Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  All my huskies were fabulous as racing dogs. We have an attic full of trophies to prove it. They lived in good health to old ages, and if they’d had to live in the woods, they’d have made it on their own without a problem.

  I’m not saying that every dog should be physically capable of living in the wild, although that’s not a bad thing. I’m just saying they’re better off without respiratory problems or hip dysplasia. And why do they have such problems? As has been said, they’re bred to meet certain standards that allegedly include good behavior but overwhelmingly are for various forms of unnatural appearance as determined not by other dogs but by kennel clubs—here in the United States it’s the American Kennel Club (AKC)—that issue the standards to breeders. For all the lip service offered by these kennel clubs about behavior, we ignore the fact that for dog breeds, behavioral similarities are minimal and individual differences are great, and when we accept the kennel club standards we say good-bye to strong dogs with good health and high status.

  I adopted a small dog from a shelter. Supposedly purebred, he had AKC papers. We knew he was born on a puppy farm and was sold to a chain store such as PetSmart, then sold again to someone in a city apartment, so he left his mother far too soon and didn’t know where to relieve himself or what grass was, or so it seemed, as he buried his nose in grass whenever he came upon it. He was looking for traces of other dogs, I later learned, but at the time I only knew that he was lonely and frightened. I was handed his AKC papers, but not wanting to be humiliated if anyone saw them, I tore them up and burned them in the woodstove as soon as I got home.

  If not for what I had seen a few months earlier, I would merely have dropped his papers in the recycling bin when I got around to it. But before adopting this dog, I had watched an AKC dog show. One contender was a little Pekinese—a breed developed for fluffy fur and short faces—and as the poor little thing was paced around the ring in the supposedly triumphant final cycle, she was panting so fast and so hard in her desperate struggle for oxygen that she had to stop and walk. She would have liked to sit down to catch her breath, but she was forced to continue.

  Dogs with flat faces have the same amount of respiratory tubing that dogs with normal faces do, but it’s so scrunched up in their distorted skulls that air can hardly pass through. But to the judges, her condition was no problem. Of all the dogs present, and there were plenty of them, thanks to her fluffy hair and flattened face, this poor little gasping creature won Best in Show.

  When humans get involved with other species, especially if they try to manage another species, things often get messed up. Ever since a dog’s appearance made a difference, breeders have been manipulating what dogs look like no matter what this does to health and longevity.

  The current solution to overpopulation by dogs and cats—overpopulation meaning that too many people have pets they don’t want so they leave them by the side of the road or abandon them at overburdened shelters—has produced semi-rules for ordinary people (in other words, nonbreeders) to spay or neuter their pets, and while there’s an argument for spaying females, there isn’t for neutering males. Females are fertile for a few days twice a year but males are always fertile. Neutering disturbs their growth if done too early, as it usually is, and alters their personalities, so they never reach the kind of maturity that intact males do. It may be necessary to spay most females, but where is the reason for neutering males other than the politically correct theory that males and females should be treated equally? It’s said that the more animals who are sterilized, the fewer unwanted pups will be born. Since modern dogs in developed countries seldom if ever get to choose their own mates, there may be a point here, but since it’s the female who has the pups, this reasoning doesn’t make as much sense to me as it may to some.

  Another reason was offered by a veterinarian who announced that castration was necessary to prevented certain health problems. I wondered if he is castrated. If he’s intact, can we believe him?

  Tiny Dogs

  — Liz —

  To my surprise, after knowing medium-size dogs for more than fifty years, I found myself the owner of two tiny young dogs, a Chihuahua and a pug type. They came from a city, and I got them from a shelter. My husband was a historian whose specialty was Central Europe, and the dogs are named for famous Czechoslovakian authors—Kafka for Franz Kafka and Čapek (pronounced Chapek) for Karel Čapek, an ethnic Czech who wrote, among other things, War with the Newts and R. U. R., a play that gave us the word robot. Kafka is the name of the bigger dog, the pug type, because in world literature, Franz Kafka is more important, thus bigger, than Karel Čapek.

  With such distinguished names, these dogs became distinguished dogs who taught me things I’d never dreamed of. Among such revelations is the way they experience the world. They’re so small and everything else is so big that they like to sit on people’s laps. No wonder they’re called lapdogs. Up on your lap they not only see you almost face-to-face instead of looking up at you as you might look at a treetop, but they can also see at a distance, just as the rest of us do.

  They’re also charming and adorable. They sleep on your bed at night, pressed against you, sometimes on top of the covers but often under the covers with you—or that’s what they do on cold nights.

  I once saw Jane Goodall interviewed on TV. She didn’t seem overly impressed with the interviewer, and when he asked what animal she liked best, her face remained blank as if she hadn’t heard him. The silence became embarrassing, so the interviewer leaned forward. “Is it chimpanzees?” he asked eagerly. But Goodall’s expression never changed. “Lapdogs,” she said.

  And I know why. Yes, they’re charming, but they’re also smart and interesting, and being too short to see at a distance, they rely on their sense of smell. We live in the country, with all kinds of odors wafting from the woods, but what interests these dogs is cars and grass. My country-born dogs had no such interests, so this surprised me.

  It shouldn’t have. My new little dogs had spent much of their early lives at the end of a leash walking down sidewalks. The grass along the sidewalks held the marks of other dogs. Grass was to them is what a list of names is to us. But why did they focus on cars?

  At last it struck me that it wasn’t the cars themselves that drew them, it was the tires. Not a car came in our driveway that these dogs didn’t rush to smell the tires, usually but not always starting on the right—the side they would have sniffed if the car was parked on a street. They then would circle the vehicle, sniffing each tire carefully, returning to sniff the others again, and when they’d examined each tire to their liking, they’d mark some of them, lifting a leg.

  Cars are the internet of dogs, and tires are their social media. From tires they learn of dogs far away, dogs they don’t know and may never meet but will have left messages. These are sometimes called pee-mail, but such a mark is more like a tweet or a blog—one of your thoughts that you share with the world in general with no expectation of a reply.

  So I’ve learned two things from lapdogs. First, like most dogs, their early years are the most important as far as their values are concerned. My house is in the country, surrounded by dozens of wild animals, but these don’t interest my little dogs. And second, their social interests are fully as flexible as ours. By now they’ve had messages from Boston, New York, Chicago, southern Maryland, northern Virginia, and eastern Florida, and they’ve sent their own messages back, confirming what I’ve long suspected: that the most important thing to dogs is other dogs. Lapdogs prove this conclusively. Although mine live amid hundreds of acres of woods and fields, an unknown dog who lifted his leg in Boston seems more important than the local bears, deer, coyotes, porcupines, bobcats, skunks, or fishers. In this my dogs are like most people. If I were told of a local porcupine, skunk, or fisher, and also of a person I didn’t know who lived in Boston, the person could seem more important to me.

  Or that’s what I’m saying. To be
truthful, I’d rather know about the fisher, but I like to seem as orthodox as I can.

  How Best to Educate a Dog

  — Liz —

  We humans don’t learn our behavior from dogs, but dogs must learn theirs from humans. Humans and their elders live in a house where the elders and the youngsters are a family. They speak the same language, they understand one another, and the elders teach the youngsters what to do. But a dog brought to that house is a stranger. He can’t understand the language. If he’d stayed with his parents and his siblings, he’d belong to a pack where he could learn from his elders, but in the new house he’s a loner. Most dogs accept their owners as their elders and learn from them as best they can, but often it’s a struggle. Does a cow learn easily from horses?

  I’ve lived with dogs for more than fifty years and found, not surprisingly, that they learn best from other dogs. During those fifty years I kept a dog culture going. They saw themselves as a pack, the young dogs learned from their elders, and the results, including their housebreaking skills, were perfection.

  The science of all this is swirling in my head. My story will prove that our best trainers are our own kind. It’s not that I didn’t train my dogs, but I’d train one at a time and only for fun. I had a little tool that made a click, and when the dog did something special I’d snap the clicker and give the dog a treat.

  They loved it. They’d beg to do it, they’d leap around with excitement when we’d start, and they’d joyfully try all kinds of things—bark, jump, lie down, roll over, whirl around on hind legs, and so on—until they’d hear the click and get the treat. I’d say “sit” if the dog sat, or “roll over” if she rolled over, so she’d do the same thing again if asked, even without a treat, because she associated the process with such pleasure.

  Clicker training is fun but really just a game and isn’t much use for addressing negative behavior. To housebreak a dog by this method, one would need to catch the dog making a mistake, click the clicker, and instead of giving a reward, give him an electric shock. But when pack dogs learn from their elders, their housebreaking skills come easily. They understand what their elders want them to do, and they do it without even wondering about it.

  For us, this pack training ended when the last dog of our fifty-year culture died. After pulling myself together I went to the local shelter and found the two little dogs I’ve mentioned in earlier essays, a small pug type named Kafka and little Chihuahua named Čapek. Kafka understood housebreaking but Čapek did not, and because these dogs were like siblings, not like a mature dog and a young dog, Čapek saw no need to copy Kafka when relieving himself. As far as he could tell, his pack and his elders were people and cats. All of them lived indoors, all of them relieved themselves indoors, and the obvious place to relieve oneself was in the house. Čapek would often pee near a cat box or a toilet.

  Of course, I tried the recommended training methods—confining the dog or keeping him on a leash, taking him outside often and praising and rewarding success, but he cried if confined and didn’t understand about the leash, and even after I gave up on these tools, keeping only the rewards, he still didn’t really get the picture. Often enough I’d find a stain on the leg of a chair or on one of my boots in the closet, or notice him innocently lifting his leg against the umbrella stand as if he found this normal. He’d acknowledge his mistakes only if I saw him make them.

  So I tried puppy pads: the canine version of incontinence pads used in hospitals. These worked well enough to some degree—he may have used them in his former home—and at night they were safer than a trip outside. A great horned owl who lives in our vicinity had floated silently out of the sky to capture and kill someone else’s Chihuahua. I don’t know how small that Chihuahua was, but mine is smaller than a cat. And he’s black, so in the dark he’s invisible to a human and to the owl he would look like a skunk—a common prey of large owls (which is why these owls sometimes smell bad). Even on a leash, which my Chihuahua didn’t understand or like, he wasn’t always visible.

  Many months passed while he used the pads. But too often he’d miss and leave a mess on the floor. He meant well, but if such a thing happens and a human doesn’t notice and clean up quickly, the house soon smells like a latrine. No wonder his first owner got rid of him.

  But that may have been for the best. By this time many an owner might be punishing the dog severely, but I would never do that—the image of a shouting giant, ten times bigger than a Chihuahua, standing over him while he’s helpless and disciplining him severely doesn’t impress me. So remembering how well young dogs learned from mature dogs, I looked forward to a visit from my daughter, her husband, and their elderly Chihuahua, Boots, whose housebreaking was perfection.

  Čapek thought the world of Boots. Wherever Boots went, Čapek would follow, noticing where Boots relieved himself even if Boots was just leaving a message, and Čapek would lift his leg to overmark, perhaps to remind Boots that he wasn’t the only Chihuahua present, or perhaps to reinforce the message. By the time both dogs were back in the house, Čapek had nothing left to mark with, and I felt we were getting somewhere. After Boots and his family went home, Čapek rarely lifted his leg in the house until after the first snowfall.

  He had never seen snow and was reluctant to go out in it. He weighed only nine pounds, his fur was thin, and his feet, which were the size of dimes, would freeze when he stepped in wet snow. I bought him clothes and boots, but he hated them and would run away and hide if he saw them. Thus he still saw the house as an acceptable winter bathroom, no matter how hard I scrubbed or how widely I sprayed deodorizer, and would acknowledge his mistakes only if I saw him make them.

  With time, things improved. He’d learned something from Boots, and praise, rewards, and attention reinforced this. He still makes mistakes but not often, and by now I consider him trained, or trained enough, if not as well as my earlier dogs who were trained by their wonderful elders.

  How many hours went into his training? I can’t count them. How many hours did my older dogs take to train younger dogs? None. They didn’t even train them. They just did what they did and the younger dogs copied them, and all this in minutes, no puppy pads, no mistakes to clean up, everything easy and natural.

  This can be considered a scientific fact, and I offer my habits as evidence. I was trained by my parents, my grandparents, and the nanny—those who would have been my pack members if we were dogs. Today when in a house, I use the bathroom and only the bathroom, then only the toilet, never the floor, and when I’m outdoors I never pee just anywhere but only in the woods when on a hike. Čapek now knows about peeing outdoors but doesn’t always. I’d often been told that Chihuahuas are hard to train, but I knew this already, and it doesn’t explain why my success has been spectacular and Čapek’s has been moderate to mild.

  I learned from conspecifics and he didn’t. That’s what explains it. People were not his conspecifics. Kafka and Boots were not the right conspecifics. The members of my pack were humans and so were his. That’s the secret.

  Cat Vandalism

  — Liz —

  I once saw a photo of an enormous mound of fluff on someone’s lawn and learned it was a sofa belonging to a veterinarian whose cats had caused its condition. This didn’t surprise me in the least because my house, while reasonably neat and clean, has signs of vandalism. The vandals were cats who sharpen their claws. But rather than having the cats declawed, a monstrous practice that removes the end of the toe and causes pain forever because cats walk on tiptoe, I manage their vandalism by accepting it. My cats are far more important to me than our sofa or our papers or our pillows or curtains or wallpaper or that beautiful china cup made by a famous pottery artist in Prague or the four-hundred-page manuscript I wanted to send to my agent. The destruction of the cup resulted not from clawing but from the desire of cats to jump into cupboards when the doors are carelessly left open and to sometimes push things out. Two of our three c
ats can jump from the floor into a high cupboard and land on their feet, disturbing nothing, so these cats seem to push things out on purpose, perhaps to watch them fall. The third cat used to do this, but he’s aging.

  As for the manuscript, its destruction was unintentional. While watching a bird through a window, an engrossed cat stood on my computer keyboard with his hind foot on the enter key until the manuscript was five thousand pages long. I would have had to delete the whole addition one page at a time, so I decided to start over. I had a copy.

  Our sofa is leaking fluff at the seams, the screens in our windows have holes in them, we no longer have curtains because the cats tore them while trying to climb them, and our hallway is hung with shredded wallpaper from the baseboard up to the height of a cat’s reach when he’s on his hind feet. That’s the downside. The upside is that higher on the wall, the paper is smoothly in place, showing charming scenes of an old-fashioned village. If visitors are disturbed by the shreds, they can look up to where the wall meets the ceiling.

  Sometimes the destruction is caused by us (although it’s a cat’s fault), especially when a cat brings a chipmunk indoors and lets her go so he can chase her. Then the race is on, the chipmunk in the lead, the cats right behind her, and the people right behind the cats, all running as fast as we can while our remaining possessions come crashing down around us. The cats are motivated by excitement, the people and the chipmunk are motivated by fear, and it all ends when we manage to throw a towel over the chipmunk, pick her up, and return her to her home in our stone wall.

  Life with cats has good and bad sides. If they ruin our wallpaper, furniture, and curtains, they also limit the mouse population, and they do this just for fun—they don’t eat most of their victims. Every time I visit the basement I see at least one mouse cadaver with the head bitten off, and sometimes I find three or four. Of course, I pick up the corpses but not every day, so our basement has been called a mouse mausoleum. But mouse hunting by cats is good—each time a mouse is killed, the chance of a mouse gnawing an electric wire and setting fire to the house is reduced by one, so we’re grateful.