The Great Cheese Leave It was tough going for Jake Piper, but public-access training at one local restaurant is greater torture still. Jake knows the space well. He’s practically grown up with its cool floors, friendly patrons, and delicious scent of fajitas and bacon-wrapped cheeseburgers. While all that has tempted him before, he’s trained past most of its temptations. He still finds one sweet-voiced young waitress the hardest of all to resist. She’s a favorite among the café regulars, a pretty, dark-eyed mainstay, taking orders and repeating them from memory, setting accurate orders down with a flourish even for parties of eight or more. Though she might be in her twenties, or possibly older, her soft voice has never matured. It’s high-pitched—the breathy, girlish sound of a preadolescent—and that, coupled with her wide-eyed, affectionate glance at Jake when he enters, is enough for him to cast all his discipline to the wind.
This is precisely why we go there. Sociable Jake has almost mastered self-control. He can be trusted to pass men, women, children, toddlers, and babies without a pull on the lead that needs correcting. But this waitress is his Achilles’ heel. I’ve seen him break his Sit to greet her and refuse a Down in order to lean nearby, gazing upward with mooncalf eyes. He knows better. I’ve seen him be sly. While Jake will hold a nice tuck under the table for all the other wait staff, I’ve seen him stretch and shiver himself out from under it, inch by inch, so that over the course of a dinner, he manages to get near enough to maybe touch her. O precious proximity! O lilting voice! “Jake Piper, tuck under,” I correct him, and he retreats beneath the table attempting to look surprised. If Jake Piper can manage to stay discreet through five restaurant meals served by the hands of this goddess, if he can stay under the table, it’ll go a long way toward proving his self-discipline.
At first the young woman didn’t really understand there was a problem. The nice white dog was here again, the nice white dog learning to be in service, and it took other staff members and patrons to point out friendly Jake’s particular love-struck expression, the fact that his head raises when she approaches, eyes turning away from me, his partner, to follow her.
“How can I help?” she asks me. Just four words in that soft voice are enough that I can feel Jake quivering under the table.
“Avoid addressing him at all and, if he turns to you, avoid looking him in the eyes. He’s got to give you up to concentrate on his partner.” I don’t mention that it’s the sound of her he’s most overcome by. I can’t ask the woman to contract laryngitis or take up a two-pack-a-day smoking habit so that my dog will love her less. It’s our job to master this, and on Jake’s prep list for the Public Access Test, I make a note: I want his restaurant testing at a table and a time when he can prove he will resist her.
I am so busy training Jake Piper that I fail to notice another woman who’s eating him up with her eyes. A retiree that we’ve passed often when we trained downtown on Mondays, she has a window-shopping ritual and then a break for iced tea afterward. She is a slight, composed figure, neatly dressed; there is a wistfulness in her expression that I’ve seen but never understood until the day she introduces herself from the next table and tells me she has a husband with advanced Alzheimer’s whom she cares for at home every day except Monday. She says gently that he isn’t responsible. He can’t be left. Their children have provided some help in the house every day, but Mondays are “her” days, she tells me. The children wanted to make sure she got out of the house. So on Mondays she dutifully gets out of the house.
She looks across the table at me and then down at her ringed hand. The thing about getting out on Mondays is figuring out what to do with the time. What do you do when your children are grown, your income is fixed, and the man at the center of your life knows you a little less each day? She shakes her head and says shopping has never been an answer for her, and it’s not an answer now. She’s busy getting rid of stuff. She certainly doesn’t need more. She looks in shop windows and tries to remember the last time she wanted something enough to buy it.
At least here, downtown, she can turn to people-watching. Sometimes it’s good to be in the center of the activity of others. If you come to a place enough, you can feel a little part of all the things going on, good and bad. Shops opening, shops closing, people getting hired or losing jobs. Kids getting married and having babies. Or having babies and getting married. Or not. She winks at me and laughs a little. It’s not proper to pay too much attention, but this is how she proves to herself that not everything is over. When people recognize her and call her by name, she feels relevant. It’s good to be a regular and to be missed if you’re not there.
She’s very attracted to Jake. She heard me tell that young woman not to distract him by giving him attention, and so she doesn’t either, but it’s hard. He is so good, she says. So good! When her children were younger, the family had a white dog. He partly raised the kids when her husband was in Vietnam. That dog always kept an eye out. He chased off an intruder once. But he was a kind dog. Kind. He lived a long time. She speaks her white dog’s name with a little pause before and after it, like an amen. You can love a dog too much, she says. He broke their hearts. They never had another.
But she quite likes Jake Piper, and she wonders if sometime she might be able to pet him. She’s seen the vest, and she can read Don’t Pet. She hates to ask, but she doesn’t know the protocol. Do these dogs ever go off duty? Can she and Jake Piper ever be introduced?
They can. Certainly they can, but not here in the restaurant, where any service dog should be vested and on duty. I ask about her Mondays. I wonder if there might be a time she’d like to participate in Jake’s public-access training. I don’t want to impose, but there are test items where she could be very helpful. Jake must be approached for out-of-vest petting and receive attention with polite grace. There’s a test item requiring that a stranger take him on-lead and walk him away from his partner. I’d love to see him walk with her. I’d love to see him perform well on other test items under her direction. Would she like to do that?
She would. She’d like to walk him, and she’d like to pet him. She’d like to do anything that might help Jake learn. She’s got time now. She’s got most Mondays, she says. Mondays are her days, remember, but she’s done enough shopping. She’d be honored to give part of her Mondays to Jake. We exchange phone numbers, and when we step outside and Jake’s vest comes off, she sits on a bench and wraps her arms around the barrel chest of him, bowing her head to his back.
As we prepare for Jake’s Public Access Test over the following month, Jake sometimes on-lead with me, sometimes on-lead with her, our friend warms to the idea of having another dog. She wonders if it was selfish of the family to shut themselves down after loss. They had a good home and love to give, and all these years—there were so many needy dogs out there. In time, she asks if a dog could be trained to find her husband when he wandered in the house or yard. Could the dog also be taught to bark when her husband tries to unlatch their locked doors?
Yes, I say, on both counts. There are service dogs out doing just that job now—with seniors and with autistic children. If she’s interested, I could help her train one. She hated to ask, she tells me, she hated to impose. But that would be wonderful. She imagines what it would be like to have a dog friend in the house again—a dog friend that could help her husband and her family in important ways.
Threading Jake Piper through an antiques store, she lets the matter drop. But the next week she asks if I might help her find a dog. A good dog just like Jake, she says, but so we’re not disloyal to our last one, any color but white.
If you want to test temptation for a would-be service dog, few places rival PetSmart. On a busy Saturday afternoon, that place has it all: kids, cats, birds, fish, noise, toys in reaching distance, and everywhere, drifting over everything, the sweet scent of kibble. It’s not the first place I’d go to train a dog, but for a dog approaching the Canine Good Citizen or Public Access Test, it can build confidence or clearly show where mo
re training is needed.
I liken training a dog for the Public Access Test at PetSmart to having a kid take a math exam at the circus. Woo-hoo! Yet here we are, Jake Piper and I, because he’s pretty much proven he can hold the Down/Stay beneath a restaurant table and pass a toddler’s dropped ice cream without struggle. He’s visited busy Dallas downtown and seems unworried by the general screech and roar of the city. He’s ignored passing dogs. He’s sat nicely for petting (vest off) and patiently allowed a groomer to examine an ear. He’s held a Down while a shopping cart rattled by just inches from his tail. He took all of this in with no more than a bemused expression, the ears alone moving randomly during each event. None of it seemed to upset him.
Today’s work is being done on an unusually busy day. A couple of animal-rescue groups are on premises—meeting and greeting with their hopeful adoption candidates in bright bandannas. It’s a perfect day for Jake to show me he can calmly pass other dogs. It’s a perfect day for the rescue group to show that their adoptables are friendly and social. One splendid senior black Lab mix, so gray about the muzzle that his head appears white, calmly works the aisles with a volunteer. He’s wearing a Donation vest with a little arrow embroidered on the pocket rather than an Adopt Me vest with a little heart. He and Jake pass each other with no more than a slight head bob. They sit while the volunteer and I talk, the old Lab settling in with a little arthritic groan, Jake rolled back slightly on his haunches, tail swishing idly across the floor.
The volunteer says it’s been a pretty good day today, though everyone wants the light-colored puppies first, and the black dogs are getting little interest, which often seems to be the way of it. Black-dog syndrome, the condition of being overlooked due to color, seems to be in play here. There are many guesses as to why black-dog syndrome exists—black dogs are more common; they don’t photograph well; there are superstitions surrounding them (similar to those surrounding black cats); some feel they are just too plain, and others that they look too mean. The rescuer says that for a time after J. K. Rowling—God bless her—created Sirius Black, a character who could shape-shift into a dog, the black dogs in rescue got a break, even a little advantage, maybe. Black dogs in that period moved. There are probably hundreds of Sirius Blacks out there now, some of them one-hundred-pound rottie mixes, others inkblot-sized Chihuahuas that top out at three pounds soaking wet.
Max here—she gestures to the elderly Lab—has been a foster for five years. He is the best dog ever, came in already knowing Heel, Sit, and Down, friendly to everyone and everything, and no one ever seriously considered him. Now Max is twelve years old, and the rescue has accepted that he is unadoptable and stopped trying. He is their mascot, their Donation dog, and though he’s had a loving home in foster for a long, long time, it’s a shame, because he would have made some family with kids or someone who wanted a quiet, mellow friend very, very happy.
I can’t believe no one ever considered this boy.
“Well,” the volunteer says, “one guy did that I remember, but then he saw that Max has a kink in his tail and didn’t want him. Seriously, it was that lame an excuse.” She reaches down and affectionately feels for the marble-sized knot that made Max a no-deal. She says it may have been a stroke of luck for the dog. A guy who got worked up over a tail kink might have been a real jerk.
I tell her a little about my work with Jake Piper and the firsthand research into training a psychiatric service dog. She likes Jake’s soft expression. She likes the way he met Max—friendly, but not rambunctious. I take off his vest, and when she pets him, she laughs at the way Jake takes affection—the flash of shy smile that some dogs do, little pearl incisors showing, leaning his head into her hand, folding his ears, tail thump-thumping rapidly like a puppy’s.
Psych dogs. She has never heard of them. She says depression runs in her family. Her grandmother had it. Her father was a veteran who came back from Vietnam with it. Sometimes he was better. Sometimes he was worse. He was never quite himself after he came home. A “woman’s weakness,” in those days; a man didn’t admit to depression. She has one arm around Jake Piper and one arm around Max and says her father self-medicated by drinking a lot. She shakes her head and says he called it “killing the black dog .”
“She was absolutely not the dog I imagined. When I met the transport truck with Mary, the man was taking the dogs out one at a time. He yelled, ‘Who has the black Doberman cross?’ I was just standing there, because at the time we didn’t think that’s what she was. And Mary said, ‘Oh, that’s Pam’s dog,’ and I was shocked. I said, ‘Whaaat?’ And out comes this dog, so scrawny. It made her look really tall because she was so skinny. She came out of the trailer, and she was just flying in the air, no feet on the ground, just bounding on the leash, and I thought, Oh my God, what did I just do?”
Pam is describing her first meeting with Babe, a rescue pulled from a shelter in South Carolina. Babe was just around a year old. She was mostly black, a rottweiler-hound cross that looked deceptively like a Doberman. Like so many others, Babe was one of those dogs typically bypassed in shelters. Field and power-breed mixes often are—for many would-be adopters, these dogs are too big, too high energy, and too dark in color, and, among many other similar dogs in the shelter, they are difficult to tell apart.
Pam had been looking to rescue a dog for a while, and she’d been looking to find the right dog from that slighted population. She had another dog and knew her household; she’d been thinking a black Lab or Lab mix, maybe three to five years old. She says she always wants to get it right when she adopts, so she takes her time. For eight months or more, she looked at hundreds of photographs and read the accompanying bios—and in a sea of black dogs, this one dog had something special. “Babe had the softest eyes,” Pam says. “The minute I looked at those eyes, I knew this was the one.”
Mary, who runs a rescue group in the Northeast, had originally gotten a plea about Babe from two volunteers in the South Carolina shelter. They too had seen something special in her. Anxiety and boundless energy notwithstanding, Babe was extraordinary with kids, so exceptional that the volunteers urged Mary to list her on her rescue site. Requests like these are often tinged with urgency. Mary recognized that here. Though she wasn’t sure this dog’s description was going to attract many adopters—all the wrong pings of color, size, and deportment—she listed Babe through her rescue anyway, and Mary’s rescue partner Annette went to the Aiken Animal Shelter to photograph her.
Great photographs can make a difference for so many of these dogs. It’s not always an easy capture in the shelter environment, and dark dogs are harder still, but Annette is particularly good at it, Mary says. Annette caught the dog’s intelligence, beauty, and, as Pam put it, “her soft, kind eyes.” Annette’s photograph made the difference, and in a much shorter time than Mary had predicted, along came adoption interest—from Pam.
Still, Mary says she wondered during that phone call if Pam had the right dog. There’s always risk in rescue. Mary wonders every time if a dog is going to end up back at her house in a week, so she tries for full disclosure. She wants people to know as much as possible about what they’re getting into, who they’re bringing home. Though this dog had no aggression issues, she was super-anxious and energetic. Mary thought she knew what Pam was looking for, and this dog was wide of that mark. “Are you sure?” she asked Pam before the adoption took place. “Are you sure?”
Pam was sure then. She seemed to stay sure, Mary says, even at that first meeting. Any uncertainties she may have felt when Babe levitated out of the trailer, Pam managed to keep to herself. Mary was impressed. Pam seemed as calm as Babe was hyper. Pam saw something in the long-legged, kiting creature; she somehow knew the dog was going to turn out fine.
Struggling to merge her preconception of the dog with the great, leaping reality of her at the time, Pam says: “I believe in commitment. I said I would take her, so I was going to take her, and within five minutes I was in love with her. Just the sweetest dog
[and when she got up close], there it was—the most beautiful look in her eyes.”
Pam named her Caro, a soft name to mark her new beginning.
Pam already has a therapy dog, and she wasn’t really looking to adopt another to do the same work when she brought Caro home. Therapy-dog policies usually specify one dog per handler on any given visit; with two therapy dogs in the house, Pam would always need to make a decision about which dog to take, and she didn’t really want that. Caro was brought into the house to be a pet.
But then Pam saw the dog’s reaction to children. Pam had never seen anything quite like it. Around children, the big dog goes boneless, she says. It’s like she’s received some kind of drug. Besotted, devoted, name the loving adjective and it seems to apply to Caro around kids. Big kids. Little kids. She likes to listen to them; she likes to be near them. If they want her to sit, she sits. If they want her to lie in their laps for a full-body hug, she wants that too.
Pam knew she had seen something in her dog in that first photograph; she remembers a low-key reference in the write-up about “good with children,” but that can mean anything, even something as minimal as a wag to a passing kid volunteer. As an experienced rescuer, she also knows that rescue dogs can hold surprises. It takes a while to figure out how much good and how much bad they carry from their past, what their triggers are. Pam socialized Caro and carefully watched her in their first months together, and while nothing seemed to faze the dog, Caro’s eagerness to please and her joy beside children was a surprise to Pam. Caro was born to work therapy. It seemed a shame to let those gifts go to waste.
At first glance, others might not be so certain. There it is again, black-dog syndrome, Pam says, and it’s all such a complicated read for strangers—the big dog of a power breed, the dark face whose expression is harder to decipher, the bobbed tail that wiggles where people would look for an all-out wag. Pam remembers a woman from their early days who glared across the waiting area at Pam and Caro before the training class began. More than an angry glance, the woman gave a series of hostile stares in Caro’s direction. They were impossible to miss. Pam wondered what made up that history, what was provoking all that, and finally she’d had enough. She made eye contact, neutral but unapologetic, as though she welcomed anything the woman had to say.
The Possibility Dogs Page 26