The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  Psych service dogs can be trained to assist those who get lost in all its variations. There are time-management dogs that can insist depressed, withdrawn partners wake up; there are dogs that can nudge slack hands until their partners recognize the hands as their own; there are dogs that, at a word, lead their panicked handlers to exits or to family they’ve lost in a crowd. A psych dog’s location tasks not only help a handler understand where he or she is but also prevent a handler from making a dangerous move (like stepping into traffic) or help the handler get to a place that feels safe—away from crowds for example, or outside into fresh air, or back home. They are intricate tasks, skills built upon skills, tasks built on literally hundreds of training experiences that prove to a partner that his dog’s assistance can be trusted.

  Is Jake Piper up for these kinds of tasks? I don’t know, but we’ll try. We’ll start with service dog location tasks first, perhaps the easiest of the three kinds of lost. Certainly, location tasks are the most familiar to me. Such tasks represent the flip side of the job I do beside a search canine—“find our way back” rather than “take me in to find,” two ends of the lost condition joined by a swath of scent. Because Jake models Puzzle, and Jake is a happy, competitive learner, we bring Puzzle into the training process—a demo dog for the student dog—and I am behind them and beside them, taking notes and learning fast.

  When Puzzle works the Home or Take Me Back command, often Jake Piper goes along. His devotion to the golden seems to make him learn faster. I’m eager to see how much of what she’s doing he picks up just by proximity. On his own, since Jake Piper has no orientation or nose-work background at all, I decide to start him with a simpler orientation task: Door. For the human partner needing to find his way out of a building, Door means “Help me leave this place,” “Take me to the fresh-air source,” or, as one partner puts it, “Get me the hell out of Dodge.”

  Training one dog in a houseful of others is always a challenge. Training one dog in a houseful of others during a rainy late autumn even more so. Jake needs to learn the Door command. Puzzle can certainly learn it too (why not?), but I didn’t really have it in mind to train the Pomeranians also. Little center-stage creatures that they are, they grumble every time they are sidelined. Maybe they are up for the challenge and maybe they strongly sense that I have underestimated the depth of their capacities, or maybe it’s because they know there are treats involved with every success, and they are all food hounds, and this exclusion is seriously inappropriate. I am used to their protests. Many a Pomeranian glared at me through the window when Puzzle was first doing search exercises in our backyard, six years ago. Now the Poms have the reverse condition. On sunny days, they are led outside when the good stuff is going to happen in the house! As we set to work, I can hear their fussy voices at the back door.

  Jake, Puzzle, and I start by defining the word door. “Door,” I say, and I stand right by it, and when they come to the door and sit at my feet, they each get a puppy biscuit. This takes a couple of rounds, and then I stand farther down the hallway and say, “Door,” and first they come to me for a treat, but in fairly quick order the dogs recognize that’s not what’s wanted. They need to go to the door and sit, and they do. They get treats for that too. This takes about two fifteen-minute training sessions to become reliable.

  It’s important that the dogs don’t block the door on this command, so now that they recognize that for the moment, the word door means our front door, I reward them only after they sit to the side of the door, so that it can be opened, rather than when they block it. This was already in Puzzle’s skill set—she’s had a lot of experience with public spaces and swinging doors. Jake seems proud of himself when he gets it. He also seems to have a sense of the spatial and the practical, recognizing that if I’m going to open the door, it’s easier if he’s not in the way. After another day of short training sessions, he dashes down the hall to sit beside the door, one paw slightly lifted and posed just so, beaming at me like a Chinese foo dog.

  Now it’s time to broaden their understanding of the word. I’d like the dogs to lead me to the closest exit to the outside, so I need to teach them that the door can mean the back door too. We try this a few times from positions in the house that are closer to the back door than the front. For both Jake Piper and Puzzle, learning that door means any exit and, ideally, the closest one to where we are, takes some doing. At first, they rush happily for the front door no matter where we are. So I start the process all over again at the back of the house. I say, “Door,” and move to the back door instead of the front. On the first attempt, I have forgotten that all the Pomeranians are outside on the deck, and when Jake and Puzzle head for the glass back door successfully and get treats for it, the Poms see the endgame from outside. They stretch up on their back feet and press their angry faces to the glass. We ignore them and train on.

  It takes a weekend of short training sessions to get Puzzle and Jake to hear the command and make a choice of door based on location.

  “Remember that the closest exit may be behind you!” I call to them, imitating a flight attendant’s briefing.

  When I give the Door command just inside the doorway to my bedroom, the dogs are truly torn. I watch them with interest. They dash into the corridor. Jake, who can scramble in reverse somehow, moves backward with his eyes on me. They seem stymied for the moment. The back door and the front door are about equidistant. But the front door, visible from the corridor, wins. Puzzle makes the choice, Jake just behind her, both of them glancing over their shoulders to make sure I am following.

  The next step for them in the task is, of course, partner loyalty. It’s not enough for the dogs to find the door. They need to make sure I find it too. There are all kinds of similarities here to a search scenario, where the dog must not only find the victim but make sure the handler knows he’s found him, and in some cases lead the handler back to the victim. I expect Puzzle to catch on to the partner-loyalty concept pretty quickly. She does, but her loyalty is of the search-dog kind. She steps toward the middle of the corridor, wroo-wroos at me, then turns back for the door. This is the “follow” signal we’ve had in the search field since she was a puppy. It’s clear between us there, and she expects it to be clear between us here too.

  Jake Piper is more unpredictable. Food-driven Jake might be so focused on the treat that he fails to recognize he receives it only if I actually get to the door. We try several training sessions where I move more and more slowly, with greater difficulty, and Jake, with his generous eye gaze and his urgency, seems to get it. He knits great stitches between me and the door—trotting back and forth and back and forth—until I get there.

  The Door command is going pretty well. Puzzle and Jake make the training fun. Wroo-wroo-woo, Puzzle says when she knows she’s got it right, her golden brag language, while Jake wiggles beside the door, waiting for the praise he thinks he’s earned.

  Then the rainy season truly hits, and separating the training dogs and the Poms gets a little more difficult. I try putting the little dogs in a bedroom so that Jake and Puzzle can concentrate (and maybe even hear me) in the rest of the house. All that distraction is a good test of the working dogs’ focus. On the other side of any door, the Poms are completely aware of what’s going on in the living room, the study, the kitchen, the hallway. I hear them put their noses to the crack beneath the door and huff. Occasionally one of them throws his entire body weight against the door, like cops in those crime dramas who shoulder into an apartment full of bad guys. Every once in a while, Mr. Sprits’l yaps an augh! I can hear the tap of his feet on the wood floor, and I know he’s spinning, one augh! per 360-degree rotation.

  After a week or so, Puzzle and Jake have clearly got it. Door now means “the-closest-exit-outside-no-matter-where-we-are.” Door also means “and-make-sure-the-human-gets-there-too.” I feel a little bad about the Poms, the tragic little overlooked, underestimated Poms, and now that Jake and Puz seem assured about the command, I decide to
invite any Pomeranian that wants in on the action to have a go.

  We’ll have a little fun. “Door,” I say in my bedroom, armed with a pocketful of treats. Jake and Puzzle race to the back door and sit, and I follow them readily, but the Poms at first follow me, because I have the treats. I start with them the way I started with Jake and Puzzle. Door means a treat when you get there, not before. A couple of them (Jack and Smokey) figure it out quickly and are happy to run to the door and sit for the treat. One of them (Mr. Sprits’l) would rather scold me from ankle level all the way there. One of them (Mizzen) is a natural. She races to the door and back to me again, there and back to me again, there and back. Hoor! she says, tap-dancing across the wood. She can get to the door and seems to know what the word means, but it’s all so exciting she can hardly contain herself. Hoor! Here’s the door! Aren’t you here yet? Hoor! Let me come back to you! Hey! Look! Over here! Hoor! Here’s the door! She is thrilled with Door. She is thrilled with the knowing. She is thrilled with the treats. Mizzen-monkey makes me a little dizzy.

  We shape the command. Ultimately, the door dogs, the ones who get there, make sure I get there and then sit out of the way, and they get the treats. The recalcitrant dogs eventually get treats too, but it takes a little longer with them tripping over their personalities along the way.

  The quicker dogs get impatient with the slower ones. At one point after the Door command, I notice Fo’c’sle Jack quivering at the door for his treat, but I’m having a tough time making my way there. Mr. Sprits’l is slowing me down, making figure eights around my feet as I walk. About three yards from the door, I catch Fo’c’sle Jack’s eye. He glances at me, then looks at Mr. Sprits’l and sighs.

  There comes a day, not quickly, when all the dogs can find the closest door when I give the command. They rush to the front or back door as a herd of ears and tails. A few of them come back for me. Some of them don’t. Then they quibble with one another for sitting position. Knowing that it’s easy for dogs to learn our habits like dance moves, I try to vary when and where I give the command. Sometimes they’re awake, sometimes some of them are sleeping, but “Door!” I’ll call, and I’ll hear the mutter and scramble. It is the doggy version of my search pager going off, that sudden call to action, and I have to laugh at their fumbling Huh? What? Oh! as they stampede through the house to find me and then lead me to the closest door.

  But they seem to enjoy it. All of them—young and old, fast and slow, strong or a little bit frail. “Door,” I say, and they find me to guide me. Mr. Sprits’l seems particularly glad to tell me where to go.

  19

  “ROSCOE PLAYED BALL the way Cal Ripken played ball,” says Alex. “He took the game very seriously.” Alex remembers how his off-duty service dog became famous at the dog park, an unexpected runner among plenty of other running breeds. Roscoe’s athleticism attracted attention.

  Alex speaks of his partner of four years with a kind of wonder. Like so many rescuers, he brought one dog home, you see, and he ended up with another. Alex never regretted it. There is still not a day he doesn’t think of that boy, not a day he doesn’t feel the dog’s influence in his own life and recognize how Roscoe changed it. Homeless twice over, Roscoe became a rescue success story. The same could be said of Alex.

  Alex was a shelter volunteer when he met the dog that would become his partner. Roscoe was a longtime resident there, the kind of dog in a shelter that attracts both attention and apprehension. A light brown pit bull–whippet mix with a generous smile and a white blaze down his chest, he was a favorite of the shelter staff—friendly, handsome, and personable. He had plenty of time to become a staff favorite too. He was difficult to find a home for. Roscoe had both size and the smoke of breed bias that surrounds any dog that looks like a pit bull.

  He was lucky in his placement; the Linwood, Washington, Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) that housed him euthanized dogs only in cases of extreme poor health or behavioral issues. Roscoe had neither of those. At PAWS, Roscoe was given time to find a home, and Alex says the dog thrived among friends at the shelter, a place where he had known only kindness. Volunteers, Alex among them, paid him a great deal of attention.

  Alex saw something special in Roscoe. There were so many good things about him, but he remembers that Roscoe was a dog that would look you in the eye and concentrate, as if, if you gave him a minute, he could understand. This dog paid attention. He wanted to connect.

  Alex needed an assistance dog. He had an eye on this dog as a service partner as the documentation necessary to support his need finalized, but before Alex’s paperwork came through, Roscoe found another home. Alex couldn’t help but be disappointed at the same time he was glad. A young couple had taken him, and it appeared that Roscoe’s story would have a happy ending, never a certainty for any dog, and especially not for homeless dogs like Roscoe, too often bypassed.

  But a few months later, Roscoe was back at the shelter. The loving couple that had adopted him had also abandoned him, moving away and leaving him tied up in their former backyard—a hint at the life they had failed to give him. When neighbors realized the couple wasn’t coming back, they fed Roscoe until animal control stepped in. AC found Roscoe’s microchip, the microchip that still contained PAWS information, and what could have been a terrible last chapter turned out well: suddenly, the big dog was back at the shelter among friends. He seemed relieved, Alex says. This was where Roscoe had known safety and happiness, and though there were no signs of abuse by his former owners, Roscoe was clearly the victim of neglect. He came back anxious and undernourished. He would not be neglected at PAWS.

  He would also not be at PAWS long. The mental health documentation necessary for Alex to have a dog in no-pet housing had come through in the interim, and Alex, who needed a service partner and was determined to owner-train and to rescue, knew the moment Roscoe P. Whippet came back to the shelter that this was the dog that could make a difference. Alex knew also he was a man who would return the favor.

  His condition might surprise most people, Alex says, because on paper it looks like everything’s great. Long involved with Toastmasters International, a nonprofit public speaking and leadership group, Alex is an extrovert. He is comfortable and confident in front of crowds. Alex has done theater and even some standup comedy.

  But there are issues. One-to-one interaction is different than public speaking. Alex wrangles attention deficit disorder, focus problems, and a social-anxiety disorder that makes even some of the basics of daily living difficult. In the days before Roscoe, at its worst, the condition was agonizing. Job interviews, first dates, meeting strangers in any context could cause intense anxiety attacks. Alex says there were times when even small, simple interactions like asking for directions or for help in a store were almost impossible. Self-consciousness overcame him—Alex couldn’t meet people’s eyes; he sometimes couldn’t speak at all.

  His job could well have been part of the problem. Alex worked on the distribution end of his own book business and spent the majority of his days alone in a warehouse, sorting books and working online, rarely seeing or speaking to anyone. It was a job he loved in a business he was passionate about, but the less he interacted with others, the more difficult it became to do so. Attention and focus issues gradually became problems at the warehouse, issues that had also kept him from driving. His separate problems added up to a whole, and there he was, a withdrawn, center-stage extrovert tipping the Myers-Briggs scale in one direction while living an anxious, largely interior life that pointed to another.

  Alex is smart and self-aware. He could feel his encroaching anxieties, the sense of his own withdrawal. The more he was alone, the more he felt himself avoiding strangers and unfamiliar situations he would have once faced; the more he was alone, the more he was aware of the division in his public and private selves.

  Alex was as startled as his audience the day he broke down during an early-morning Toastmasters address. Toastmasters is famous for its supportive communi
ty, and Alex knew this group well. He was comfortable there. He had been involved long enough that he’d become the chapter’s president. The day’s exercise was not meant to hold surprises; like most other Toastmasters events, there was a speaking topic for the meeting, and each member would get up to address the group.

  Pets and Animals was the subject of the day. There were certainly more difficult topics, and Alex remembers that the subject didn’t seem particularly volatile when they’d come up with it. He enjoyed animals, had had a few dogs in his childhood, but he had not had a pet as an adult. No problem, he thought. He liked animals well enough that he knew he’d find something to say. Other members got up to speak of their own pets past and present, and when it was Alex’s turn to speak, to close the meeting, he began to speak but faltered, unable to go on, and then wept hard enough that the vice president of the group had to take over. Twenty or so Toastmasters members on folding chairs in a church’s Sunday-school classroom: it was a routine he enjoyed; he was familiar with this space; he was confident with these people—and yet somehow he got blindsided by a topic that might have been given to first-graders.

  What had happened? Alex isn’t sure. Perhaps it was the collective power of the other speakers’ stories, some joyful, some meditative, some sad. Perhaps he suddenly realized the depth of his own disconnect. Whatever it was, he felt a dark space widen, and there it was, this grief he wasn’t prepared for.

  The situation was relieved only when another member of the group came up to talk to him about PAWS, where she had once volunteered. Walking dogs, socializing dogs, comforting and caring for them—she suggested that if Alex was not able to have a dog in the home he was renting, this might be enough in the interim, this ability to be with some dogs and do some good.