I didn’t want to disturb this lovely scene, so I simply greeted them both and offered to open a bottle of wine. Wiz seemed to be having the desired calming effect on the woman I loved.
CHAPTER 20
CAIRN OR CAN’T
Now I had two dogs to train and two dogs to compete with in obedience trials. The early part of Wizard’s training was easy, since he had learned most of his basic commands from simply modeling his behavior after Flint’s. When he was only about 14 months of age, I put him into his first real obedience competition, and that weekend he earned two qualifying scores. A month later, in another competition, Wiz earned a final qualifying score and his Companion Dog (CD) degree. Working with Flint and my continuing study of dog behavior and training techniques clearly helped speed Wizard’s learning.
Meanwhile, I was training Flint for his next degree in Open Competition, which leads to a more advanced title, something like a high school degree for dogs. Training at this level is much more exciting because the dog must work completely off leash and he has a variety of interesting tasks to perform, such as retrieving and jumping a high jump and a broad jump. You can teach a dog to jump in a number of ways, but the easiest involves showing him another dog jumping and then encouraging him to join in. In the same way that Wiz was modeling his behavior after Flint, Flint needed someone to model his behavior after. Since Flint focused his attention on me, I had to become the model.
We started with a high jump, which is just a wooden barrier that the dog has to vault over. Initially the jump that I asked him to make wasn’t very high, about 4 inches or so. I put Flint on leash, gave a happy “Flint, let’s go!” and ran to the jump. As we reached it, I gave the command “Flint, jump!” and I made an exaggerated jump over the low barrier with Flint jumping right beside me. I then raised jump and we repeated our side-by-side jump, now without the leash. This process continued until ultimately Flint and I were simultaneously going over the jump set somewhat higher than Flint’s shoulder height.
Flint liked this game and was soon answering my command to jump with a single happy bark, followed by a charge forward toward the jump. Next I had Flint sit facing the jump while I went to the other side. I now called “Flint, jump!” and tapped the barrier with my hand. It did not take a second try. My gray dog answered with that happy bark and leapt over the high jump and then proceeded to circle me several times in excitement.
Another type of jump is the broad jump, which is made up of a series of horizontally arranged boards low in height but covering a wide area—twice the dog’s height at the shoulder—that he must leap over. The basic training procedure was the same, with me modeling the behavior and going over the jump with Flint. The big difference was that just after we reached his full jumping length and I went over it with him, I tripped and fell in such a way that the boards scattered noisily on either side of me causing Flint to yelp in surprise and leap back from the site of the accident. He stood there staring at the white boards and grumbling to himself while I painfully picked myself up and rearranged the jump to Flint’s jumping length and hobbled back to the starting place.
I was hurting a bit but felt it was important to work through any problems that might arise as the result of my clumsiness, which had clearly startled Flint. “Okay, let’s try that again. Flint, jump!” I called to him and painfully vaulted over the broad jump only to see my dog run around it giving the white boards a wide berth. I could hear him in my mind saying, “Those boards tried to leap up and bite me. I’m not taking a chance on them again! I saw what they did to you!”
Flint contemplates the broad jump.
Back in the early part of the twentieth century the psychologist John B. Watson showed that if you show a baby a white furry animal and then simultaneously produce a loud, unexpected sound that frightens the baby, the child will learn to be afraid—not only of that animal, but of anything with white fur. In effect, the child has been taught to be afraid of something that he was not afraid of before.
I was now faced with a similar situation. Clearly, Flint had become anxious about jumping over the broad jump. I tried reducing the width of the jump, but he still shied away from it and would not jump with me. He wouldn’t even jump over a single board when I called him or tried to lure him with a treat. This meant that I needed some motivation that was stronger than his fear. It dawned on me that his hunting and chasing instincts might work in this instance.
I went to my equipment bag and pulled out a small squeaky toy. It was a fuzzy pillow-shaped object about the size of a tennis ball that made a high squeaking sound when it was squeezed. This was one object that Flint loved to chase and “kill.” I then took some long pieces of wood and made a sort of tight corridor with the broad jump in the middle. The pieces of wood, although low, would discourage my dog from going around the jump. Then back to the starting place in front of the jump.
“Hey, Flint! Look at this!” I waved his toy excitedly and made it squeak a few times. “Do you want it? Yeah, you want it!” followed by more squeaking. At this point Flint was dancing around with excitement. I then tossed the toy so that it fell just in front of the jump.
Flint dashed out, grabbed the toy, and brought it back to me, squeaking all the way. I repeated the procedure, only this time I tossed the toy so that it landed over the first board of the jump. Flint again dashed out, hesitated a moment at the board but leapt over, grabbed the toy, leapt back over the board, and returned to me.
This was going well, so I lengthened the throw and the toy went completely over the jump. There was a bit more hesitation this time, but Flint wanted that toy enough that he pushed away his fear and made the jump. With the toy in his mouth squeaking loudly, he jumped back and returned to me. We repeated this a few times with me calling “Jump!” just as he went over. Now I felt that we were ready to try a more formal version of the broad jump again.
Back to the starting point with the leash on him: “Flint, let’s go!” and then “Jump!” as I leapt over the boards. I turned to watch my dog only to see that he had stalled in front of the jump and was looking at me with his ears lowered in a fearful manner. I could hear him saying, “There’s no toy for me to hunt and kill out there, and I’m not going to risk my life by going over this monster for nothing.”
I sighed but then had an idea how to continue Flint’s “therapy.” When he was not looking, I dropped the toy between the boards. This time I let him watch me make the jump while asking him to accompany me—which he did not do. But once on the other side, I picked up the toy and started to make it squeak while I danced around singing, “It’s mine. I made the jump, so the toy is mine.”
Flint approached hopefully, but I didn’t give him the toy. Again when he was not looking I hid the toy—this time near the far end of the jump, just barely out of sight. Again I made the jump alone and snatched up the toy, happily waving and squeaking it. Flint was excited now.
Finally, with the toy again hidden at the far end of the jump, I went back to Flint, attached his leash, and asked “Do you want the toy?” then with a command to go and another to jump, I went over the boards. This time he jumped with me. As a reward I let him find the toy and play with it for a few moments.
Although I had broken through his fear of the jump, another problem presented itself, which was the direct result of the method that I used to solve his fear. This is the bane of psychology: every form of therapy has the potential for not only curing problems but also for triggering others that eventually have to be dealt with as well. Flint was happily going over the jump, beginning with his single bark of joy, but in his mind he had come to suspect that there was always going to be a toy hidden near or in the broad jump. In competition, once the dog completes the broad jump, he is supposed to circle back and sit in front of his handler, who is standing next to the boards. Flint was now making the broad jump, but was then immediately stopping to check around under each of the boards for his squeaky toy.
I had to do a quick fix, so next wh
en he went over the jump, and while he was still in the air, I tossed the squeaky toy in the direction he was going. When he landed, he continued moving forward and grabbed the toy happily. I could then call him back to sit in front of me. Flint had now come to love this exercise because it seemed like play to him and he would indicate how happy he was by making excited up-and-down pitter-patting movements with his front paws while he waited for the command to jump. At that point I knew that his brain was filled with little more than “Where’s my toy? Let me at it!”
All that remained was to phase out the toy; but here, too, I ended up with a problem that is typical in older dogs and common in virtually all terriers, regardless of age. It is generally easy to teach a dog something new, but once he’s learned to do a task in a certain way, it can be difficult for him to learn to do it differently. I’d trained away Flint’s fear that the jump boards would leap up and bite him by teaching him that a chance to play with a toy was associated with the jump. In competition there would be no toy, so I had to phase out its use. But when I tried to replace the toy with a treat after he completed the jump, it wasn’t as much fun, so there were times when he would suddenly revert back to what he learned first and start searching the area for his toy after taking the jump rather than returning to me.
Eventually, Flint was reliable enough to compete in obedience trials, but occasionally his early experiences with the broad jump would swamp his mind. For example, in one competitive trial Flint had performed splendidly and all that remained was the broad jump. As we stood in front of it, I began to worry when I saw him doing an excited pitter-patting with his paws, which meant that he was in his “chase the toy” mode.
“Just one more exercise, my puppy. Focus! We’re almost there,” I said hopefully.
At the command to jump, Flint gave his happy bark and then hurdled over the broad jump. When he landed he spun around. He was clearly searching for his squeaky toy. He then looked straight in front of him and dashed out of the ring. Before the ring steward or I could respond, he reappeared carrying a small terrycloth hand towel that one of the other competitors must have used when grooming a dog. With the blue-and-white towel in his mouth, he ran directly to me, snapped the towel back and forth a few times, then sat down. I knew what he was saying: “Hey, it doesn’t squeak, but it’s better than nothing.”
Running out of the ring is an automatic failure in an obedience trial. The judge for this trial was known for having a good sense of humor, however, and also understood terriers, since his wife worked with Manchester terriers. He walked over to me, laughed, and then, as if ringing the bell at the close of a boxing match, said, “Ding! Ding! Ding! It appears that your dog has thrown in towel. Sorry, you’re out.”
Teaching Flint to retrieve was a different problem, since terriers are not natural retrievers. They will chase things, but reliably picking up objects and bringing them back on command is not natural for them. I decided to use what psychologists call shaping or rewarding successive approximations, where you gradually build up the behavior that you want in a step-by-step sequence. The object that Flint would eventually have to retrieve was a wooden dumbbell, so I started by holding a dumbbell in front of Flint as he sat in front of me and telling him, “Flint, take it.” Then immediately but gently I rolled it into his mouth and said, “Hold it,” while keeping my hand under his chin to keep him from spitting it out. Finally, I told him “Give” and took it from his mouth, then told him “Yes!” and gave him a treat. We repeated this steps many times. After a while I would wait until he spontaneously opened his mouth before giving it to him. Next I held the dumbbell out in front of him, just an inch or two so he had to bend forward to take. Later, I gradually increased the distance so that he was bending down to take the dumbbell from a lower position, until he was picking it up from the floor. Eventually, I would put it down a foot or two in front of him so that he had to take a step, then further out where he had to run to pick it up, until finally I was tossing it 10 or 15 feet for him to go out and get. Each successful completion of part of the exercise ended in a bit of praise and a treat, so Flint liked the training.
Unfortunately, this is a slow process, especially with a terrier. It was not unusual for each step to take a dozen or so repetitions on any given day, and sometimes several days of practice before I could move to the next stage. I rigged my training sessions so that they would be in the evenings when Joan and I usually watched TV. During commercials or when the program had not caught my interest, I would sit on the floor and patiently go through parts of training the initial steps of the retrieving. “Take it” and I placed the dumbbell in his mouth, “Hold it,” and finally the release “Give” where he dropped the dumbbell to trade for a treat. This early training took many evenings so it was, perhaps, not surprising when one evening Joan sat down on the sofa and looked at me on the floor getting ready to work with Flint and asked, “Is there anything worth watching on TV tonight—other than ‘Take It—Hold it—and Give’?”
Flint eventually learned all of the obedience exercises, and he came to truly love the jumps and the retrieves. He expressed his pleasure the way that terriers express everything—with a bark. When I would send him out to retrieve a dumbbell, he would give an enthusiastic bark as he launched himself toward it, then the moment before he picked it up, he would look at me and give another bark. He would do that for the basic retrieve, where the dumbbell is simply brought back after it is tossed across the room, and also for the retrieve that sent him out and back over the high jump. In addition, he gave a launching announcement bark as he started his run to leap over the broad jump. Those barks, along with the wagging of his carrot-shaped tail, let me know that he was working happily and enjoying the competition and the training. It reassured me that he was not an automation doing my bidding without thinking, but rather a happy member of a team doing what he liked.
Unfortunately, not everyone recognized the joyous nature of my dog’s performance. In one trial the judge came up to me as I was getting ready to leave the ring with Flint. I was feeling quite good and confident about his performance this day.
“You know that your dog was barely in control today,” the judge said, looking down at my dog with some disdain.
“I’m sorry,” I replied, feeling quite confused. “I thought that he was performing reasonably well.”
“How can you say that, given all of that barking?” He looked at the sheet on his clipboard, and then continued, “By my count there were five barks. Any more and I probably would have dismissed you from the ring because your dog was not under control.”
I was astonished and tried to explain, “He gives those short barks to tell me that he is enjoying himself and that he likes the exercise. He was never out of control.”
“Your dog’s emotional state is irrelevant. Each time he barks, a judge should deduct one point. That means that if you don’t correct that behavior, you will start each competition effectively with five points already lost.”
“He barks when he is happy. Should I make the work unpleasant for him in order to earn a few more points in trials?” I asked.
“He is here to do a job—not to have fun! With an attitude like yours, your dog will never amount to much as a competitor.”
Looking at the unpleasant scowl on his face, I decided that I would never again enter a trial in which this person was judging. Although I was sure that it would make no difference, I felt that it was necessary to say something. So, as calmly as I could I told him, “Dog obedience is a sport—an entertainment. The day that it stops being fun for me or my dog, I will start looking for a different sport.”
Flint and I then turned and walked out of the ring without waiting for a response.
Because God sometimes has a strange sense of humor, it was only a few days after this encounter in the obedience ring that I received a large envelope in the mail. It was a certificate from Dogs in Canada, the official publication of the Canadian Kennel Club, that announced that Flint was n
ationally ranked as the second highest-scoring Cairn terrier in obedience competition that year. I felt a surge of pride and wished I could roll back time to be able to wave this piece of paper in front of that judge, accompanied of course by some witty and cutting remarks about how fine a competitor Flint was turning out to be.
It was then that I looked at the certificate more closely and started to giggle. In the line where it lists Flint’s official or kennel name, it should have read “Remasia’s Our Man Flint.” Instead, this handsome certificate had a misprint which designated him Remasia’s Our Man Fling. I was laughing out loud when I held the certificate up to my dog to show him.
Flint was dancing around, as he always did when I laughed, and replied, “You are always telling me that the elevator to my brain stops one floor short of the penthouse, so why shouldn’t the Kennel Club spell my name one letter less than correctly?”
Although Joan suggested that I return the certificate and have a properly spelled one drawn up so that I could have an accurate document indicating what we had achieved that year, I never did. Flint would never be perfect in competition, and I would never put pressure on him to be perfect, so this certificate was at least as perfect as Flint would ever be. For the next week or so, however, I found myself calling him Fling every now and then.
CHAPTER 21
BEGGING TO DIFFER
Having two dogs as different in their personalities as Flint and Wiz was fascinating to me professionally and personally. Flint was a classic terrier: active, bold, and inquisitive. He was the eternal warrior and hunter and looked at life as a challenge that he would live on his own terms regardless of the consequences.
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