DogTown

by Stefan Bechtel

  But despite the history of failure, Pat did not see a hopeless dog in front of him at all. “When people say a dog can’t learn, well, it’s a challenge to a dog trainer, and I’m a little oppositional by nature, but the statement makes no sense to me,” he said. “It’s not possible for an animal not to learn unless there is severe cross-circuiting in the brain—unless something’s really put together wrong up there.”

  And Pat Whitacre just didn’t believe that was the case.

  It’s not as though much beloved goldens are dim-witted as a breed. In a book called The Intelligence of Dogs, neuropsychologist Stanley Coren ranks the intelligence of dog breeds, based on the speed with which they learn new commands and several other criteria. Out of 79 breeds, according to Coren’s ranking, golden retrievers come in fourth. They’re in the top ten group of “brightest breeds” (smartest: border collies, followed by poodles, German shepherds, goldens, and Dobermans; dimmest: bulldogs, basenjis, and Afghan hounds).

  But arguments over intelligence aside, one of the things that Johnny really had going for him was that “he’s the sweetest dog you’d ever hope to find,” Pat said. “It’s impossible to get him angry with you, and he has no real handling sensibilities, he has no kind of contact reactions from things touching him or brushing him or whatever. He doesn’t care who’s touching him, he doesn’t care if you touch him on his face, or touch him in his ears, or stick your fingers in his mouth, he’s not going to snap and bite somebody. He just loves everybody.”

  Pat Whitacre was eager to work with a happy-go-lucky dog like Johnny and believed the dog could be taught new tricks.

  WHY CAN’T JOHNNY LEARN?

  The fact that Johnny had spent weeks or months in a puppy mill might have had something to do with his house-training problems, Pat felt. Like so many puppies raised in these factory farms for dogs, Johnny wasn’t housebroken simply because he didn’t need to be. Kept confined in a small cage, he simply defecated wherever he happened to be and learned to live in his own filth. Also, if he was confined in a small area where he got little if any exercise as a pup, that could have caused a bit of developmental delay in his motor skills, Pat reasoned. “We see that in him even today—he’s a little bit goofier and floppier than most year-old dogs would be,” Pat said.

  Johnny had this harebrained way of stumbling into things so frequently that when he walked through the clinic kitchen, you could sometimes hear him walking by the procession of clanks and clatters. He’d do silly, inappropriate things for fun, the sorts of things kids do—like digging to the bottom of the trash can and scattering crumpled paper all over the floor, like someone searching for something.

  Johnny, in effect, may well have been in recovery from the crimes that had been committed against him as a helpless puppy.

  Pat took Johnny in for an overall physical with Dr. Mike Dix, the head vet and medical director at Dogtown, not long after he arrived.

  When Dr. Mike began looking the shaggy dog over, he quickly noted that “he does seem a little bit slow to respond.” Johnny would look in one direction, and then Dr. Mike would make a noise, and a couple of seconds later Johnny would turn around and look. “There seems to be a disconnect between what happens and how he responds to it,” Dr. Mike said. Physically, though, Johnny was a fine specimen—a handsome, healthy dog with a good heart and lungs, able to move freely and without pain. His hearing and eyesight appeared to be normal. Medically, there seemed to be nothing wrong with Johnny at all. He was also, Dr. Mike noticed, “a very nice dog. He’s very sweet. He just seems like he’s kind of in his own little world.”

  Dr. Mike described Johnny’s attitude as “happy-go-lucky but not aware…he’s like a rich billionaire who has no clue about life. He’s fun. He loves life. He just bounces around being goofy. I saw him playing with another dog one day and he’s sitting on top of him wrestling him. He’s a goofy dog. He could be a great family dog…as long as they don’t want too much out of him.”

  The good news was that Johnny had a clean bill of health. As far as the vets could tell, there wasn’t anything physically preventing him from learning. The next step would be on the behavioral side: seeing what could motivate Johnny to learn.

  PARTNERS WITH PAT

  “Within the first 24 hours of meeting Johnny, I was real impressed with him,” Pat said. “This dog gets me very excited. I love this dog.”

  Pat Whitacre looked at the same animal everyone else had looked at, but he did not see a dumb, hopeless bumbler. He saw a shining star. “He’s got so much going for him—so much potential. I can’t wait to start working with him. He has so many good features—everything I would look for in a dog to train. He is motivated, he is mobile, he is active, he gives you lots of behavior to play with. And he is absolutely harmless. He is the gentlest dog.”

  Only a day or two after Pat started working with Johnny, such an obvious rapport had built up between the two of them that other trainers on staff at Dogtown started asking Pat if he was going to take Johnny home and foster him. Pat had already started to think that training Johnny would require being around him a great deal—more than simply visiting him at Dogtown. In fact, Pat felt that full-time fostering would be critical if Johnny was ever to overcome all his bad habits and lack of good ones. On a pragmatic level, Pat realized that fostering Johnny would probably mean not getting much sleep for a number of nights, and if he did get started fostering him on a weekday, he’d be dragging himself to work every day, exhausted. So he decided to wait until the weekend to get started, even though “had I waited one more day, somebody else would’ve yanked him out and fostered him first, and I wasn’t about to let that happen!”

  Pat knew that having Johnny in a home environment would be enormously revealing. If Johnny was kept at the sanctuary, Pat would never really know if he’d solved his problems, because Johnny wouldn’t exhibit any problems there. In his comfortable, simple quarters at Dogtown, there would be no shoes for Johnny to chew up, no cats to bother, no food on the counter to gobble up—problems that hadn’t shown up yet but might in a home. Pat wouldn’t even really be able tell if Johnny was housebroken, either, because if he failed to go out through the doggie door and instead defecated indoors on the concrete, it just got cleaned up by volunteers.

  In the sanctuary, “There’s really no reason for him to change his behavior, especially the behavior that keeps him from getting him into a home,” Pat said. “He would basically still be able to continue being Johnny, with very little opportunity for us to help him change those behaviors.”

  So Pat took the happy, ditzy dog home. Pat led him, still on leash, around his house, where all Johnny’s problem behaviors popped up immediately. He tried to chew on anything within reach. He strained at the leash. He tried to eat food on the counter.

  At the same time, he seemed oddly oblivious of things dogs usually notice—like one of Pat’s cats. Pat had put the cat safely in a cage so he could gauge Johnny’s attitude toward cats, but Johnny didn’t even register that there was a cat in the room. Holding out a treat, Pat tried to lead Johnny’s nose toward a cat on the windowsill above the sink. But Johnny just playfully grabbed a pot by the handle and started dopily playing with it, oblivious of the cat in the room. “Everything’s a toy, isn’t it?” Pat said to Johnny, unable to stop laughing at the dog’s endearing absentmindedness.

  Just because a dog has papers doesn’t guarantee he’ll have a home! Thirty percent of all animals in shelters are purebreds.

  The qualities that had put other people off only made Pat love Johnny more. But although he could see what a great dog this was going to be, he had no illusions about the difficulty of the undertaking. Though Johnny was 11 months old, he had learned almost nothing he needed to know to coexist in a human household, and he had acquired quite a few habits he needed to unlearn. For one thing, Pat discovered, Johnny had no boundaries. He just climbed all over everything, “which is probably more of a problem in a potential home than mine,” Pat observed with a l
augh, gesturing around his spare bachelor quarters, with the weight-lifting bench, dirty dishes in the sink, piles of paper, and general air of cozy, comfortable disorder.

  Pat decided that, to expunge Johnny’s old, bad behavior and instill new, good behavior, he was going to need to keep a close eye on Johnny around the clock. He decided that the two of them would need to be physically leashed together, at least for the first few days or weeks. He’d even sleep with Johnny’s leash around his wrist so he knew when Johnny was coming or going, or when he needed to get out his doggie door to relieve himself. They were literally together all the time.

  The first few days weren’t easy. Pat discovered that, contrary to Johnny’s first low-key reaction to cats, he actually started to think cats were “kind of cool.” If the cats dashed around the house, Johnny would follow, his golden fur a blur behind them, and drag Pat along for the ride. Unfortunately, one of Pat’s other dogs tended to get swept up in the excitement and join in the chase, so that cats, dogs, and Pat were all racing after each other through the house. The end of the chase was never as exciting. If Johnny ever actually caught up to a cat, he would just stop on stiff legs and look at it goofily, sniffing, apparently without a clue about what to do next.

  Pat also discovered that Johnny had a much less endearing habit, which to most people would be a genuine deal breaker: He liked to nose around in the kitty box and eat the little “kitty crunchies” he found there. It was yet another bad habit he’d have to unlearn.

  THE POWER OF POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT

  When Pat brought Johnny home to foster, he thought the biggest problem was going to be the thing that had gotten him thrown out of his first home—his inability to be housebroken. Pat prepared for the worst, fortifying himself with a fresh supply of paper towels and spray cleaner. If Johnny hadn’t learned to succeed at this most basic of tasks at the age of 11 months, retraining him could be difficult. Pat knew that, with an unhousebroken dog like Johnny, he’d have to keep an eye on him all the time. “Most dogs will give you some sort of a cue as to what they’re about to do, particularly male dogs, who will often have to find an object, sniff on the object, get sideways on the object, and then raise the leg. As a trainer you’ll have a lot of warning that he’s about to do something; you’ve got time to hustle him outside before he does it.”

  But to Pat’s amazement and delight, he didn’t really need all those paper towels. Johnny was almost—though not quite—housebroken from the second day at his house.

  Johnny’s goofy antics and sweet nature won him many fans among the Dogtown staff.

  When Johnny was about to do his business, Pat picked him up and gently pushed him out his doggie door. After a few tries at this, Johnny would dutifully scramble out the doggie door when the time was right, relieve himself in the outdoor run, and then—get stuck outside. Because the riser on one of the back steps was too high for him, Johnny would clumsily, and unsuccessfully, struggle to get up it. Pat had to fix the step so Johnny could come and go as he pleased.

  “I certainly couldn’t have him going out and thinking he was trapped out there, and then not wanting to go out anymore,” Pat said. “Because one of the basic principles of dog training is to make it as easy as possible for him to do what you want him to do.”

  The primary tool Pat was using to change Johnny’s behavior was positive reinforcement, which is at the core of Best Friends’ training philosophy. Negative reinforcement—that is, punishment for bad behavior rather than rewards for good behavior—can also produce behavior changes in dogs. But Pat knew it can also produce unwanted side effects. “I don’t want Johnny to be afraid of me,” he said. “I want him to enjoy our training sessions. I don’t want him to think, ‘I have to shut down and not behave around this guy because if I make him mad, he’s going to smack me around or punish me somehow.’ Instead, I want to encourage behaviors that I like, which means making them not just fun for me—because I’m tickled that he’s doing the right thing—but fun for Johnny too.”

  Pat would simply ignore Johnny’s bad or unwanted behavior: if he jumped up on Pat, or chased the cat, or dug in the kitty litter. Instead Pat only paid attention to the behavior he wanted to encourage, the one he would reward. But for Johnny to learn a whole slew of new behaviors at the same time that he unlearned all the old behaviors would require constant, nonstop attention.

  “If I work with him 20 percent of a day, he’s going to find out the old behaviors are still great 80 percent of the time and the new behaviors may only need to be looked at when he sees me hanging around,” Pat explained.

  The main thing about a reinforcement that matters is that it should be something that’s valued by the dog, Pat said. If he used dog biscuits and Johnny didn’t like them, the whole exercise would be futile. He’d seen dogs who would close their mouths and turn their heads when offered a treat—indicating that they wanted to be petted, not fed. So petting and affection is the reinforcer that should be used in that case.

  According to Pat, if a dog can do something on his own, he can be taught to do it on cue. If a trainer says “sit” and the dog doesn’t move, he can gently force the dog’s body to sit, force him to obey the command by leading his head with a handheld treat (if that’s the reinforcer that works). The trick is finding the dog’s trigger—the stimulus that gets a response. For a small boy, it might be a toy truck; for Johnny, it’s physical affection, toys, and—Johnny’s favorite—treats.

  Pat demonstrated this profound, simple principle while Johnny was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor. Pat held out a treat and then waved it around the room. Johnny’s nose followed it here, followed it there, and finally followed it into a sitting position because that was the easiest position to reach it from. It was also the place where he got to eat the treat.

  “He’s learning to sit on cue,” Pat said. “He’s learning, ‘My butt on the ground is when the guy lets go of the treat.’ This is not a dog that can’t learn,” Pat said, after he’d fostered Johnny in his home for two weeks. “I can show you a whole myriad of things he’s mastered, just like any other dog—I’m kind of embarrassed to say that he already knows more than my other dogs! He literally was sitting on command within 24 hours and then we built on that.” Even Johnny’s most revolting habit, digging in the kitty litter, yielded to the power of positive reinforcement.

  Why had Johnny seemed so slow? Well, Pat says, maybe it was because he was slow, and still is—but that didn’t mean he was untrainable, or unlovable.

  The saying “You cannot teach an old dog new tricks” is false. Shelter animals respond well to good, effective, and humane training techniques. When training your pet, it is important to be consistent, patient, and understanding.

  The persistence of the trainers at Dogtown in dealing with a dog like Johnny is genuinely inspirational. Pat Whitacre simply did not give up. He didn’t make one of those pragmatic bargains people often make with the universe: “Look, this is a dumb, difficult dog with disagreeable habits, who won’t behave and really isn’t worth much trouble. Save your energy for a dog that’s worth the time.”

  Instead, Pat simply focused intensely on helping Johnny learn what he needed to know in order to survive in human society—all the behaviors that would make his shining star visible to the world—even if it meant tethering himself to a rambunctious golden retriever all night long. And to what purpose? In order to give Johnny away to a stranger.

  Dogtown is, one might say, actually a spiritual community for humans masquerading as a no-kill shelter for animals. It’s a kind of monastery where the goal is simply giving dogs a happy life, and then giving them away—with no worldly credit for having done so, and only the guarantee of long hours and low pay. For the dog-monks of Dogtown, the payoff is entirely psychic and spiritual. And their good works—in the form of contented, well-behaved dogs—spread out into the world like wave after wave of blessings.

  With Pat Whitacre’s help, Johnny proved that he could learn better manners whi
le staying true to his goofy personality.

  THE SMARTEST DOG ON THE BLOCK

  Pat is sitting on the sofa at his house, with Johnny sprawled beside him, his head in Pat’s lap. While he talks, Pat absently strokes the resplendent golden fur on Johnny’s head and neck. From time to time Johnny heaves a big, contented sigh and looks up, cocking an eye from side to side, as if by means of some cosmic prank he could actually understand every word Pat was saying.

  “The biggest measure of how far Johnny has come is that he has come at all—that he is learning,” Pat says. “He’s learning what he needs to learn to fit in to a home, and he’s doing it fairly easily.

  “Johnny’s come such a long way, from having to live in a kennel because his manners were so bad he couldn’t be adopted, to living pretty well in my house. He’s only been here two weeks, and he’s already well on his way to being completely housebroken.”

  Johnny, the dog people said was untrainable, has come further than anyone believed possible.

  “I’m gonna miss him when he gets adopted. He’s a very personable dog—he’s one of the most popular dogs at Dogtown right now. He loves everybody. You’ll never get bored of him watching his antics, whether he’s dragging things around or digging through the trash, or whatever he’s doing to entertain himself. He’s quite comical. He’s very well loved.”

  Not long afterward, when Johnny’s story and photo were posted on the Dogtown website, a childless couple from Utah saw what Pat had seen. The couple had lost a beloved nine-year-old golden to bone cancer a year earlier, and the death of their dog had left a hole in their household.

  “We are wanting to add a new member of our family—we are wanting to come meet Johnny in particular,” the couple wrote in their adoption application.

  When the couple arrived at Dogtown, Johnny greeted them with his sweet, dopey grin, his readiness to play almost any kind of game, his limitless hunger for affection—and a few new tricks, like “sit,” “stay,” “lie down,” and even “roll over.”