The Education of Will

by Patricia B. McConnell

  In the early afternoon, a client came in with a large mixed-breed galumpus whose slaphappy attitude around people belied his murderous behavior around other dogs. By the time I saw him, he’d killed the owner’s Yorkie and badly injured three other dogs. His owner was older and relatively frail and did not have much money to spend to try to change his behavior, much less contribute to healing the pets her dog had injured. The dog was no spring chicken himself, and the chance of successfully placing him was small. She wept at the realization that I had no magic cure for her and her dog.

  After that, a couple entered the office with a small butterscotch-colored dog named Trinket. The man never looked at the woman. The woman never looked at the man. The dog followed suit and lay down under a chair as if exhausted. I asked why they were here and how I could help, although they had indicated when making the appointment that the dog was constantly messing in the house. Silence.

  I left my desk to greet Trinket, who wagged weakly at my approach. I got out some treats and began to play games with her. A rescued bichon-poodle mix, Trinket had spent her life pumping out puppies in a puppy mill. She perked up as we went through the basics of sit, lie down, and stay, all rewarded with tiny food treats. She folded her ears and licked my hand when I handled her, quick to learn and caramel-colored cute. I sat back, looked directly at the wife, Diane, and said, “Well, you’re not here because she’s dumb. She’s as smart as she is adorable! But I understand you’re having some problems with house-training?”

  Diane burst into tears. Harold, her husband, explained that Trinket urinated and defecated all over the house. Whenever she was left in her crate, she pooped in it and got covered in filth. Every time they returned to the house, they had to pull her out and bathe her. Every morning they awoke to find waste in the crate, on the carpet, or in their bed. They told me that they had tried “everything,” and now Harold was done with it, sick of the whole mess. He wanted to return her to the rescue group that had pulled her from the puppy mill or to euthanize her. But Diane loved Trinket and couldn’t bear the idea of giving her up. They’d been fighting about the dog ever since they got her, and they were both angry and tired. Harold was considering a divorce.

  At that, Diane and Harold began arguing in my office, no doubt replaying the same argument they’d been having for months. I interrupted gently and asked if it would be helpful for me to explain what might be causing the problem in the first place. Then we could talk about treatment and the probability of success. They nodded.

  Trinket had lived in a small wire crate for years and was never let out except to be bred so that she could produce puppies. She had learned to potty where she slept and to ignore the most basic of canine instincts—to keep her own nest clean. It also appeared that she was suffering from separation anxiety, having lived in a room with other dogs all her life. She may not have had a chance to interact with them, but she had never been truly alone, as she was when Diane and Harold left for work.

  The good news was that they hadn’t really done everything; there was a lot they could still do to turn things around. Trinket would need to be taught to potty as if she were a puppy—going outside every few minutes and getting a special treat for eliminating outside. Diane and Harold needed to use commercial products that eliminated the scent of urine on the carpet, so that Trinket no longer categorized the house as a bathroom. Her separation anxiety could be treated with the step-by-step plan I had used with Petunia. The bad news was that dogs from puppy mills, especially small ones like Trinket, can’t always be fully house-trained. We could make it much, much better. I couldn’t guarantee that she would ever be perfectly behaved, but I’d do everything I could in my power to help all three of them.

  That was great news for Diane. Not so for Harold, who clearly loved Diane and wanted to love Trinket but was emotionally exhausted by the dog’s behavior problems. This is a common scenario for behaviorists and trainers: People often don’t come to see us until they are so depleted by the problem that they have little or no energy left for a treatment plan. I learned early on that my job wasn’t just to tell owners how they could solve or manage the problem; it was also to help them think through how much energy they had to do so.

  Diane began to cry again. Harold tried to hold it together, rubbing his hands as if to wash himself of worries. Trinket sat between them, her eyes questioning.

  We talked for a while about how to treat both issues, house soiling and separation anxiety. I gave them my home phone number and told them to call any time. I picked up Trinket and sat her in my lap, stroked the fur between her eyes, and tried to communicate to her that she was loved and possibly would be better understood. They left, Trinket in Diane’s arms, Harold shaking my hand and thanking me for my advice.

  I was deeply tired as my car turned into the driveway to the farm. When I became a canine applied behaviorist, I had been warned that I would spend most of my time on aggression issues. I’d expected some danger and that I might get bitten a time or two, but I could also minimize the chances of being injured through knowledge and careful planning. But I was not prepared for the emotional toll of “Do I have to kill or rehome my dog?” cases day after day, week after week. After the day I’d just had, I wanted only to take a long, leisurely walk in the woods with my dogs and not to worry about behavioral problems of any kind.

  When I got home, I did the chores and then put Willie through his third daily set of exercises designed to heal the torn tendon in his shoulder. Then I gathered up his favorite treats and toys and drove to a local park where dogs were allowed on-leash. While Willie’s injury was healing, we were to begin short on-leash walks to start him moving again. The park’s leash restrictions also meant that we could safely work on conditioning Willie to be more comfortable around other dogs, because they wouldn’t be able to run up into his face. As we began walking across the grass, Willie turned to his left and burst out barking, his voice high-pitched with panic. I jumped, heart racing. Knowing full well that my reaction would only worsen Willie’s—and sick at heart that perhaps my own problems had created some of Willie’s—I took two long breaths to calm myself down.

  When I turned to assess the “threat,” I expected to see an approaching dog, but it was only a tall man ambling along behind us, clearly out for a relaxing walk. No dog; just a guy. He wore a hat that made him look even taller. Willie kept up his barking as the man got closer. I tried to ignore Willie’s noisy agitation, which was like trying to ignore a machine gun going off in my ear. I asked Willie to sit while I gathered myself. “Oh boy!” I managed to say, trying for a happy voice as we played the game we usually did when he saw unfamiliar dogs. I gave Willie a treat when he looked back at me to condition an association between approaching men and things he loved.

  I felt hollow. Now Willie had another problem—the fear of unfamiliar men. Willie had always loved people, but as I calmed us both, I realized that he had backed away from the deliveryman the week before. He had also barked atypically at a male friend who came to visit the day after. I gathered what little stamina I had left and moved on, trying to focus on why we’d come to the park—to work on his fear of unfamiliar dogs.

  “Watch!” I said to Willie as his head turned toward a West Highland terrier we encountered after the man passed us by. Willie turned his head toward me instead of growling at the other dog, and got a treat. Again I said, “Watch,” treated him for his appropriate response, and then let him turn his head back toward the Westie. This time I waited in the hope that he’d turn his head to me on his own, the “auto watch” we’d worked on before that taught Willie to associate seeing other dogs with feeling good, instead of responding to them as if they were serial killers bent on slaughtering us both.

  Willie began to turn his head to me as the Westie moved away, but before I could pop the treat in his mouth, three off-leash hounds ran boisterously toward us. Willie exploded—and I couldn’t blame him. Asking him to stay calm when he was surrounded by three large barking dogs
was like asking an eight-year-old to do calculus at a water park. I put Willie in the car, drove to a quieter spot, and tried again. I got in a few good sessions when the other dogs were far enough away and no tall men frightened him, so Willie was able to focus on the treat or the toy. Finally, as darkness fell, I drove home, exhausted.

  I gave Willie a chance to potty before entering the house, but he didn’t take it. I went into the kitchen and cobbled together an easy dinner for one, since Jim was out. As I sat down to eat, I smelled the acrid and oh-so-familiar smell of doggy diarrhea. The stress at the park had been too much for Willie, and he had anointed the living room carpet with liquid brown puddles.

  “Damn it, Willie!” I said. I’d like to say that I spoke quietly, but I didn’t. There were multiple reasons not to correct him at all—he couldn’t help it, it was too late, he was already stressed—but my words were not helpful in any way. They were simply an expression of my own exhaustion and frustration. I thought of Harold, how much he loved Diane and wanted to love Trinket, and yet how deeply tired he was by the constant conflict. He wanted a respite when he came home, not another difficult challenge. So did I, and I knew that losing my temper and yelling at Willie was the worst thing I could do. But I did it because my exhaustion overwhelmed my reason and knowledge.

  Willie’s problems seemed never-ending. His shoulder was healing, but he needed physical therapy and careful monitoring of his activity levels: not so easy to do with a dog who could twirl in a full circle before you could even get a word out. If I let my guard down for a fraction of a second, Willie could destroy all the healing that had occurred in the weeks before. It was like watching a single popcorn seed in a hot, oily pan and trying to pull it out just before it popped. All day, every day.

  Willie’s fear of other dogs also required energy and attention in order to counteract it. We weren’t close to “done” yet, as the off-leash dogs at the park had proved. Left free in the house, he barked desperately at the window—eyes hard, saliva flying—when someone walked a dog down the road. He panicked if an unfamiliar dog got closer than twenty feet. These events rarely happened because I managed him so carefully. Now I needed to add the same kind of conditioning program to teach Willie to associate unfamiliar men with something wonderful. I knew exactly what to do, but I also knew it would take time and energy to pull it off.

  • • • • •

  Energy was in short supply that night. After yelling at Willie for doing something he couldn’t help, I added shame and regret to anger and exhaustion. I cleaned up the mess, threw my dinner down the garbage disposal, and went to bed. Jim came out to the farm later that night and cuddled next to me. I listened to him breathing beside me all night, until the sky began to lighten and the wrens welcomed the day with their rock sonata of song.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Willie’s shoulder improved, and then it didn’t. Every time it seemed that he had fully recovered, a setback would occur. It didn’t help that he had matured into an exceptionally long and tall border collie, looking like a marathoner who gave up his running shorts to play professional soccer. Sheepdogs have to run great distances, but much of their work is like that of a quarter horse and involves slamming their legs into the ground to turn right or left at high speed to work the stock. As much as he loved it, Willie wasn’t built for it.

  But it wasn’t working sheep that caused Willie his most serious injury. A visiting dog slammed into him during play and left him whimpering on three legs. The orthopedic specialist at the University of Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital said he’d badly torn his bicep tendon in the same shoulder he’d injured earlier. Damage to other connective tissue was also possible. We could try more rest and rehabilitation or do surgery right away. Rest included months of crate rest and leash restrictions; surgery would require even more. It seemed wise to get it dealt with once and for all.

  Willie walked into the clinic on the day of his surgery wagging from the shoulders back. He happily limped alongside the technician into the back rooms with just a brief glance at me. The surgeon called me while Willie was opened up on the table to tell me that not only was the bicep tendon torn, but another tendon and two ligaments were also badly damaged. They could not be surgically repaired. There was no way to know if the operation would result in a dog who could ever work sheep again. He might always be permanently disabled. Did I want to go ahead with the surgery anyway? “Yes,” I said, sick at heart after hearing the news.

  The day after the operation, they brought Willie out to the consulting room, floppy-boned and blank-eyed, a quarter of his body shaved. The surgeon had severed his badly torn bicep tendon, pulled it through a hole that she’d bored into the humerus bone, and screwed it into place. When I saw the radiographs of the screw, I was appalled at its size. It looked big enough to hold up a house.

  I sat stroking him, stunned into silence by his frailty, as the surgeon explained the importance of keeping him immobile for weeks in order for the screw to set into the bone. Without the blanket of white fur on his chest and black fur on his shoulder, Willie’s skin was soft, velveteen, but mottled like that of a pinto horse. The incision was huge. He seemed so helpless and vulnerable.

  I carried him into the car and drove as slowly as traffic would allow. When we arrived home, Jim took over and gently lifted Willie out of the car and placed him in front of his crate. He went into it and slept quietly that night, but the next morning he woke at dawn. When I walked into the room, he greeted me with a grin, a swoosh of the tail, and a 360-degree spin inside the crate. “I’m good! Let’s go play!”

  Of course, he wasn’t. Even the slightest abrupt movement could destroy the healing process. Willie needed to stay almost immobile for several weeks for his bone to heal. “Immobile” should be listed in the dictionary as the antonym of “young border collies.” He was wonderful about his crate—he entered it happily and rarely whined or barked there, but he could still perform an entire gymnastics routine when inside, no matter how small it was. A young border collie won’t stay in a crate for long without starting to spin in circles, so I couldn’t let down my guard even when he was confined. When he began to move too much, I’d sit beside the crate and use my voice to calm him down. Aware that the words “crate” and “rest” were not compatible, I kept him attached to me on a leash whenever I could. I cooked and ate dinner with him at my side. We watched TV together in the evenings, attached like convicts in a chain gang, serving out our time.

  After the first month, Willie’s inactivity reduced him to an unnatural calmness. Just as lying around all day makes people tired, Willie became a kind of rug potato, sleeping and walking on-leash with a resigned sluggishness, no doubt in part because I relentlessly reinforced him for moving slowly. But he was still Willie and still alerted to sounds too quiet for anyone else to hear, if they even existed at all. Every time Willie looked ready to leap up, a wave of fear coursed through me. Would he jump at the wrong moment and cause his shoulder to fall apart?

  The primitive part of my brain, which turns on the fight-or-flight system, began working overtime. There was never a time at home when I could relax. I was always ready to react at the speed of light in case Willie moved too fast. I began to have trouble sleeping again and became more nervous at night. I stopped walking in the woods at night and took a flashlight to the barn so that I didn’t have to walk into the darkness before finding the light switch. Every night when I closed the drapes in the upstairs bedroom, I was afraid there would be a strange man standing under the yard light, staring back at me.

  After eight weeks, Willie’s bone healed enough that he could begin physical therapy for his muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Jim bought a ramp that allowed me to walk Willie into the car on the way to meet with UW’s veterinary rehabilitation specialist, Courtney Arnoldy, twice a week. Between therapy sessions, Willie and I did his exercises religiously, three times a day, a half-hour each, for eight long months. He became a circus dog—balancing on teeter boa
rds, perching on large air-filled balls, striding on the underwater treadmill at the rehabilitation clinic as I lured him forward with treats.

  Spring became summer, and summer turned into fall. The sumacs turned the color of blood oranges, the crickets buzzed like baby chain saws, and the starlings chattered as they clustered on the telephone wires. Willie’s restrictions and exercise routine continued until, finally, he was allowed to trot. Still on-leash, still highly modulated. At first our homework was: “Walk for ten minutes on-leash, then trot for ten seconds, then walk for two more minutes. See how he does, and increase the trotting up to thirty seconds. We’ll evaluate his progress at our next session.”

  The first time Willie was allowed to trot outside, his head rose up and he looked at me like a little boy who had just discovered ice cream. The second time, he got so excited that he flipped around in a full circle before I could stop him. I called him “Rip Van Willie,” after the character who had slept for twenty years and finally woken up.

  After I pulled him back from spinning in circles, he turned to face me and looked straight into my eyes. He gave a long, breathy sigh and turned his head away as we walked back and forth down the driveway. He refused to look at me again.

  Instead of being encouraged by these short moments of release, he became depressed. Evenings were punctuated by his drawn-out sighs. It was as though each newfound moment of freedom reminded him of what he was missing and made things worse instead of better.

  Willie wasn’t the only one who was depressed. Keeping him at a slow trot was like trying to convince a sparkler to shine on one side and not the other. I was still on alert 24/7 to avoid Willie tearing his shoulder tissues before they had fully healed. In addition, much of what I loved most in life had been taken away. No working sheep together. No long off-leash walks in the woods. No joyful dog, running free, turning back to look at me: “Are you coming? Hurry up!” I hadn’t realized how much of my happiness revolved around our mutual freedom. The recovery process had already stretched over a year. It seemed endless. I counted up the months that Willie had been restricted to his crate or a leash because of his bad shoulder, and realized he’d spent over a third of his life restrained because of injury. During all that time, I couldn’t let down my guard for even a moment, lest he set himself back.