals, I asked her more than once, or just relaying her sense of their thoughts?

  “Oh, they’re talking to me,” she said. “These are their literal words.” Sometimes she
laughed at their “jokes.” With that she lost me.

  I debated this visit with friends for months afterward. Probably it’s healthy and valuable to explore alternative ways of communicating with our animals. But I found it arrogant to assume that animals would use our words. Their animalness is practically sacred to me, and I respect and love them for it. Interpreting behavior is one thing; picking up verbal jokes quite another, a place I couldn’t go.

  So I was especially wary when Lesley Nase, the shaman, called to say she was receiving “fascinating images” from Orson, from the picture I’d given Valerie. She would love to come to the farm and see him, she suggested, and explore whether there were places he might be getting “negative energy.”

  Lord, I thought. In a country where millions of people don’t have basic health care, my border collie is getting visits from communicators and shamans. But I had gone this far.

  Lesley showed up the following week in a tiny foreign car, a middle-aged woman clutching a handful of dowsing rods. I liked Lesley, too; she was warm and funny, joking about retrieving souls. I was struck by how the dogs—especially Orson—warmed to her.

  She also pointed out the irony, noticing my limp, of Orson’s getting regular acupuncture while I didn’t. Did I want some energy treatment for my leg, she wondered. No thanks, I said.

  I think by now Orson had figured out when someone was coming to care for him. He’d always craved being the center of attention, elbowing other dogs aside to greet visitors, curling up in almost anybody’s lap. So he was shortly in Lesley’s, as we all sat in a heap on the front porch steps. He’s too large and heavy to really be a lap dog, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “I got an image of a Nazi parade from Orson” was her opening revelation. “He was inside gates and fences, and there were people marching, and other people watching and clapping.”

  Orson had once been an obedience show dog, I told her; he’d often entered competitions through fences and gates, although I’d never been sure how that connected to his arousal and nipping. A woman who’d known Orson back in Texas had e-mailed me after a previous book to say that some competitors on the circuit there were referred to as “Nazi obedience trainers,” because they were so critical of their dogs. As in any sport, from human soccer games to canine herding trials, people do get swept up in the passion of competition, which can become something ugly, an arena for enforcing control rather than working together.