The Education of Will

by Patricia B. McConnell

  I showed him another treat, lured him to the floor with it in one fluid motion, and said, “Lie down.” Tanker looked at the treat, about twelve inches below his mouth, his eyes riveted on the food in my hand. My own were glued to his shoulder, watching for signs that he’d lunge to bite my hand. George and Cynthia were silent, and I could feel their focused attention without looking at them. The absence of breathing in the room was broken by the afternoon train whistling through town a few blocks away.

  Tanker didn’t lie down. “Too bad,” I said, and withdrew the treat again. This time I only pretended to eat it; I palmed it and put it in a pocket. Tanker stood up and walked to within a foot of me. He raised his head to make eye contact with me again, and again I heard a growl. He kept his eyes locked directly on mine and walked one stiff step toward me. “Give me the treat, bitch”—dogs can say that, just not out loud—“or I’ll bite you.”

  Great. Now what? Stay loose; I knew how important that was, so I took some deep breaths and softened my posture—not an easy task when my heart was pounding so hard I could feel it on the inside of my rib cage. I was scared, no question. The more important question was whether that was equally obvious to Tanker.

  Probably. I hadn’t run into a lot of dogs who had bitten twelve times. I’d had enough experience, however, to know that I was in danger at the moment and could get myself bitten with the smallest of mistakes. I was equally sure that I could get out of this fix by giving up and moving back behind my desk. I glanced at it: an old mahogany ocean liner that I’d picked up for a hundred bucks. It looked like a bunker that I could hide behind before the bombs fell.

  But there were Cynthia and George, waiting expectantly for me to provide the magical cure to their problems. And there was Tanker, up close and personal, patiently awaiting my next move.

  Keeping my head still, my breathing measured, and my eyes averted, I tossed a treat behind Tanker with a flick of my wrist. We all watched it arch through the air, and saw the white tip of Tanker’s muzzle follow it up and around behind his body. He looked back at me momentarily, straight into my eyes, before he turned around and swiped the piece of chicken off the floor with a fat pink tongue.

  As he turned away, I let out a breath and stole a glance at Cynthia and George. They had their eyes on Tanker. George’s head was cocked, seemingly charmed by Tanker’s ability to slurp food off the worn carpet. Cynthia sat and stared, first at him, then at me. I licked my lips and took another breath.

  Next round. What I wanted to try next involved getting down on the ground with my face square in the middle of Tanker’s strike zone. I didn’t like this plan, but at the time it seemed to be the best option. Soon after working with Tanker, I learned safer and easier ways to handle similar situations, but then it was all I could think of to do. I knew the outcome of this moment was critical. If I could teach Tanker that it was fun to do what I asked, we could begin to turn things around between him, Cynthia, and George.

  “Hey, handsome!” I said, determinedly chipper. Tanker turned around to look back at me, and I swear he looked amused. He came closer and watched me take a piece of chicken out of the canvas treat pouch that I wore around my waist. I held the treat in my right hand and showed it to him. As his nose began to twitch in response, I asked him to sit again. After he did, I crouched down on one knee and extended my other leg parallel to the ground, about eighteen inches high.

  Then I moved the treat down toward the floor, on the other side of my extended leg. In order to get it, Tanker would have to lie down and crawl partway under my outstretched leg to get the treat. I didn’t ask him to do anything; I just concentrated on holding my leg out straight and the treat in place and avoided looking directly into his eyes. He tried standing up as if to lean over my leg and get the treat, but I just withdrew it and asked for a sit again. He sat. Good start. I teased him again with the treat by holding it under my leg. Like a carrot pulling a donkey forward, I lured him so that he had to lie down first in order to get the treat.

  You can count on one hand the number of dogs who don’t lust after chicken. Tanker, luckily, was not one of them. A thin stream of drool coalesced on the side of his mouth. The food was still two inches away. All eyes were on his head as he finally crouched down on his forelegs to try to get the food. I cooed, “Good boy!” and released the food into his mouth, rewarding him for going down toward the ground, even if not all the way.

  I got him back into a sitting position and lured him downward once again. After a long hesitation, Tanker lay down flat on the ground. “Yes! What a good boy you are!” I crowed, giving him several more pieces of chicken from my pouch.

  “See, isn’t he clever?” George said.

  “A food hound is more like it,” Cynthia answered, but she was smiling.

  Tanker and I repeated the exercise a few times, until it began to feel like a game—hopefully to him as much as to me. Of course, I hadn’t really asked him to do anything; I was merely finding a way to get him to lie down in my presence. On our fourth try, he began lying down without hesitation, and I said, “Lie down,” right before he collapsed his forequarters to the ground. On the seventh try, I said, “Lie down,” with the food in front of my leg. He didn’t have to lie down to get the food, but as I’d hoped, he did anyway. The next time I stopped extending my leg and stayed squatted down beside him. Good thing, too; my thigh muscles had been screaming for the last several minutes.

  He lay down. Glory hallelujah, he lay down just because I asked him to. I gave him the rest of my chicken and walked to my desk, trying not to dive behind it. My legs were shaking, no doubt from the effort of squatting on one and extending the other.

  Once I was settled, we talked for a long time about how Tanker needed to learn that it was fun to do what they asked; they had to find fun and friendly ways to influence his mind, rather than trying to force him to be obedient. They both burst out laughing when I suggested George start spoiling Cynthia more than the dog. Cynthia liked the idea of using Tanker’s brilliance to shape the right behavior, and we worked out a set of exercises for the next few weeks. They agreed to come back in two weeks.

  When they left, I wasn’t optimistic. One-trial learners like Tanker can be exhausting to train—give the dog a treat just once after he barks and you have a nonstop vocalist. Bring him back inside right after he potties in the backyard, and he learns to delay urinating outside in order to spend more time in the great outdoors. Tanker was smart, no question about it. As it turned out, so were Cynthia and George. They were equally dedicated and became two of my best and most beloved clients. Tanker stopped biting and used his brainpower for good, and their visits became social ones when they traveled to vacation spots in northern Wisconsin.

  Cynthia died of cancer a few years later. George told me that he didn’t know how he would have made it without Tanker cuddled up beside him through the dark of the night.

  • • • • •

  After seeing Tanker, I worked with hundreds of dogs for behavior labeled as aggression. Some dogs were “aggressive dogs” simply because they’d learned that showing their teeth got them what they wanted. They didn’t want to hurt anyone; they just wanted what they wanted and had figured out that threats were effective. That was Tanker. But most dogs are “aggressive” because they are fearful. Like Samantha, a spaniel/something-or-other cross who sat in my office like a furry stick of dynamite with a lit fuse. Her owners said, “Oh, she’s fine! Go ahead and pet her,” while she stood motionless, flicking out her tongue and turning her head away. She was saying in the only language she had, “Do not reach over and touch me. Not now, just not now.” Like unprepared students in a classroom, dogs avoid eye contact when they want to disappear and avoid interactions. Forcing yourself on them rarely leads to something good.

  Other dogs barreled into my office frenetically, like job candidates who can’t stop talking at an interview. Their owners would laugh while the dogs bounced from wall to wall like hyperactive beach balls. One massive L
abrador leaped onto my desk, smashing into my computer, scattering papers like leaves in an autumn storm. “He’s so friendly!” the owners chortled. He didn’t look friendly to me, he looked frantic. Dogs can express fear in a multitude of ways, from growling in the corner, to standing as motionless as a stuffed dog, to being hysterically active. Dogs are often trying to tell us how frightened they are, but people can be resistant to that. “He’s just being dominant,” they say about a terrier who is terrified of strangers who loom over her head. “She has a mind of her own!” I’d hear on a weekly basis about a collie who resisted going into a crate during the day because she was frightened to be alone.

  But why wouldn’t dogs be afraid? They are small compared to us. They have little power. We control their food, their social interactions, and when they are allowed to go to the bathroom. Most important, they have no voice. They can’t say, “Please don’t grab my head and loom over me while staring straight into my eyes.” Or “I’m terrified of that dog walking straight toward me, and the leash and the sidewalk are forcing the two of us into a rude, inappropriate greeting that we would both avoid if you would let us.” So they do the only thing they can do: Some dogs cower or try to hide, but others act on their fears by growling or shouting out frightened barks, their ears flattened, the corners of their mouths pulled back in a fear grimace.

  I loved them, all of them, especially the fearful, frightened ones who desperately needed someone to hear them, to understand, to have some sense of what they were going through. My empathy for them overrode my own fears of getting bitten, along with my own need to face fear in a context I could control. Dogs can be muzzled. People can’t.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As the pale light of a winter sunrise filtered through the window, I heard the first of the black-capped chickadee’s spring song: “Woo-HEE, Woo-HEE!” Winter residents like chickadees and cardinals begin to sing when the daylight expands in February, regardless of the temperature. I declare it spring when I first hear those liquid notes, snow and ice be damned.

  I padded over to Pippy Tay, sound asleep in the dog bed under the window. “Pippy. Pippy, wake up, hon.” Nothing. I said her name again, louder, and gently rubbed her shoulder. She seemed less responsive than ever. Was she breathing?

  “PIPPY!” I was yelling now. “Wake up, Pippy!” I shook her shoulder, tears forming in my eyes, the thought that she had died in the night hardening inside of me like the icicles hanging from the gutters. And then she blinked and lifted her head. Her tail began to thump, thump, thump while the tears streamed down my face in relief.

  Pip had been the easiest and sweetest of all the dogs I’d ever had. She loved everyone, both two- and four-legged. She may have been a failure as a sheepdog, but she was the ultimate nanny dog, and I didn’t want the Peter Pan story to end.

  After we got downstairs, I took her outside to potty, being careful to keep her from slipping on the icy driveway. Pippy squatted to pee, and as her body rose back up, she began to shake and twitch. Her back legs collapsed and she sank toward the snow-covered ground, body leaning like a sinking ship, while her head swung around drunkenly. I ran to her and eased her down, checking her eyes for the obvious signs of vestibular disease, a distressing but usually temporary glitch in the inner ear that brings on the symptoms of vertigo. It looks awful and is clearly distressing to the dog, but it tends to disappear within days or weeks. If it were vestibular, Pippy’s eyes would be darting back and forth, left-right-left-right. No such luck. I scooped her up, no small task, and carried her into the house. Later that morning, Pippy seemed to have recovered, and veterinarian Dr. John couldn’t find anything wrong with her, except that she was well over sixteen, totally deaf, and partially blind.

  She had another event a few days later and grew even weaker. Jim and I stopped leaving her alone for fear that she’d get worse and suffer a long, frightening death. We became slaves to the calendar. “Can you take Monday afternoon if I do the morning and our friend Barbara does Tuesday?” By the end of the week, it became clear that it was time. Keeping Pippy alive was just that: Keeping Pippy Alive. I was reminded of my mother in the last year of her life, when she said, “My body is nothing but a burden now. I just want to let it go.”

  We decided to let Pippy go on a Sunday afternoon. Dr. John agreed to come out and send her off after a celebration of her life. My final arrangements related to the other dogs. Lassie and Tulip could wait quietly in the study while we said good-bye to Pippy in the living room. But Willie? A bundle of adolescent exuberance, he needed exercise and attention, while I wanted a quiet weekend with my dear old friend. A good neighbor with ample room and lots of frisky border collies kindly agreed to take him for the weekend.

  Pippy died with her mouth full of chicken and her belly being rubbed. After she was gone, we brought Lassie and Tulip in. We spent slow, bittersweet hours sitting beside Pip’s body, trying to bridge the gap between “Pippy here” and “Pippy gone.”

  We drove her body to the vet clinic the next morning. They had agreed to store her in their freezer until the ground defrosted enough for a burial at the farm. We placed her still-warm, bundled body into the white mist of the freezer and said good-bye again. That was when the full impact of her death hit me hardest. My legs buckled as I turned to leave, and I slumped to the ground, as surprised as everyone else that my body had simply collapsed. My God, it hurts to let a dog go.

  • • • • •

  Afterward, Jim and I drove directly from the vet’s to pick up Willie, who grinned and leaped and twisted his body in circles of happiness. Except he did it on three legs. He couldn’t put any weight on his left foreleg at all, having slipped badly on the ice. Our friend felt sick about it, as if somehow it had been her fault. We reassured her that of course it wasn’t, and thank-you-thank-you-thank-you for taking Willie while we said good-bye to Pippy.

  I sobbed all the way home, great gulping sobs that took over my body like an alien. I had just gone through two years of extreme medical care for three geriatric dogs, and it wasn’t over. Tulip still needed a tremendous amount of care. Lassie’s recurrent bladder infections were driving me and her vet crazy. Having just lost a dog whom I had loved and admired for sixteen years, I was wracked with grief. Yet I was also relieved; living for so long with worries about Pippy had been exhausting. Though I desperately needed a respite, Willie’s behavioral problems required constant energy and attention.

  Every time Willie startled at the slightest noise, bursting upward as if propelled by his panicked barking, I jumped even higher. He’d run wild-eyed to the window while I stood trembling in the living room, attempting to breathe. I’d try to say, “It’s okay, Willie; false alarm,” in a calm, low voice instead of a fear-filled squeaky one. For years it had been things that came out of the blue—abrupt loud noises or shocking scenes in a movie—that set my heart racing and readied my body to fight for its life. I’d been so much better the last few years; better, that is, until Willie came and made me worse than I’d ever been.

  Driving home in the car that morning, I knew instantly that Willie’s shoulder injury meant a lot of care for a long time to come, and the stress of keeping an especially active and reactive dog quiet for months on end. And so, while we drove through snowy fields as blue-white as the winter sky, I cried my heart out, grieving for the loss of Pippy and sick at heart from the continual and exhausting drama that was Willie.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Spring was now in full swing on the farm, although it was late in coming. The sunburst honey locust tree unfurled its chartreuse leaves a full month later than usual. The blue-winged warbler should have been singing in the woods across the road. Every spring I heard its unmusical, raspberry-like song, and it always made me smile. I missed it and wondered if it would ever arrive.

  As I did now every day on the way home from working with clients, I let my car coast down the hill on the county road that approached the farm, and tried to leave the day’s challenges behind me. Som
e days were easy. I saw a lot of cases that were relatively routine: Young couples needed advice about how to prepare their docile dog for the baby scheduled to arrive in a few months. Other clients had dogs who were afraid of loud noises. After taking a history and getting to know the dog a bit, I explained how to match up something the dog loved with a low-intensity version of what scared it. Once dogs learn that a baby’s cries or the sound of thunder leads to eating chicken, their attitude can change quickly. You have to do it right, and in the right order, but the basics of what is called “counter-classical conditioning” are the same in all cases.

  Other days, I felt as though my clients and their dogs drove home with me. I’d arrive at the farm heartbroken about someone sobbing in my office because he thought he might have to put down his beloved companion. That particular day I’d met a lunky black Labrador named Marvin who had been a policeman’s best friend until the guy married a woman with a three-year-old. The dog had never been around children, and his initial discomfort and attempts at avoidance had changed to outright aggression. The week before I met him, Marvin had bitten the child’s face, and now he was beginning to growl at the mother. Tears streamed down the man’s face as we discussed their best options, including finding Marvin a new home without children.

  I’d seen four clients already, a typical daily load. Each session took from one to two hours, plus another half hour to type up my notes.

  After meeting with Marvin, I’d seen a springer spaniel who was so compulsive about eating rocks that he’d had three abdominal surgeries. The veterinarian said she simply couldn’t do another surgery with any degree of success, because more scar tissue would impede the natural peristalsis of the intestines. I developed a training routine that included teaching the dog to turn and pick up a toy whenever he looked at a rock, managing him to prevent relapses, and suggesting that they talk to both an Eastern and Western veterinarian about medical treatment for obsessive behavior.