One afternoon at the park I called Lucille toward me, then gave her a biscuit when she complied. Ellen looked over at me and said, “Oooh, you’re cheating!” Small enough incident, but it revealed volumes about the politics of food treats, about how something as simple as handing a dog a biscuit can become imbued with deeper meaning. Her view (not uncommon) has to do with attachment: the dog should come because she wants to, not because there’s a biscuit at the other end; the dog should obey because she loves me, because she has an innate desire to please me. Actually, I’ve come to believe that that’s an irrational view, or at least a naive one, and I tend to side with the Monks of New Skete on the question of the canine desire to please: dogs, they say, care a lot less about pleasing humans than they care about pleasing themselves; if acting in a way that pleases you means something good will happen to them—they’ll get a biscuit, a reward, a pat on the back—they’re likely to be motivated to carry out the task, but their agenda is not necessarily driven by the pure and selfless wish to make you happy. But I also know how tempting it is to equate obedience—and the control it symbolizes—with love, and I remember the little flash of worry and shame I felt at Ellen’s comments: Uh-oh, maybe there’s something amiss here. Is the dog coming when I whistle because she’s attached to me, or is this all about liver? Am I nothing more to her than a biscuit vending machine?
Good question: I still ask it periodically. I love the dog in a very human way, which is to say that I often nurture and tend to her in the way I might nurture or tend to a person—say, a young child. I cuddle with her on the bed. I walk into a room and see her lying somewhere—the couch, her dog bed—and I go over to her and scritch her around the ears, pet and coo at her simply because I find her irresistible. And sometimes—when I’m handing her a biscuit just because I feel like it, or when I’m enthusing over her just for being cute—I look into her little dark face and I wonder: What do you make of this? Do all these outpourings of emotion make you feel warm and cozy and attached to me, or do you think I’m a nut?
“Sometimes I think Lucille loves me, and sometimes I think she sees me as the butler.” I said this to a friend not long ago, and we laughed about it (“Time for my walk, James”; “More liver, James”), but the statement actually reflected the presence of a low-level tension on my part, a quiet but persistent worry about the relationship between power and forcefulness (mine) and respect (hers). When I indulge Lucille, stroke and gush at her, does she read my behavior as loving, or does it make her see me as a wimp? Am, I in fact, the leader in her eyes or the two-legged servant, a slightly strange but ultimately benign presence at the other end of the leash?
These questions reflect older, more personal concerns on my part—historically I’ve not tended to see myself as a particularly powerful or authoritative person, and I worry that the dog picks up on this, that she very adeptly sniffs out my wimpy side—but they’re also valid worries and not uncommon ones among owners. The dog, after all, is a creature who by nature requires leadership and limits, who does best when she knows her place in the hierarchy. Lucille may not be an inherently dominant dog, and she may not be particularly interested in challenging my authority, but I sometimes wonder if I stray too far across some line that’s important to dogs, veering out of the realm of Leadership and into the land of Love.
There are various schools of thought on the relationship between human forcefulness and canine respect, but the world of obedience trainers can be roughly divided into three camps. The first camp is harsh and unforgiving, and it is expressed most vividly by the late Bill Koehler, a legendary California-based trainer (he made a successful career by, among other things, training dogs for Walt Disney movies) who would have looked at someone like me with utter contempt. Koehler was crusty and hard-boiled in approach, and his training books are merciless on the subject of overemotional owners, whom he refers to variously as “wincers,” “humanaics,” and “cookie people.” “Their common calls,” he once wrote, “are: ‘I couldn’t-do-that—I couldn’t-do-that,’ and ‘Oh myyy—oh myyy.’” I’d be a classic wet noodle in his eyes, the kind of spineless dog owner who tries to lure her puppy around with biscuits and has no idea how crafty, uppity, even disdainful a dog can be. Koehler believed that control needs to be unyielding and absolute, discipline applied in the firmest, most unequivocal and physical ways. Without it, he believed, dogs lose respect for owners (and they express their contempt through lazy, inadequate responses to commands or blatant acts of disobedience), and owners—unable to prevent dogs from running out in traffic or assaulting mailmen—lose dogs. Dog love, in this view, requires tough love.
At the other end of the spectrum is the philosophy you’ll find in books with titles like Training with Love, Praise, and Reward and Dog Training The Gentle Modern Method. This is the dog-as-partner view, or dog-as-slightly-retarded-child, a view of the dog as an innately good, sweet-tempered, loving creature who needs guidance and positive reinforcement rather than punishment and force. Here the coercive, physical methods advocated by trainers like Koehler—lots of firm corrections with a choke collar, for instance—are seen as punitive and unnecessary, and the canine experience of love (or what we can know of it) is believed to be largely compatible with our own: you can, in fact, adore your dog into submission.
That’s certainly an appealing view, but it’s not very widely shared. The third and largest camp comprises more mainstream trainers like the Monks of New Skete, Brian Kilcommons, and Matthew Margolis, who exist somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, acknowledging the dog’s potential for both aggression and goodness, and doling out equal shares of firm physical corrections and enthusiastic words of praise. There in the middle, the human style of loving is recognized as both understandable and potentially dangerous, an asset and a liability: sure we love dogs, and well we should, but loving a dog isn’t the same as controlling one, and what we perceive as sweet, nurturing behavior may be perceived by dogs quite differently. My trainer, Kathy de Natale, belongs to this camp, and I remember the look of barely disguised horror that crossed her face when I told her that Lucille, then four months old, was sleeping on my bed every night. Among many trainers, the idea of letting a dog, particularly a young pup, sleep with you is widely considered taboo because it gives him the message that he’s an equal. So can allowing the dog to jump on you, or to growl at you if you approach his food bowl. The logic: being cuddly and permissive may feel good to you, but such behavior isn’t necessarily good for your relationship. It may undermine your power and help the dog figure out whether he can successfully challenge your authority.
I also remember standing in an early puppy class, reading directives on a handout Kathy passed around: “Teach the puppy that nothing is free! Make him sit before you give him a treat, or before you pet him.” The reasoning here was clear—if you make the dog earn things like biscuits and pats, you reinforce the idea that you are in charge, not him—but I recall a feeling of collision inside, intellect bumping up against emotion. Make her sit every single time I want to pet her? No free lunch ever? I stood there thinking about all those unsolicited treats and strokes, and I gulped, imaging the dog’s respect diminishing with each successive Milk-Bone. One of the reasons controlling a dog is so complicated, one of the reasons it can make you feel like you’re standing on such shaky ground, is that it poses so many internal challenges. You have to look at your dog (and into your own heart) and figure out where you stand on the power-and-respect continuum, which camp you belong to: What is this creature? A crafty, uppity beast or a toddler in a fur coat? You have to balance your need for a relationship that feels affectionate and giving with your dog’s need for hierarchy and order. You have to figure out what it means not just to express love to a dog but to generate love in return.
And sometimes—no small feat—you have to be the heavy.
Observe Leslie, thirty-eight, owner of a two-year-old Wheaten terrier named Wilson, who has just absconded with a jogger’s glove. Wilson is boxy an
d tan and soft-coated, a teddy bear of a dog who looks fluffy and sweet and perfectly innocent, but when he sees the jogger, he trots alongside him and just snatches the glove out of his hand. Leslie is mortified. She tries calling Wilson: no response. She tries yelling: “Drop it! Wilson, drop it!” Nada. She tries chasing him, and of course he thinks this is a hilarious game: she gets within grabbing distance of the glove, and he dashes off, a look of devilish glee in his eye. Finally an onlooker grabs Wilson by the collar and wrests the glove out of his mouth. The jogger, glove returned, gives Leslie an annoyed look and proceeds on his way.
Leslie is freaked out by this, even two weeks later. “It is so embarrassing,” she says. The episode makes her feel humiliated and out of control, and she worries that Wilson’s behavior reflects badly on her, that when he’s unresponsive and ill mannered, he becomes not just a dog but something much more revealing: a four-legged embodiment of her fundamental inability to set limits. “When people stop you on the street and say, ‘Oh, he’s such a nice dog,’” she says, “it’s like they’re saying, ‘Oh, and you must be such a nice person, too.’ And when the dog is bad—well, you can’t help but think that people are thinking you’re a bad owner.”
When Leslie first got Wilson, she was as ignorant about dogs as I was, and her definition of training consisted of two eensy words: “house training.” She thought: You teach the dog not to go to the bathroom in the house, and that’s that—trained dog. Yeah, right. True to his breed, Wilson is an exuberant, energetic dog—Leslie loves this about him, but it also causes her problems. He leaps up on people, anyone who shows up at her door. When she takes him out for walks, he drags her down the street, and people are forever shouting out, “Hey, are you walking that dog, or is he walking you? Ha, ha, ha.”
And yet Leslie cannot bring herself to control the dog—at least not the way most mainstream trainers tell you to. When Wilson was about six months old, Leslie took him to a trainer who taught her what’s variously known as the leash correction or the “pop,” pretty standard training fare. Take one choke collar, issue a command, and if the dog doesn’t obey, give the leash a good snap, hard enough to communicate to him that he’s done something wrong. This method never bothered me—dogs are physical creatures who understand and respond to comfort and discomfort; they’re also a good deal tougher than some of us give them credit for—but Leslie couldn’t stand the idea. “It made me so uncomfortable,” she says. “The trainer was so rigid and controlling. For me, the idea of relating to a dog by snapping his neck was like an anathema. I’d never relate to anybody that way.” She lasted through one session, never went back. Leslie tells me about this, talks about how uncomfortable all that authoritarian neck snapping made her, and then she lowers her voice and confesses: “What I really want to do is negotiate with my dog.”
Beneath that simple statement—“I want to negotiate with my dog”—are all those vexing questions about the nature of animals, about relationships, and about giving and getting love. Leslie is an art therapist who works with children in a local hospital, and although she knows Wilson is a dog—she can see that, he reminds her of it daily—a part of her genuinely wants to treat him like one of her young clients, like a young, vulnerable child. Leslie is also a great believer in equality in partnerships, in forming alliances: when she interacts with Wilson, she envisions, she says, “a kind of give and take,” a dynamic that includes mutual respect and a willingness to compromise. And as she is discovering, she is not by nature an authoritative or domineering personality. “There’s such a huge emotional overlay to setting limits, to being controlling,” she says. “It makes me really uncomfortable to have to be that way.” Authority, in a nutshell, conflicts with her relational style, with her concept of a loving bond, with her sense of self as a loving person.
Leslie, of course, is hardly the first dog owner in America to experience this conflict. “Thirty percent of my clients cannot assume a leadership role. Their definition of love just won’t allow for it.” Myrna Milani, D.V.M., a veterinary consultant and author based in New Hampshire, utters those two sentences with so much frustration, she practically spits. She is not alone. When Brian Kilcommons, nationally known dog trainer and author of several training books, starts talking about the human inability to set limits with dogs, you can practically hear his blood pressure rise: “People tolerate behavior in dogs they would never tolerate in a human being,” he says. “I mean, you don’t let your boyfriend come up and punch people in the crotch to say hi, or maul them because he doesn’t like them. But that gauge is not applied to pets. The dog leaps up on someone, and the owner says, ‘Oh, he’s just being friendly,’ or the dog attacks the mailman, and the owner says, ‘Oh, the mailman must have done something to make him angry,’ or the dog doesn’t respond to a command—an animal whose hearing is far more acute than ours is—and the owner says, ‘Oh, well, maybe he didn’t hear me.’” Jodi Anderson, a trainer in New York, describes men who head up multimillion-dollar corporations, men who wield vast amounts of power, who are charged daily with the hiring and firing and control of other human beings, and yet who cannot bring themselves to reprimand the dog, cannot so much as put the dog in a simple sit-stay and ask him to wait for his dinner.
This all sounds rather amusing in a pathetic sort of way—you picture the big powerful CEO, a tiger at work and a marshmallow at home, held hostage in his own kitchen by a Yorkshire terrier—but lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog’s mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it’s not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog—to train him, to correct him when he’s wrong—but cruel. Lack of leadership also ruins a lot of canine lives—and quite literally. In the absence of control, dogs get loose, they don’t come back when they’re called, they bolt into traffic, they die. (Staffers at Angell Memorial Hospital in Boston, one of the best-known veterinary hospitals in the nation, see this happen so regularly, they’ve coined a phrase for the phenomenon: dogs who get hit by cars are called victims of “heavy-metal disease.”)
Those who aren’t killed in city streets may be killed at animal shelters. Four to six million animals are given up to shelters each year by their owners, and a healthy proportion of those—as many as 40 percent—are surrendered by disillusioned or frustrated people who didn’t realize how complicated living with a dog can be. Numbers like these will break a trainer’s heart. Often shelter dogs are young animals (about 25 percent of pets are destroyed by the time they reach two years of age) whose lives might have been spared had their owners put some time into basic training. A recent study from Purdue University found that people who hadn’t taken their dogs to obedience classes were about three and a half times more likely to surrender the animal to a shelter than owners who had: training, not surprisingly, creates both a better-behaved dog and a closer bond between dog and human.
And yet the mindset and skills required to control a dog don’t come easily to a lot of humans. You have to be tough. You have to deal with conflict in much more direct and physical ways than many of us are used to. Dogs themselves are enormously clear with one another; if you’ve ever watched a documentary about wolves and seen how a mother reprimands her cubs, you get an idea of the kinds of signals they respond to. She cuffs the cubs across the snout, bares her teeth at them, nips them on the flank; she’s clear and physical and harsh. In human form, “alpha” behavior—firm, stern, consistent—may not only feel unduly harsh or dictatorial; it may also evoke any number of unpleasant associations on the part of the owner, reminding us of the authoritarian parent or schoolteacher, of ancient feelings of being unloved or treated unfairly; as it did for Leslie, controlling behavior may run counter to our most basic ideals of what nurturance is supposed to look and feel like, particularly when it’s directed toward an animal you adore.
My friend Wendy describes the first weeks with her new puppy, an Austr
alian shepherd named Alaska, as a frenzy of proactive discipline. Alaska, now almost three, is a beautiful example of her breed—a forty-five-pound tricolored shepherd with a silky brown coat, white and tan markings, and green eyes—and she was as cute as they come as a puppy, a floppy brown puffball. When Wendy looked at her, all her instincts said: Melt! Cuddle! Pet! All the experts said something else. She remembers, “All the books tell you to set limits and establish the rules and be the boss, so you’re running around saying ‘No!’ ‘No!’ ‘No!’ from the very beginning.” Wendy compares this to her experience as a new mother some twenty-five years earlier, when her baby spent most of the time asleep, allowing her to indulge in the cuddling, bonding side of new motherhood. “Getting a puppy is more like acquiring a two-year-old,” she says. “It’s very disconcerting.” Indeed, control can fly in the face of all those warm maternal instincts; it can make you feel withholding and mean, inspire guilt around even the most seemingly straightforward decisions.
Wendy and I talk about this, and a single image floats to mind: the crate. The image of tiny Lucille at the age of three months, barricaded in her wire crate, dark puppy eyes blinking out at me. The horror! The agony! And (on my part) the abject stupidity. Like most contemporary dog owners, I’d been encouraged by virtually every dog-training book I read to crate Lucille as a puppy, and I understood the rationale—because dogs don’t like to soil the area where they sleep, crates are masterful tools for housebreaking; crates also prevent the puppy from tearing up your house, and they give the puppy the safe, enclosed sensation of being in a den. So I trooped out to buy one, dutifully stationed it in my bedroom, and proceeded to freak out. Reason is no match for the sound of a crying pup. I’d put Lucille in the crate before I went to sleep, and she’d promptly start to wimper, and I’d lie there in bed and want to die. She’s miserable! She’s lonely! I’m causing her pain! Invariably, Lucille would settle down after a few minutes and fall asleep, but I found the act of distressing her for even a moment excruciating. If she woke up in the middle of the night needing to pee, I’d take her outside and then let her spend the rest of the night with me on the bed. On the third night of this, I woke to the sound of her crying, stumbled out with her, then got back into bed and looked at the clock: 11:30. We’d been asleep for less than an hour. Dogs are very smart. The crate was history.
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