by Ted Kerasote
There are two varieties of this unhappy state. The first starts by a dog not getting what it wants, which breeds frustration. The second entails being victimized, which breeds fear. In both cases, the dog can react to its low status by acceptance or by becoming a poseur. If the poseur isn't checked, it can become a bully, sometimes a violent one.
The entire syndrome may have begun by the white Shepherd's having been removed from her mother and littermates before or during her primary socialization period, when she was three to five weeks old. It is during this time that puppies learn to play together and begin to understand the difference between biting for real and biting softly during sparring matches. As the dog behaviorist Steven R. Lindsay notes, "If they exceed a certain limit in how hard they bite or bite in the wrong place, the partner will either yelp and quit playing or retaliate by attacking them." Being penalized for biting roughly gives young dogs a sense of appropriate behavior and fair play.
However, the white Shepherd's case seemed additionally complex since it was obvious that, while chained in front of her house, she was well behaved. Only when walking with her person did she attack other dogs. More than likely, these attacks occurred because the white Shepherd felt compelled to protect Ms. W. This need was probably fostered by Ms. W. herself as she transmitted her own fears to her dog. Usually, people do this unconsciously by tightening on the lead when approaching other dogs or people as well as by changing the expression on their faces—widening the eyes or rounding the mouth, for instance, in the universal signs of apprehension that dogs can read so exquisitely. Perhaps Ms. W., like thousands of people, had gotten a big dog on purpose—a dog of a breed with a genetic predisposition toward aggressive behavior—in the hope that it would protect her. To be fair, such dogs almost never become aggressive without the proper reinforcement, the human rewarding their first lunges and barks at other dogs and humans with a "Good dog." Just as often, the reward can be more subtle: the dog not getting a check by voice or, if that doesn't work, by leash, so that it learns that its aggressive behavior will be permitted. Tragically, the more fearful the person is, and the less the dog is checked, the more ingrained becomes its aggression.
When I replayed the incident, I realized that Ms. W. had made no attempt whatsoever to call her attacking Shepherd back. She didn't sing out, "No!" or "Heel!" as her dog raced toward Merle. And perhaps it wouldn't have done any good. The white Shepherd, like many aggressive dogs, probably hadn't been trained to obey the basic commands of no, sit, come, and stay.
The situation I now found myself in was uncomfortable. One of the most refreshing aspects of living in Kelly was that people left each other alone. Even the most eccentric of us (and there was eccentricity aplenty) could live as we wished. Yet the white Shepherd was dangerous, and if Ms. W. wanted to live in the village, or, for that matter, anywhere with other dogs and people, it might be helpful if someone spoke to her about working with her dog. She could begin by gently introducing the Shepherd to other dogs—at a safe distance—while maintaining control over her with something more than a retractable lead. She could use the sort of halter collar that fits around a dog's head. A muzzle also might save a lot of strife. If the Shepherd didn't lunge, she could reward her with a kind word and perhaps a treat. If these measures weren't successful, fluoxetine, the canid version of Prozac, might help. The association between aggressive behavior and abnormal brain chemistry has been well documented, and a serotonin reuptake inhibitor might calm the Shepherd and make her more receptive to training. I really didn't want to be the someone who spoke to Ms. W., but if the white Shepherd eventually killed a dog, especially my dog, I'd feel awful.
Later that day, while Merle was off on his own business, I walked over to Ms. W.'s house and tried to explain how she might help her Shepherd without broaching the subject of the possible causes of the dog's aggression: You're a fearful person, and your fears have created a monster. We stood at her front door, her two Shepherds locked inside, the white one growling menacingly. Ms. W. said that the white Shepherd was "really a very loving and affectionate dog," but had a "few problems." She said that she was "working on them with her," and that I shouldn't worry because she was "always on her chain." From now on, she'd keep her under a "tight leash" when walking. She said that she was sorry about a dozen times.
Though I wasn't sleeping in the cabin, I still cooked there, sleeping outside, under the stars, with Merle by my side. On the very day that Merle had been attacked by the white Shepherd, I had redrawn the floor plan, filled out an application for a construction loan, and revised an article for an upcoming deadline. Hungry and preoccupied, I left the trailer with Merle in the early evening, biking down the dirt lane and turning onto the potholed blacktop. In an instant, I realized that we had to go by the white Shepherd's house. In fact, I could see her in the distance, chained by the front door with her companion.
Merle was trotting by my side, and for a moment I considered turning around and biking home the long way through the field, across our land, down the main road of the village, and finally over to the river—almost a mile out of our way. It seemed unnecessary. Merle wasn't a fighter, and I trusted him to stay by my side. He had always trotted by the white Shepherd's house, and, previous to this morning's incident, he had never been in a fight. He was larger than all the females in the village except her, and any uncut males who were his own size didn't view him as a threat since he was neutered. When they tried to mount him, he neither fought them nor stood for their displays of dominance. Instead, he slipped his butt away from them and met them chest to chest.
His reaction now took me by surprise. As we approached the house, the hair on Merle's back stood up like an electrified Mohawk, and his breath began to rasp.
Before I could react, he broke into a gallop and dashed across the lawn toward the two Shepherds, fangs bared and growling viciously.
"Merle," I bellowed. "No!"
The white Shepherd leapt to her feet and tore out to meet him.
My only thought was "She's going to rip his head off."
Merle knew better. He skidded to a stop just as she was jerked backward by her chain and crashed in a heap. Somehow, he had calculated the precise length of her tether. Bouncing to her feet, she lunged at him. To no avail.
Dancing his front paws up and down, Merle pattered eighteen inches from her slavering jaws. His snarl was gone. His lips were down. "Ha-ha-ha!" he panted. "Ha-ha-ha!" Had he been a child, he would have been taunting, "Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya."
This totally undid the white Shepherd. Her barks rose into one long hysterical shriek of rage. Foam flew from her mouth. Hideous, she surged against her chain, choking herself as Merle continued his little dance in front of her, laughing in her face. The other Shepherd had stood, but remained behind the white Shepherd, watching.
"Merle," I shouted at the top of my lungs, fearing that she'd tear her chain from the logs. "Come! Come now!"
He whipped around and followed me as I rode off.
Trotting by my side, he panted jubilantly, wagging his tail from side to side like a medieval soldier waving a campaign banner.
"You are so bad!" I cried. But I couldn't hold back my laughter. "Way bad."
He stepped gaily, and his eyes sparkled at me: "Got her."
How had he known how long her chain was—known so exactly that he had charged to within a foot and a half of her? The only thing I could think of was that while on his rounds he had seen her stretch the chain to its full extent, had marked that place on her lawn, had filed that distance away in his mind, and then used it to his advantage. His revenge was straight out of Che Guevara's manual: Know the terrain; hit the enemy at its weakest; never use brute strength. He was now so full of himself, he was bursting at the seams.
"You be careful, Sir," I warned him. "What if she hadn't been on her chain?"
He tossed his head at me: "Don't sweat it, Ted. I got it wired."
In this he was mistaken.
In late April, a couple of
weeks before our horses arrived, I went over to Idaho and bought an old but serviceable four-horse trailer and a used, three-quarter-ton pickup truck to pull it. I had always taken delivery of leased horses at the trailhead and returned them at the same place. Now, wanting to keep the horses in Kelly and do a variety of pack trips over the summer, I needed a rig.
I held open the door of the pickup, and Merle jumped onto the front seat as if he had been doing it his entire life. Puffed up and holding himself erect, he sat with electric anticipation as I fastened a specially made dog seat belt around his shoulders and chest. When I got behind the wheel, he sat even taller, holding my eyes, as if to say, "Guess what? I'm a big dog now. In fact, I'm as tall as you." Clearly, sitting in the front seat of the truck with me—instead of behind me in the back of the Datsun, and more recently our new Subaru—had given him increased status.
Within minutes, he let me know this in no uncertain terms. Without any apparent motion, he somehow maneuvered himself across the front seat so that his left haunch was pressed against my right thigh. Staring straight ahead, he leaned against me until he had pushed me against the door.
"Sir," I said, laughing and pushing him across the seat. "What gives?"
Five minutes later, he was back at it, leaning against me and staring straight ahead with a proud and arrogant expression. I pushed him away again, and, sure enough, within minutes, he inched across the seat until his full weight was bearing on me.
Evidently, sitting in the front seat with me, our heads at equal height, had given him license to change our status—leaning against another animal is one way in which both wolves and dogs express dominance.
"Okay, enough of this," I told him, pushing him firmly away and pointing a finger directly at him while looking him straight in the eye. "None of this one-upmanship. You lie right down there." I pointed to the opposite side of the bench seat.
Raising his snout, he glanced away and laughed, "Ha-ha-ha." Then he lay down, wriggling his butt so that the base of his tail just grazed my thigh. Turning his head, he gave me a quizzical over-the-shoulder look: "Is that okay?"
"Touching's fine," I told him, "but no pushing."
He gave me another panty laugh, and down the road we went in our new blue pickup.
The four horses lived in a corral that I had built near our pile of house logs. Merle had been quite intrigued by the corral's erection, for ever since watching the building of his doghouse, and the installation of his dog door, he had gotten the impression that a nail belt and tools had something to do with him. The doghouse had not been much fun, but clearly the dog door had been a triumph. So he followed my spiking the rails and bucks together, just as he had watched my staking out our new home's dimensions.
When the four horses arrived, it suddenly all made sense to him: Ted using his nail belt and tools meant a corral, and that equaled horses. In an instant, he was like a commoner before royalty. He gazed up at the horses with adoration; he followed them around, smelling their legs and avoiding their kicks; within minutes, he rolled in their poop, wearing the goofy expression cats adopt when they've buried their nose in catnip. He was in seventh heaven, and more so when we went riding, which was about every afternoon.
But instead of trailing me, as he did when we hiked, he immediately trotted in front of the horse I was riding, a sorrel quarter horse named Tinker. Tail erect, head swiveling left and right, Merle led us down the trail, letting everyone know that he was in charge. To test him, I clucked Tinker into a trot and went by him. Immediately, Merle loped into a gallop and took the lead. This was so unlike him that I dismounted, tethered Tinker to a sage bush, and began to hike. Without hesitation, Merle dropped behind me. I returned to Tinker, mounted, put him into a walk, and Merle dashed in front of us and led once again. Apparently, he had his own notions of our little family's hierarchy: Ted on ground, Merle follows; Ted on horse, Merle leads.
One June evening we were proceeding in this fashion—Merle ahead, Tinker and I behind him—deep into the prairie that lies between Kelly and the Snake River. Merle climbed a slight rise and stopped short, his gaze on something in the distance. Tinker took a few more steps, and we were able to see what had caught Merle's attention. Twenty yards off, a half dozen bison glanced up from their grazing and turned toward us.
We advanced to Merle's right side, and the three of us stared at the huge shaggy animals. They were shedding their winter coats and the black fur hung from their shoulders in ropy tatters.
Merle and Tinker continued to watch the bison with excitement. Then Merle glanced up at me with a longing expression. Tinker read his energy and turned his ears back, the way a horse does when he's waiting for direction. I don't know why I did it, but I did. I clucked my tongue, and Tinker and Merle both shot forward.
The bison grunted and wheeled. We closed the gap and galloped among them, hooves thundering, the air sharp with wooly musk. Merle streaked ahead, his mouth open in utter glee as he pulled abreast of the lead bison and matched him stride for stride.
Finally, reason prevailed. I pulled on the reins, whistled to Merle, and the three of us slowed, the bison cantering off and leaving us blowing. Tinker tossed his head the way horses do when they're charged up and playful, and Merle sent me an ecstatic grin: "At last, you came to your senses!" And in the world of horses and dogs, just for an instant, I had.
These were childish days. The dawn came early, the dusk was long, the valley green from the warm spring rains. In the heat of the afternoon, Merle and I would walk to the Gros Ventre River and jump off the big eddy rock. Side by side, we'd float down the emerald channel, both of us dog-paddling and smiling at each other in the easiness of the current. Sometimes I'd come up behind him and put my arms around his chest, and sometimes he'd swim up my back and hang his paws on my shoulders. Just before the waterfall, we'd angle to shore and shake ourselves off on the rocky beach. Spying a stick, I'd pick it up and rear it over my head to test him.
He'd look at me with his head cocked, not cringing in the least, in fact staring at me placidly, with an expression that said, "I'm over those puppyhood fears. I'm a big dog now."
I'd toss the stick into the water, and he'd give it his cool appraisal and look back at me, one brow going up, the other down, signifying, "That doesn't mean I'll fetch. That's for other dogs."
In August, Benj and I rode the Continental Divide from Jackson Hole to the border of Yellowstone National Park, riding at twelve thousand feet across the Buffalo Plateau and dropping into the head of unnamed drainages to camp. Hour after hour, Merle led us across the high tundra, occasionally disappearing over a hill, only to reappear ten or fifteen minutes later on an escarpment ahead of us, where he'd look down and laugh at our slowness.
For a week we rode under the blue sky, picketing the horses in the late afternoons and letting them graze as we lay on our saddle blankets with a switch of grass in our teeth, our noses filled with the pungent scent of horses and the fragrance of lupine.
After a few days, time collapsed and my life started anew, tasting like my first kiss with a sixteen-year-old girl who had never taken a sip of coffee or drunk wine or smoked a cigarette. The purple lupine was from that time, and the pine-filled air was from that time, and my reddish-gold dog was from that time, lying with his head upon my chest, paws twitching, as he led our horses through his dreams.
Back in Kelly, on writing days, we'd often walk in the afternoon, especially when I was having problems with the piece I was working on. I'd whistle for Merle, and we'd saunter down the river road while I'd ponder where the piece might go, ruminating on its difficulties "like a camel," as Henry David Thoreau once noted in his great essay on walking. It was also in this essay that Thoreau recounted an anecdote about William Wordsworth. A visitor asked the poet's servant if he might see her master's study. "Here is his library," the servant replied, "but his study is out of doors."
I couldn't help but think that the same was true of myself—that much of my study was done outside, and that it
was Merle who helped me to read the books of that library. He had shown me how to smell the wind; he had taught me the importance of getting down on all fours and putting my nose into the ground; now, he demonstrated how to read between the lines.
We were tracking some pronghorn antelope, and Merle kept smelling the prints and lifting his nose, smelling the prints and lifting his nose, as if following a scent that oscillated. Putting my own nose to the spoor, I could detect nothing. Yet later, when we found the herd and I shot one of the antelope, I put my nose directly on her hooves. The result was startling: The cleft in her back hooves smelled far more strongly of pronghorn—that tangy mix of herbivore and sage—than did her front hooves. Since then, every antelope whose hooves I've smelled, smelled exactly this way, and not one person to whom I've recounted this observation has ever said, "I knew that." Nor has any book I've read mentioned it. But Merle knew it, as no doubt countless wolves and coyotes have known it—"known" meaning "experienced." And I learned it by watching him.
On just such a post-writing day we were walking down the river road—I thinking about some intractable paragraphs, Merle loping ahead, deep in his world of odors. Curiously, when we walked in and around Kelly, as opposed to the backcountry, he always led, as if this were his territory and he was leading an apprentice around. To our right was an irrigation ditch, overgrown with tall summer grass, and beyond it stretched a mowed field of alfalfa, used to feed the horses and longhorns on the neighboring Teton Valley Ranch.
Suddenly, Merle's nose whipped right. In the same motion, he leapt into the ditch. Out popped a coyote, Merle in hot pursuit. The coyote glanced over its shoulder and adopted the disdainful lope that coyotes have when being chased by dogs: "You catch me? Right." Perhaps it was the coyote's obvious contempt for him, or the memory of the coyote pack beating him up, that sent Merle into a startling burst of speed. The coyote must have heard him coming. It looked back and its eyes bugged out—Merle was a stride away. The coyote began to run in panic; Merle kept apace; and I watched in silence. This was a score to be settled without any interference from me.