The Education of Will

by Patricia B. McConnell

  Setbacks are common in treatment plans, no matter who you are or how much you know. “Stuff” happens less often if you have experience, but it still happens. Knowing this theoretically is one thing, but dealing with it personally is another. It takes more than knowledge to work on a serious behavioral problem. It also takes faith that it will work and, most important, the energy required to work through it day after day after day. I had the first two nailed. The third was a struggle.

  I took a breath and wrote out a new treatment plan. Willie and I went back to basics yet again. We did hundreds of repetitions of the “watch” game. I reinforced good behavior both with tug games and by backing up a few steps to teach Willie that a calm response to another dog results in more distance, and thus less tension, between them. I asked little of Willie at first, keeping well away from dogs we saw on the street. I took him back to our local park that allowed dogs, sat in the car, and said “Watch” every time he spotted a dog. I took him to an empty dog training center and let him inhale the scents of other dogs until his nose was weary, then asked for watches rewarded by tug-of-war games. I enrolled in an outdoor training class that allowed us to stay on the other side of the fence, away from dogs, and we played the watch game over and over; I eventually letting Willie go up to the fence and sniff noses with dogs who seemed sweet and deferential.

  After a month of this, Willie had progressed back to responding to approaching dogs with a loose body and a goofy grin. He continued to play keep-away with Sydney in the crusty snow on the high pasture, and he walked with Ashby as she hunted for field mice. And then his friend Zip, the border collie he’d played with so well just a month before, came to visit.

  When Zip and his owner drove up, it was unusually quiet. Not a bird sang as I left the house with Willie. As expected, Willie automatically looked at me when he saw Zip, anticipating the good things he had learned to associate with other dogs. As we got closer, Willie continued to look relaxed, as if he’d love nothing more than to play with Zip. So I dropped the leash and let Willie run over to Zip. Everything looked good at first, Willie noodling over to Zip with his mouth relaxed and his body loose. Zip bowed down with a submissive grin on his face while Willie stood over him sniffing.

  Just as I was about to lead the dogs to a play area, Willie attacked.

  He lunged with an unmistakable look of pure, unmitigated rage and leaped on top of Zip, who squealed and threw himself to the ground. Willie’s growls pierced the air. I never saw Willie’s mouth attached to Zip; it was always open, teeth bared, eyes enraged. We got them separated soon enough, and it didn’t appear that Zip had been hurt. But he was frightened. So was I. The look on Willie’s face as he attacked Zip was chilling.

  People often object to the suggestion that dogs can feel the equivalent of human anger. “I’m shocked that you are engaging in such blatant anthropomorphizing,” I was once told by a veterinary behaviorist after a speech I gave at the National Institutes of Health. Shaking with what appeared to be her own anger while the audience sat in stunned silence, she publicly castigated me for mentioning the words “anger” and “dog” in the same sentence.

  And yet anger is a primitive emotion, as primitive as fear, and closely related to it. The neurobiologist John Ratey labels anger as the “second universal emotion,” the first being fear. Not only are anger and fear universal in mammals, they can be hard to discriminate between. In people, ponies, and pandas, anger is the emotion that allows an individual to move past fear and take action to save itself, to protect its young, or to save its mate.

  Most animal behavior scientists and animal trainers don’t hesitate to talk about anger in mammals. Chimpanzee researchers, pig farmers, and dolphin experts often speak of an individual animal “going into a rage,” or how easily irritated one particular individual animal might be.

  However, it is one thing to accept that a rampaging chimpanzee can experience an emotion akin to anger, but it’s another thing to attribute it to a dog. In his famous soliloquy on the loyalty of dogs, John Hobhouse wrote that dogs embody “all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.” Dogs are said to give us “unconditional love,” to greet us with unmitigated joy when we arrive home, and to accept us unquestioningly, no matter how flawed we might be. How could such a paragon of virtue experience the red-eyed rage that plagues our own species?

  This vision of dogs as vessels of pure love and affection is dear to our hearts, and most dogs are indeed docile and loving, ridiculously so in some cases, forgiving their owners for a litany of abuses. But that doesn’t mean they are incapable of the emotion of anger. They are equipped with the same structures in the brain that mediate anger in humans, produce the same set of neurohormones that create the emotion, and have expressions on their faces similar to those of humans when they are angry. When he went after Zip, the anger in Willie’s eyes replicated the look on his face when he was but a tiny puppy and went after Pippy over a piece of food on the kitchen floor.

  As I thought about it, I realized that Willie’s reaction was most likely because Zip smelled like the boxer Tango. Tango’s scent, and the bad memories it brought back, were reasonable explanations for Willie’s response. However, it was the extremity of Willie’s behavior that was so worrisome. After a long period of time and a vast array of treatments, his outbursts had become rare, but when they happened, they seemed pathological. Willie’s expression when he went after Zip was shocking. He wasn’t just protecting what he wanted by going on offense; his eyes had that strange combination of ice and heat that is associated only with out-of-control rage. It was anger multiplied by ten. Where in heaven’s name would a young dog develop that kind of emotional intensity?

  • • • • •

  Later that night, I heard coyotes yip-howling far away. Tulip heard them, too, and leaped up, barking low and loud at the front door, always quick to protect the flock from danger: “My sheep, my lambs, my land. Stay away!” She fretted for an hour, pacing and listening. I got up with her, moved to the couch, turned the television on and off. In spite of all of our progress, Willie still had a serious behavioral problem. Like Tulip, I couldn’t settle down, filled with worry about Willie. While Tulip paced, I tore at my cuticles and scratched my mosquito bites.

  As I worried, it occurred to me that Willie was acting like a dog with PTSD. Given my own symptoms, you’d think I would have figured it out sooner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When I was eighteen, I fell in love with Doug McConnell, a ruggedly handsome environmental activist whom I had met through my sister Liza. He swept me off my feet in about five minutes. We dated and married, and after seven years of living in different parts of the lower forty-eight, we wound up living in Ketchikan, Alaska, where Doug had gotten a job with the borough’s planning department. This was before the oil pipeline, when Ketchikan was a soggy little town with endless rain, a lot of bars, one small grocery store with moldy apples and pitted potatoes, more bars, two restaurants, a bank, and a few tourist shops. It served the men who worked for long stretches in logging camps, on salmon fishing boats, and in the coast guard, and who got highly prized trips to town every so often. There were a lot of bars—did I mention that?

  When the sun came out, it was glorious. Standing on the shore watching the sun sparkle off the sea, I saw a pod of orcas swim down the coast, massive black-and-white ovals curving through the water. At moments like those, I thought I was living in the most beautiful place on earth.

  I got a job as a counselor for troubled adolescents, with a paltry two weeks of training. I loved it; I worked with bright young kids who needed only a positive place to put their energy and someone to listen to them. Of all the children, I most vividly remember Marta: a raven-haired Native American who came into our program infamous as the town’s best knife fighter. I would lean forward into her energy as she spoke, intensity radiating from her face, to listen to her voice, let her say what she had to say. A few years later, she successfully redirected her energy and was herself an
administrator of a nonprofit agency that helped wayward teens.

  In spite of the good days in Ketchikan, the oppressive, wet weather didn’t make life in a moldy one-room cabin any easier. Nor did it help a marriage that just wasn’t working. After two years in Ketchikan, I flew away from both the town and the marriage. At the airport, a suitcase in one hand and in the other a flat-faced Persian cat named Chat crammed into a travel case, I stood motionless beside Doug at the loading gate. Both of us looked down, words stuck in our throat, as Chat the cat yowled in fury.

  Chat and I were heading to Madison, Wisconsin, where I’d been happiest in all of Doug’s and my travels. At the time, I had one goal and one goal only: to live in one place for five years. That was forty years ago. I’m still here.

  • • • • •

  On my way back from Alaska, I was twenty-seven and reeling with the necessity of striking out on my own. Between flights at the Minneapolis airport, I met a blond, dapper guy in a designer suit and a Rolex. He wasn’t my type. The only clothing labels I was familiar with had letters instead of names, like L.L.Bean and REI. To me, “sexy” is an outdoorsy guy in a flannel shirt and muddy boots.

  Jason (as I’ll call him) caught my eye while I waited at the gate for the next flight to Madison. He was tall and groomed like a GQ model, with perfect manicured nails and green eyes that drank me in like crème de menthe. Casual pleasantries led to conversation, which led to a drink at the bar. I don’t drink much now—one drink is enough to make me slaphappy—but I barely drank at all back then. Just being in the bar at the airport was enticing in a delicious “I can’t believe I’m doing this” way. One gin and tonic later, I slipped his phone number into my purse.

  We talked a lot on the phone over the next few months. Actually, Jason talked and I listened. He was in real estate and sold expensive properties in Mexico. He was funny and interesting, and he encouraged me to visit him in Minneapolis. I kept thinking about his eyes, and a few months later, I was back in the Minneapolis airport. Jason picked up my bag, resting his hand on the small of my back as we moved through the crowd. I stopped in the restroom and reapplied my lipstick. We walked to his SUV in the parking lot, and I remember thinking that the car didn’t fit the businessman image.

  His place was in a development at the edge of town, four apartments to a building. There were open fields on one side of the complex, with plumes of goldenrod and scruffy asters swaying in a light breeze. It was dusk when we arrived, and I didn’t see a soul as we left the parking lot, entered the building, and walked up the stairs.

  We entered into the living room, and directly on our right was the door to the bedroom. Standing at the entrance, I could see the bed, covered with a brown quilted spread and a bedside table. There was nothing on the table except a lamp. And a gun. It was black and shiny, and it overwhelmed everything else in the room.

  “Do you always have a gun in your bedroom?” I asked. He told me yes, he did. And that it was loaded.

  “Oh.” A little voice inside my head began to whisper that this wasn’t good. I ignored it.

  We settled into the living room and had a drink. As I got up to change for dinner, there was a backfire from a car outside, a loud, guttural BLAM! I turned to find Jason facedown on the floor. “Sorry,” he said as he rose from the carpet. He’d been in ’Nam, he told me, and had never quite gotten over reacting to loud noises.

  Poor Jason, I thought, panicking just because he heard a loud noise. Magazine articles and television shows were just beginning to mention the condition called PTSD, explaining how exposure to trauma caused some returning vets to be excessively fearful and sometimes have anger management problems. I wonder if Jason has it, too. I was fresh out of a job in social services, and I still wanted to save the world. Egotistically, I thought that maybe I could help him.

  At least that was the conscious conversation I conducted with myself. But there was another one spoken by the inner observer that taps you on the shoulder. It said: Something is wrong here. You should go.

  I ignored it, in part because it was so inconvenient. Where would I go? How could I get home? I had no vehicle and was completely reliant upon Jason. I could simply tell him I was sorry, I’d changed my mind and needed to go home, or to stay in a hotel, or to call a cab. But that would be awkward. I didn’t want to be rude to this man who had unselfishly served our country. Stop being stupid, I told myself. He’s articulate and funny. Besides, he needs help.

  Jason laughed as he dusted off his jacket. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m fine. Just a little jumpy sometimes.” He smiled, his green eyes crinkling. “Let’s go have some fun.”

  We had dinner at a quiet restaurant, where he rested his hand on mine atop the white tablecloth. His touch made me tingle. We went back to his apartment and walked into his bedroom together.

  And there was the gun again, sitting cold and black on the table right next to the pillow. Again that voice inside me said, Stop, don’t do this!—and again I told it to shut up. He’s a nice man. It’s not his fault that loud noises scare him and that he still doesn’t feel safe after spending years in a war zone. Obviously, that’s why he keeps a gun by his bed. Besides, things hadn’t been going well before I left my husband, and it had been a long time since I’d been with a man. It was intoxicating to feel wanted again, to feel the heat of a man’s desire radiating warmth and energy like fire in a woodstove.

  Jason unbuttoned my blouse and nuzzled my neck. He kissed my belly and unzipped my pants. We sank into his bed and began to kiss. And then, suddenly, before I could process what was happening, he grabbed me by the shoulders and flipped me over onto my stomach. He didn’t say anything, just held me by the back of my neck and forced my face into the pillow. I yelled, “No! NO! STOP IT!” He didn’t answer, but his body was a bull-like mass of force and power.

  He sodomized me for an endless period of time. The pain was worse than I had imagined pain could be. My screaming and struggling made him even more violent, and he began to growl, “Bitch. You f—g dirty little bitch.” Every time I protested, his grip hardened and his words got uglier. I went mute. I stopped struggling, but my face was pushed so hard into the pillow that it became hard to breathe. It occurred to me that he might kill me. As his breathing intensified, I was able to turn my head and suck in some air. The movement caused him to squeeze my neck even harder. I stopped moving altogether.

  Finally, when he was done with me, he fell comatose on the pillow next to me. I lay frozen in bed beside him. I did not try to get up or call the police. I lay immobile the entire night, as if unable to move ever again, while he snored into the daylight. The fact that I lay there all night long makes no sense to me now. Why didn’t I get up? Why didn’t I call the police? Perhaps it felt safer to stay immobile than to try to move. Perhaps I was back in my own bedroom, as I had been years before, paralyzed with fear as my sister’s boyfriend molested me. Or stunned into silence when a man fell out of the air and died at my feet.

  • • • • •

  By silent mutual agreement, Jason took me to the airport the next morning. As soon as we pulled up to the curb, I grabbed my bag and ran out of the car. I got on the plane, opened up a novel, and began trying to pretend it had never happened.

  Blood flowed from my body for a few days after I came home, but I ignored it. I was too ashamed to go to a doctor. It never occurred to me to call the police. In the mid-seventies, a rape was a violent attack by a knife-wielding stranger who leaped out of the bushes. I had gone voluntarily into Jason’s apartment, into his bedroom. There was no question in my mind that what had happened was my fault, just like being molested as an adolescent must have been my responsibility. Overwhelmed with the shame of it all, I told no one what happened in Minneapolis, not even my best girlfriend. I read a lot of mystery novels and willed myself to forget about it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I wasn’t able to forget what had happened in Minneapolis, but I didn’t talk about it. I tried once to tell a
girlfriend but found that my throat tightened too much to get out the words. Rape. Such a horrible word. I couldn’t say it aloud. And besides, it wasn’t really a rape, was it? It was just the result of a stupid decision on my part, one that ended badly.

  Along with the molestation and the trauma of watching Albert McCarthy die at my feet, the effects of the rape sat inside me, like a tiny tumor too small to see on an ultrasound. But I soldiered on, as we often do, willing myself to forget about it. I concentrated on my job, my studies, and my friends. Eventually, there were a lot of things that helped me excise it, but dogs played a leading role in my recovery.

  My second husband, Patrick, and I bought my first border collie in the early eighties. His name was Drift. I met him when he was two years old, lying on a bed of straw in a barn straight out of a Wisconsin tourism calendar. Drift had a feathery black coat with a white fur collar as bright as a TV star’s teeth, and a long sweeping tail that thumped against the weathered wood as I approached. I wanted to buy him after just one glance. I’d been in love with border collies ever since I’d first watched them herd sheep. It still seemed impossible that these beautiful dogs could dash away from one’s feet, run two, four, six hundreds yards away in a sweeping semicircle, and ever so carefully nurse the flock toward you. Their combination of speed, power, and intelligence took my breath away. “Three-dimensional chess on fast forward,” I called it. I’d never seen anything so exciting. I couldn’t imagine living without a sheepdog a moment longer. Only problem was, we lived in a rental house and didn’t have any room for sheep. No problem, I’d figure it out.

  Jack took Drift out and worked him on a small flock of sheep, remarking that he’d had less training than usual for his age. I didn’t have enough experience to evaluate his ability, but Drift’s working potential wasn’t really relevant at that point. He could have put his head on his paws and yawned at the sheep, for all I cared. I was smitten, flushed with dopamine-driven energy like My Fair Lady after the ball. I wanted this dog as much as I’d wanted anything in my life. I think his selling price was six or eight hundred, which at the time seemed an outrageous amount of money to pay for a dog.