All of this work eventually became the basis for my first book about dogs, The Intelligence of Dogs, which, in addition to discussing how dogs think, also provided the ranking of the working and obedience intelligence of the 110 dog breeds for whom the obedience judges had provided adequate data. I expected that many people would be interested in the book, but I did not expect all hell to break loose.
The book’s publication ignited a massive press response. The whole list that ranks dog breeds by intelligence was printed on the front page of the newspaper USA Today and in the lifestyle and science sections of many other papers. The owners of the top-ranked dogs—including the border collie, poodle, German shepherd, golden retriever, Doberman pinscher, Shetland sheepdog, and Labrador retriever—all felt that they had bragging rights. The owners of dogs like the Afghan hound, Basenji, and bulldog, which were judged the least intelligent breeds, were hostile and defensive. I can’t tell you how many television and radio reports of my work began with the once popular children’s song “My Dog’s Smarter Than Your Dog.” And I suddenly found myself appearing on virtually all of the television shows that have talk and interview segments such as Oprah, Larry King Live, Charlie Rose, and many national morning and evening magazine and news shows.
Joannie became increasingly uncomfortable with my public exposure, feeling that her own privacy was being violated even though the majority of my appearances involved me traveling alone to studios in other cities. She also worried about my decorum during these appearances. One day after I returned home, I found her fuming. In a clipped voice she said, “I just got a phone call from one of my friends, and she said that she saw you on Oprah and you were barking! You were demonstrating different dog barks by barking at the camera. I am so embarrassed and humiliated. How can I maintain any sense of dignity if my friends know that my husband was barking on national television?”
I tried to explain: “Joannie, I was talking about the sounds that dogs make. I didn’t have any tape clips with those sounds, but those kinds of barks are simple and easy to mimic. I gave some examples of the various barks so that people could understand what I was talking about and so that they could learn how dogs communicate.”
“So if you want to talk about how dogs use urine to mark their territory and send messages are you going to pee in front of everybody on national television?” she asked.
Joan came from a family where she had been taught to be quiet and discrete, modest, unobtrusive, no matter what the situation might be. In my family, however, storytelling and clear communication were important. If you had to jump up on a table and pretend to be a monkey doing a ballet in order to make the story more interesting or the make the point that you were trying to get across more understandable, then to not dance on the table would be a violation of proper behavior. Given an irresolvable conflict like this, I chose to retreat, grabbed a pair of leashes, and took my dogs out for an hour-long walk, hoping that Joan’s anger would have burned out by the time I got home again.
Eventually, as I feared might happen, the media coverage made its way to my home. The first such was NBC Television’s Dateline. They sent a crew to film me testing and interacting with dogs. They also wanted to meet my own dogs and asked if they could do some of the filming in my home. Joan would be very uncomfortable having a TV crew there, but she would be teaching and away for most of the day, so I somewhat reluctantly agreed with the idea that part of the segment would be shot in my house, with the proviso that the area must be cleaned up and back to normal before the time Joan normally returned. The crew descended upon my tiny house and filled my living room with lights, sound equipment, and cameras.
The camera kept slipping so the crew kept adding additional straps and strips of duct tape.
In order to show a dog’s-eye view of what it looks like being trained by a human, the crew had a “doggy-cam,” a small camera that could be strapped to a dog’s head to film what he was seeing. We had made the decision to use Wizard for this segment simply because his head was somewhat broader and flatter, which made strapping on the camera a little bit easier, but even so the camera kept slipping forward to point down toward his nose, and the crew kept adding additional straps and improvised supports ingeniously constructed with strips of duct tape. Wiz showed a remarkable degree of patience and forbearance—more than I had, since I was starting to get edgy about what all of that tugging and taping to properly fix and aim the device was doing to the emotional state of my dog. By the time it was fully anchored and pointing in the correct direction, my poor Wiz looked like a canine refugee from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, although true to his breed characteristics, he still wagged his tail and showed few signs of being upset by the proceedings.
Flint was getting excited watching me and everyone else fuss with Wiz, and I thought about putting him in another room until the filming was done, but he was already showing his little front paw prancing movements, which meant that he might be sufficiently wound up that he might start barking if he were separated from me. So I called over one of the crew members and enlisted his help, saying, “Just stand nearby, so he can see me, and hold his leash and he should be okay.” He nodded, and I went back to working with Wiz.
As with most things involving filming, the setup took longer than we expected, but finally the lights were on and the doggy-cam was pointed in the right direction and recording. To allow viewers to see and hear what the dogs were experiencing when they received commands, I gave Wiz the signal and command to sit, and he sat. Then I said “Wiz, down,” and signaled him to lie down, and he responded. Next I called and signaled him to come. I thought that it went well, but the person doing the directing wanted me to repeat the sequence and to “Make your words a bit more forceful and make your hand signals broader and larger so that they can be more easily seen.”
So, as instructed, I repeated the sequence of commands with a louder voice and used much larger hand and arm movements. All went well until, probably because of the pressure of trying to be more vigorous on camera, I did what I often do when I am tired or distracted, which is to use the alternate, generic name that I give to all of my dogs. That means that when I called for Wizard to come, instead of saying “Wiz, come,” I made a large gesture and called out “Puppy, come!” Immediately, there was a loud crash, a bright flash, and the smell of ozone. I spun in the direction of the commotion and saw Flint dashing toward me dragging a flimsy tripod that was attached to his leash, and bouncing behind it was a light with a large reflector. Instead of holding Flint as he had been asked to do, the crew member had tied him to the light stand, thinking that he was a small dog and could do little harm. On hearing my command, Flint had charged forward with enough force to completely demolish an expensive TV light.
The room exploded into pandemonium, as I tried to untangle Flint from the lamp he was dragging while trying to avoid entangling Wiz, who was pulling his camera cable behind him. The camera man was standing with his arms clutched around the big TV camera, clearly fearing that the tripod on which it was standing might become the next victim of all of this mayhem. I finally managed to sort out the dogs, and as I sat on the floor unhooking Flint, Wizard sat nearby with the doggy-cam still on his head. “That dog camera didn’t catch all of this madness, did it?” I asked.
One of the cameramen shook his head and the interviewer added in a good-natured way, “Apparently not. It might have been an interesting bit. Would you like to have your dog do it again?”
Fortunately, the film from the previous doggy-cam sequence was good enough to use.
We still needed to do the interview segment. Unfortunately the crew had not brought an additional lamp, so we did it outside with me walking the dogs where nature and a bright sky supplied enough light. I thought it best not to inform Joannie about the little catastrophe.
Only a few weeks had passed since the NBC crew had visited the house and once again my living room was filled with lights and cameras. This time a woman was interviewing me and we were
sitting on the sofa while the crew set up lights and cameras, when Flint jumped up between us to say hello to this visitor.
The very first dog “trick” that I teach my puppies is to “Give a kiss.” I tap my index finger against my own or someone else’s cheek, and the dog then moves his head close to the spot that was tapped and gives a little lick with his tongue. It is a cute little bit of behavior that makes children laugh.
To train for this trick, I simply put a little dab of butter on my index finger and then let the dog lick it off. Next I show him another dab of butter on my finger, then touch my cheek, say “Give a kiss,” and let the dog come over to lick the butter off my cheek. Next I have him lick a dab of butter off the face of someone else after the person taps a finger to her own cheek. A few rounds of this and most dogs will respond to the word kiss and a finger tap by coming over to lick the spot you touch.
Flint knew this trick quite well—perhaps too well. The interviewer laughed at Flint’s sudden arrival on the sofa and raised her hands in front of her face in a surprised, amused gesture and said, “He appears to be a kissy dog.” As she said this, her index finger landed on the side of her nose, and at the word “kissy” Flint did what he was trained to do—craned his head forward to lick her face. Somewhat startled by his quick movement, she flinched backward, so Flint did what he always did when seeing something move quickly, he tried to grab it. My little gray hunter had had lots of practice and was very quick, and he managed to catch the end of her nose in a nip. The interviewer squealed, swung her arms out to her sides, and toppled the table lamp beside the arm of the sofa. The lamp and its stained glass shade hit the floor with a crash and broke into several large pieces.
Flint had not actually broken the skin on her nose, but there were two little red marks. So while the blonde was in the bathroom putting on makeup, I was cleaning up the broken glass. This time the havoc that Flint had initiated could not be completely hidden from Joan.
While the TV crew continued setting up, I turned to Flint and announced, “I think that this is the last TV interview that we do at home. It’s just too hard on the lighting fixtures.”
Flint’s goofy voice responded, “It was her fault. She shouldn’t lead a guy on like that with promises of a kiss!”
CHAPTER 23
NOT QUITE A CHAMPION
Flint’s escapades with the TV crews brought him back onto Joan’s annoyance radar. However, his training was going well and he was now ready for the highest level of obedience competition—the Utility Class. Once Flint earned that title, he would become an OTCH, or Obedience Training Champion. It was a bit more difficult to find time to train him now because of changes at the university.
I often brought both Flint and Wiz into work with me. They stayed in my office during the day, and when I was in the lab or teaching, they slept in a wire pen under my computer table. Often I would take a break from my work in the midmorning or midafternoon to take the dogs out and practice some obedience exercises with them for about 15 minutes. I kept a few training items in a drawer in my desk and improvised high jumps by propping up a piece of cardboard for them to go over. I could also lay down a few boards to act as a broad jump. This bit of training every day made their progress much faster.
Sometimes I would eat lunch quickly in order to leave time to take one or both dogs out, sometimes simply to play. Having the dogs near helped me to deal with the pressures of research and my administrative duties, which in turn made me more creative and productive. Working with my dogs also provided me some much needed physical exercise.
Flint would chase things that I threw, but he would seldom pick them up and bring them back on his own accord unless specifically commanded to do so. It was much more likely that he would try to “kill” the toy by shaking it to death. A friend had given me a Frisbee-like throwing disk made of cloth stretched over a flexible plastic hoop. I thought this had some promise as a retrieval toy for Flint. Wiz never chased anything of his own volition, and whenever I would try to entice him, I would say in his quiet voice, “I don’t do that sort of thing. I am a companion dog—the ‘spaniel’ in my breed title is merely honorary.” Then he would trot off to find someplace to lie down.
This particular day I left Wiz dozing in my office and Flint and I went off behind the psychology building to a small grassy area. I waved the flexible throwing disk in front of him and tried to get him interested in it by chanting “Do you want it? I know you want it!” in an excited voice. The sun was glinting off the bright colors of the disk and Flint started to do his little front paw prancing indicating that he was interested in what was going on. Next I threw the disk and it flew in a low flat path over the sunlit lawn while I called out, “Fetch it up, Pup!”
Flint was off like a shot, chasing after it as fast as his short feet would allow. When it stopped he grabbed it, and, as I had expected, went into his “kill the vermin” mode, shaking it vigorously back and forth. Because the disk was large and soft, every shake of his head caused it to curl and hit him in the face. These slaps made him more excited and motivated him to shake harder. Suddenly he lost his grip on the disk in the middle of shaking and it flew through the air on a perfect trajectory—just as if he had intended to toss it to me. Obviously surprised by his prey’s escape, he stood and stared with his tail quivering with excitement. I made a quick dash to my side and managed to catch the disk. Flint barked with what I chose to interpret as approval and trotted toward me.
Since I had the disk in my hand once more, I threw it again, and Flint chased it again. This time, when he grabbed the disk he gave it only a few shakes before releasing it, and it once more flew in my direction—close enough so that by running quickly I could catch it midair. Flint now seemed to be truly amused and barked for me to throw it again. I did, only by this time it appeared that my gray dog had worked out was happening. Now he grabbed the disk, gave it only two shakes, and on the second one released it for me to chase across the lawn.
The game of me tossing the floppy Frisbee to Flint and him tossing it back for me to chase went on for several more rounds. He was clearly enjoying the fact that he could do something to make me run across the lawn. After we had been at the game for around 10 minutes, I had gotten tired of all the running, and since I did have work to do back in my office, I decided to end the game. I hadn’t noticed that a small crowd of students had gathered to watch a dog tossing a Frisbee for a university professor to chase. They smiled and two or three of them applauded, so I waved at them.
I had clipped on Flint’s leash and started to return to the building when I noticed that one of my colleagues, whose research involved the training of animals (mostly rats and pigeons), was watching with a visitor—someone I identified as an eminent animal behavior researcher who was giving a guest lecture later that afternoon. The visitor looked amused and asked politely, “How did you teach him to do that?”
Feeling rather silly at being caught at play with my dog by such a well-respected scientist, I dodged the question and gave a lighthearted response, “Well, he hasn’t fully learned the game yet. He’s not very accurate with his throws, and I still have to run a lot to catch it.”
As I was talking, Flint snatched the disk that I had been loosely holding in my hand. He gave a quick snap of his head and released it in my direction. He was only a leash length away from me and instead of arching through the air, the Frisbee hit me right in my crotch. Flint’s throw had a lot of force so the impact was hard and it hurt. The breath was knocked out of me and I buckled over in pain. As I tried to strand straight again, I noticed that my colleague and our visitor were trying to suppress outright laughter, and all that I could think to say was to painfully grunt, “Like I said, he is not very accurate with his throws.”
Sadly, the era of my bringing my dogs to the university was coming to a close. Peter had resigned as head of the department of psychology and gone on to become the dean of graduate studies. The person who replaced him did not like me personally and used
the authority of his office to make life unpleasant for me. He had little leverage to use against me, since my research and writing were internationally acclaimed and respected, my teaching ratings were among the highest in the department, and I carried a heavy administrative load as well. The only thing that he could do (other than making snarky comments) was to take action against my having my dogs at work. In fact, on the very first morning that he took over the office of department head, he sent me a memo denying me the right to continue to bring my dogs into the psychology building. It was a petty action and not really enforceable. Peter was concerned that I would resist this edict and turn the issue into a noisy and unpleasant fight that could harm the image and harmony of the department. He asked me as a personal favor to be a “team player” and not contest this order. My fondness for Peter and my love of the department that I had seen grow to its current mature stature prevailed.
I had always worked longer days than many other faculty members and had been continuously available to provide assistance, guidance, and advice to all faculty and students in the department on issues associated with teaching and research. However, since data analysis and writing could be done anywhere that there was a computer, I really did not have to be on campus to continue to function at a high level. If I could not have my dogs with me in my university office, I decided I would spend less time working on campus and would work at home, where my dogs could keep me company.
My absence was noticed, but since my research productivity continued unabated and I never missed classes, meetings, or required campus activities, our department head was unable to make an issue of this change in my schedule.
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