Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  More than likely, these spots were where moose had bedded during the night or a coyote had left its mark, but I always wondered if the smells of his past persisted even though Zula had moved away with her family, Jack had been shot for chasing cattle, and his successor, Jack Two, had been hit and killed while chasing a snowmobile trailer in front of the post office.

  Whatever the case, Merle would lift his head and his eyes would slowly refocus as if returning from a long ways off. Then, squaring his shoulders, he'd set a speedy course for the western boundary of Kelly, where Lucille Garretson's cabin stood. A stooped and elderly bookkeeper, she worked the night shift at Snow King Resort in Jackson and rose just about the time Merle passed by for a mid-morning treat. From there he'd go to the post office and finally come home, having completed his first circumambulation of the village for the day.

  Soon, though, Merle was paying the price of his ambitions, as do a lot of politicians. He began to put on weight, his torso and belly getting rounder and rounder until some people, instead of calling him "Mr. Mayor," began to call him "The Sausage."

  I couldn't understand how a few biscuits here and there could be making Merle into a balloon, so I began to follow him. Merle, however, would have nothing of it. Unlike when we took a walk around the village together, and he would lead, if he saw me trying to follow him at a distance, he'd stop, trot back to me, and wait for me to set the route. If I tried to follow him secretly, he always seemed to spy me out and would come up to me with a "gosh, great to see you" look on his face.

  "Go ahead," I'd say, motioning for him to proceed.

  "Ha-ha-ha," he'd pant and sit down. "You lead, please."

  I had to leave the house far behind him, scuttling here and there for cover like some burglar before I discovered what he was about. Gladys was feeding him all sorts of kitchen scraps—leftover casseroles and bread—and the number of people he hit up for a dog biscuit was truly phenomenal. It was Lucille, though, who was pushing him over the top. She was feeding him a daily ration of grilled chicken breasts and filet mignon stuffed with Roquefort cheese that the chef at the Snow King Resort was giving her.

  I printed a sign—"Please do not feed me. The extra weight is bad for my joints and heart"—and hung it around his neck. He gave me the most put-out look: "You gotta be kidding. Me, moi, the dog who does not wear a collar, wear this?"

  "You can't control yourself, Monsieur," I told him. "This is the price."

  It did little good. Merle's constituents and he were in a co-dependent relationship, especially the old ladies. I went to each one and impressed upon them that they had to stop feeding Merle or I would keep him home—no more visits. This threat worked with everyone except Lucille, who said she'd try but she didn't think she'd be able to stop feeding him.

  "He looks so irresistible," she said.

  "He's milking you," I said.

  "I can't refuse him," she answered.

  It was at this time that Allison got a shock collar for Brower. She was finding it difficult to get him to come consistently, and he also was jumping on people when he greeted them. I thought long and hard about trying it on Merle, hating the thought of shocking him but fast running out of alternatives to stop his bingeing. He was hanging out at Lucille's for a good part of the day, either sitting expectantly on her front step or parking himself there for a nap. I'd be leaving for a bike ride or a hike, activities he enjoyed, and after calling for ten minutes I'd have to go over to her place and fetch him. Even after seeing me in biking shorts or hiking boots, he wasn't terribly excited to leave, and I found myself reflecting on something that B. F. Skinner once said: "The fundamental mistake made by all those who choose weak methods of control is to assume that the balance of control is left to the individual, when in fact it is left to other conditions."

  In the past, the other conditions that Merle had been exposed to while he wandered around Kelly had been healthy. They had made him a well-rounded dog. Now, some of these conditions were making him well rounded in a way that was guaranteed to shorten his life. When at last I blocked his dog door and refused to let him leave the house without me, he'd come to my desk at ten-minute intervals, asking to be let out, doing his little dance with his front paws and panting excitedly.

  Obviously, the problem we faced was founded upon freedom. Confine the dog and you can control every calorie it consumes. To be fair, what was happening to Merle was just as much a human problem as a canine one. Eating as much as possible works for a wolf or a dog who, like Merle, gets a lot of exercise and finds the occasional windfall of a carcass or a casserole. It doesn't work when someone indulges a dog's hardwired tendency to eat as much as it can. In short, if Merle was going to keep his freedom, I had to change my neighbor's behavior as much as I needed to change my dog's. I borrowed Brower's shock collar.

  It had an orange neckband and a small black transmitting box with two prongs that made contact with the dog's neck. The prongs were interchangeable and color-coded. Green gave the biggest shock. Yellow, orange, red, and brown prongs gave lesser shocks in descending order. Brower would respond only to the green prongs, exhibiting no more than a sudden flinch, as if to say, "Oh, yeah, I remember—don't jump on people." Given Merle's history with guns, I wasn't sure that starting him out on green was the best of ideas. So I tested the collar on myself and almost jumped through the roof at the shock. My admiration of Brower's stoicism went up markedly. I used the red prong on Merle.

  When I put the collar on him, he gave me a disgusted look and tried to study the contraption by craning his neck and peering out of the bottom of his eyes.

  "Enjoy yourself," I told him and went to my desk. Ten seconds later, I heard the dog door slap.

  After about an hour, I took the transmitter, put my bike and some dog biscuits in the car, and drove over to Lucille's, where I found him—sure enough—sitting on her step, staring at her front door with hypnotic intensity. "Open the door, Lucille," his gaze commanded. "Open the door."

  Stepping out of the car, I yelled, "No," and shocked him.

  He yowled a high-pitched bay and whirled to face me.

  "No," I said again.

  He ran toward me. I opened the door of the car and he leapt in. I took the collar off, gave him a biscuit, and said, "Thank you. How about we go for a bike ride."

  The next morning, however, he was back at Lucille's.

  I drove over, shocked him again, and he yowled just as pitifully.

  This time he didn't come right away.

  "Come," I called. "Come, please!" And he ran to the car, jumped in, and we went for a hike.

  But filet mignon stuffed with Roquefort cheese is a powerful reinforcement. The following morning I found him at Lucille's just as before. This time, he only had to see my car pull up before he started yowling at me. And instead of coming to the car, he ran across the field toward our house before I had a chance to shock him.

  "What are you doing?" asked Lucille, opening her door. I told her.

  "That's awful," she said.

  "You can continue to feed him," I told her, "and he'll keep getting shocked."

  "This doesn't make me happy," she said.

  "I'm not exactly thrilled by it, either," I replied. "Don't you understand that you're killing my dog with what you're feeding him? It's like giving crack to a kid. And if I have to keep him home to keep him away from you, he'll be really unhappy. Please, can't you stop?"

  Her sharp gray face became a mask of conflicted emotions.

  "How about we make a deal," I offered. "If he comes by here, you can feed him one biscuit a day—one small biscuit."

  She thought about this.

  "I'll even buy them for you, the kind he likes."

  She looked at the ground. "You don't have to do that," she said, and without another word shuffled inside.

  I drove home and found Merle lying on the dedicated quadruped couch.

  "Are we done with Lucille's?" I asked.

  He gave the tip of his tail the tiniest
of wags.

  I took off the collar and petted him. "It's for your own good, you know."

  We had a few days of respite; then I noticed him leave the house and head directly across the field toward Lucille's cabin. I called him back and put on the shock collar. He gave me a grievous expression.

  "Your choice," I told him. "You can go over there and you'll get shocked. This is nonnegotiable."

  "Ha-ha-ha," he panted, "okay," and without missing a beat he turned and walked out to the main road, where he trotted south, toward the opposite end of the village from Lucille's. I waited about two hours before walking to the post office and along the buckrail fence to Lucille's, almost certain that he had tried to fake me out. Of course, he was there.

  "No!" I shouted, shocking him.

  His voice rose in a heart-rending series of bays and howls. "Why are you doing this to me? Why?"

  I shocked him again, shouting, "No!"

  Then I started to walk home. A minute later, I turned my head and caught sight of him, following about fifty yards behind me. When I got to the house, I waited for him. Tail low, he came up to me.

  "Good," I said, removing the collar and handing him a biscuit. He took it without interest, opened his mouth, and let it drop to his feet.

  "I'm sorry," I said, "that biscuits, and elk and antelope, are no longer good enough for you. You can go live with Lucille and be her dog if you want. I'm sure you'll get to do a lot of skiing and mountain biking and hunting with her."

  He stared at me.

  I shrugged my shoulders. "Go ahead," I said, extending a hand across the field. "See you later."

  I walked inside, shutting the sliding screen door behind me. From my office, I watched him look across the field, first toward Lucille's, then toward the main road, where he would normally begin his rounds. He lowered his head and sniffed at the dog biscuit. Picking it up, he ate it perfunctorily. A minute later, I heard the dog door slap and his paws come across the pine floor. I heard him drink some water then pad to the middle of the great room, where he lay down with a disgruntled sigh.

  For the next two days I kept an eagle eye on him. He made his rounds to the south and came home directly across the field without going toward Lucille's. Then, on a warm sunny afternoon, I saw him begin to meander through the sage, smelling here and there as if he had no particular destination in mind and were simply following his nose wherever it led him. But he was going west.

  I opened the sliding glass doors and stood on the deck. Whistling sharply, I held the shock collar aloft, letting it dangle from my fingers.

  He turned. I raised the collar higher.

  "No, no, no," I said.

  He glanced in the direction of Lucille's cabin.

  "No," I repeated.

  For a good five seconds, we remained in this standoff, then he walked to the deck and lay down, glumly putting his chin on his outstretched paws.

  "Well done," I said, dropping the shock collar by his side. Going to the fridge, I got him an elk bone that I had defrosted for this moment. When I brought it out to him, he took it softly from my hand, put it down on the deck next to him, and laid his chin back on his paws. I left him to his sulk.

  About an hour later, as he was working on the bone, I went outside, sat down next to him, and put an arm over his shoulder. He dropped the bone and put his chin on my thigh.

  "Are we done with Lucille?" I asked.

  He gave his tail two thumps on the deck: "I'll try."

  He really did. It also helped that his pitiful howling had had its effect on Lucille. She stopped feeding him. Periodically, I'd wander over to her house, but he was never there. Much as I hated to admit it, my experience with the shock collar bore out the experimental evidence of many studies, which has shown intense punishment to be effective in reducing unwanted behavior to zero while positive reinforcement gets only marginal results. Even more important to note, the behavior eliminated by punishment doesn't return, as it often does when positive reinforcement has been tried.

  There is a difference, though, between this sort of punishment and the sort that becomes abuse, creating stressed and permanently cowed dogs. Steven R. Lindsay, who has trained dogs for the U.S. Army, notes three commonsense checks that a dog owner can use to differentiate between pain that is inflicted beneficially and that which turns into cruelty. Punishment, says Lindsay, that is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and inescapable is abuse. None of these conditions applied to Merle or, for that matter, Lucille.

  Within a few months, he was back to seventy pounds, slim and lithe, and no one was calling him "The Sausage." He kept to the south and east sides of Kelly, spending more time with people who had their own dogs and who knew intuitively that the way into a dog's heart is never through its stomach but through activity and affection, a concept whose truth was verified by John Paul Scott and John Fuller during their massive study Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog. Dogs who were hand fed by attendants immediately lost interest in their keepers if they were shown no affection. On the other hand, dogs became attached to people who lavished affection upon them even when these people did not feed them. As Scott and Fuller wrote, "[A] puppy does not automatically love you because you feed it."

  Lucille learned this the hard way. She later told me that Merle would not come into her house, nor would he let her pet him. "I'd get so mad at him," she said in exasperation, "but finally"—her thin face softened—"he let me pet him, just on the head, and only occasionally."

  ***

  It was at this point in Merle's long tenure as mayor that the dogs of Kelly faced a crisis. The dogcatcher began to visit the village. This was unprecedented, for even though Kelly was in Grand Teton National Park, the park's leash laws had never been enforced within the village's boundaries. Since the village's dogs were well behaved, and the village was off the main tourist routes, the dogs were given dispensation by the park—unstated, of course—to roam freely.

  Most of us suspected that the sudden appearance of the dogcatcher had been initiated by the cutting horse instructor, who was tired of a few ill-mannered dogs bothering his training sheep. In short order, numerous dogs were picked up, and their owners had to drive to Jackson and bail them out of the pound. Several dogs were caught repeatedly. Somehow, Merle glided through these months without being nabbed, and one morning I finally saw how he did it.

  Only a minute or so after he had left on his rounds, I went to the shed to fetch some tools. He was trotting south, tail high, head erect, looking briskly left and right. At that very moment, I heard tires rumble over the cattle guard at the entrance to the village. So did Merle. His ears went back and he glanced over his shoulder. The white truck of the dogcatcher was coming down the main road. Without breaking stride, Merle faded left—faded being exactly what happened. Without giving any indication that he was alarmed, he simply angled into the tall grass by the side of the road and disappeared as if the golden field had swallowed his golden body.

  His instant reaction to the dogcatcher's truck made me suspect that he had seen the man capture other dogs and put them in the truck's enclosed rear compartment. I didn't think that he himself had had a confrontation with the man and escaped, because several people in the village had mentioned watching Merle spy the dogcatcher at a distance. When they had looked for Merle the next moment, he had simply vanished.

  His behavior seemed to be another demonstration that animals can learn by observing other animals and then apply what they've seen to themselves without any direct positive or negative reinforcement. In other words, the training is in the watching, not in the doing. I've described several instances of dogs learning in this fashion in previous chapters—dogs watching other dogs pull sleds and then imitating them; a dog watching other dogs eat and then mimicking their stance in front of their bowls; and Merle watching Brower retrieve and then doing it himself.

  Karen Pryor, the psychologist who was responsible for popularizing clicker training after Skinner invented it, also tells a stor
y of observational learning on the part of two porpoises, Malia and Hou, whom she trained to perform at Hawaii's Sea Life Park and Oceanic Institute. Each porpoise had her own act—back jumps, fetching rings underwater while blindfolded, aerial corkscrews—which each performed separately from the other. One day, however, both porpoises had trouble from the start; everything they did was a little rough and mistimed. Nevertheless, they managed to perform all their tricks, including difficult ones, like the high hoop jump, that had taken Pryor weeks to train.

  When the show was finished, Pryor was left scratching her head at what had gone wrong. Then her assistant came up to her and said, "We got the animals mixed up. Someone put Malia in Hou's holding tank and Hou in Malia's.... They look so much alike now, I just never thought of that."

  Remarkably, each porpoise had done the other's routine so well that Pryor assumed that they knew their acts by heart and were merely having a bad day. Without any reinforcements—no tossed fish, no whistles, no clickers—the two porpoises had learned each other's acts simply by watching each other perform.

  Pryor saw this as a leap of the imagination on the part of Hou and Malia—what she called "insight." Wolfgang Köhler, one of the fathers of Gestalt psychology, agreed and used the same word, insight, for the phenomenon of animals having a eureka experience. He added that the animal suddenly sees the "structure of a situation" in a different light.

  What intrigued me most about the dogs of Kelly, with respect to the dogcatcher, was why those who allowed themselves to be repeatedly caught never had such an insightful moment. Were they unable to remember what happened to them after they were put inside the dogcatcher's truck, or did they find their stay in the Jackson Hole Animal Shelter pleasant? Temple Grandin points out that "nervous animals investigate their environments more, learn more, and get smarter in the process." Perhaps the dogs who were repeatedly caught were so placid—so highly domesticated—that the stress of being confined in the pound didn't bother them. An unflappable Holstein cow fits this description perfectly.