However, nothing compares to the guilt that dog lovers feel when forced to make the decision to have their dog euthanized. Despite moving heaven and earth to save their pets, many owners are wracked with guilt over putting their dog down to relieve its suffering. It breaks my heart, because I, too, know the burden of guilt associated with taking away the life of one’s best friend. I was overwhelmed with guilt when Luke died at age twelve from kidney failure, sure that if I had just tried hard enough, I could have saved him. The fact that five of the best veterinarians in the country couldn’t save him was irrelevant to me. I was his human. He was my dog. He had risked his life to save me from horned creatures who could have killed me; how could I not save him in return?
• • • • •
Guilt is an equal-opportunity employer, affecting us in all aspects of our lives. Nowhere is that more evident than in the aftermath of sexual assault. Survivors find a multitude of reasons to feel guilty, from blaming themselves that it happened in the first place; to feeling guilty that it wasn’t “bad enough” to be upset about; to believing that if they were better people, they’d be fine by now.
For years, when I allowed myself to think about it, I asked myself, How could I have possibly gotten myself raped and molested? (That is the way I asked the question—“gotten myself.”) Surely, both events must have been my fault. In some ways I was lucky that I kept quiet about what happened for so long, because it spared me from being blamed by others, a common occurrence after a traumatic event. Some version of blaming is almost universal, no doubt because it assuages the fears of nonvictims: “That wouldn’t happen to me, because I would make a better choice.” You can almost hear them say “whew” in relief.
While “You’re guilty (and I am not)” can provide solace to others, “I’m guilty” has its own benefits. If you yourself are guilty, then by implication you had some kind of control over the situation—and heaven knows, we all want to believe that we are in control. Perhaps the most frequent words I hear as an animal behaviorist are, “If only . . .” “If only I had remembered to shut the door, my dog wouldn’t have run outside and been hit by a car.” “If only I hadn’t taken him to the park that day, he’d never had gotten in that horrible fight.”
If only. Seductive words, because they protect us from facing the far more frightening reality—that stuff happens all the time over which we have no control. Bad stuff. To good people. And good dogs. It just does. That is why it’s comforting to believe that if we had just done X or not done Y, the horrible event Z would not have happened.
Sometimes, of course, there is some truth to the “if only” game. If only I had been strong enough to walk out of Jason’s apartment the moment I saw the gun in the bedroom, I probably wouldn’t have been raped. If only I had been able to tell my parents or my sister that Bruce was coming into my room at night, the intrusions would have stopped sooner. But that is not always the way the world works. We don’t always make the right decision. Stuff happens no matter what we do—there was nothing I could have done to stop a man from falling out of the sky and dying at my feet. And covering myself with a heavy blanket of guilt couldn’t change any of it.
• • • • •
It took a long time for me to get over the death of Willie’s uncle Luke. He was otherwise brimming with health, exuding a vitality that no dog I’ve had has ever matched. I fought the reality of his untimely death daily for years after he passed away. If only I had figured out why his kidneys were failing. If only I had been a better person, a better dog owner, a better animal behaviorist who knew how to get my dog the best possible medical care.
Luke’s headstone is at the top of the farm road that leads to the pasture high above the farmhouse. It is a rough-hewn slab of granite that sits in the grass where Luke used to wait for me to catch up with him so that we could work sheep together. He would stand on the hill’s rise, silhouetted by the sky, and turn his head to me as I walked up the slope behind him. “Are you coming? Hurry! I see them! They are there, over there. Can I go get them?”
In the years after he died, sometimes I’d sit down beside his grave with no purpose except to be close to what was left of him. One crisp fall day years after his death, when I was still fighting the “if only” battles, I looked at the words engraved on his headstone: “That’ll do, Luke, that’ll do.” These words, in sheepdog speak, tell the dog that his work is done for the day. I put them on the headstone to tell Luke that it was time to let go of his responsibilities. Your work is done now, Luke. That’ll do.
As I sat in the sun and listened to the crickets buzz, I suddenly felt as if Luke were standing behind me. Of course I knew he wasn’t there, but I still felt him standing in the grass, looking at me with his usual bemused expression. The feeling was so strong that I couldn’t resist turning my head to look behind me. There was nothing there but grass and sky. My eyes rested on Luke’s headstone as I turned back around, and I read the words on it as if for the first time: “That’ll do.”
Oh. Okay. I stood up and felt layers of guilt shedding off me, as if I had just entered a warm house on a cold day and removed a heavy coat. I let go of my guilt over Luke’s death, as well as much of my guilt over what had happened in my past, and left it lying on my good dog’s grave. It was the last and best gift that Luke ever gave me.
• • • • •
In late summer, I found young Hope another home. He had begun barking fearfully at unfamiliar people and dogs, not an uncommon problem for an adolescent border collie. I had no doubt that I could help him through it—it is a phase that often disappears if handled correctly—but his behavior began to affect Willie. Willie’s problems had been too serious, and the idea of losing the ground I’d spent years gaining was untenable. As much as I didn’t want to give up on Hope (oh, the irony of that phrase), it became clear that he wasn’t helping Willie or me. Loving Hope wasn’t reason enough to keep him. Neither was being afraid of what people would say.
The decision was made the day when both Hope and Willie barked aggressively at a sweet elderly woman walking down the street. Willie had a host of problems, but a fear of an elderly women walking toward him wasn’t one of them. Hope’s fearful behavior was contagious, and I could not allow Willie to develop another problem behavior.
As often happens, the universe provided. I found Hope a wonderful new home within days. I felt grief over his departure but also a deep sense of relief.
A few weeks later, we ran into him at a sheepdog trial. Hope was happy to see me but ran back to his new human with glee, obviously enthralled with his new family. Willie’s response was to take one sniff of Hope, turn his back, and sit facing away from him. After that, he refused to look in Hope’s direction. I suspect that guilt was the last thing on his mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
One fall day, Willie was standing stock-still about two hundred yards away from me in the field, behind three sheep who would rather have been somewhere else. He had run his gorgeous wide outrun to the back of them at a sheepdog trial, but now he stood motionless, looking directly at me as if he had no idea what to do. I whistled to him to Walk Up, to put his head down and take charge of the sheep, which he did every day on the farm. He’d done it at other sheep trials, like all the other border collies competing, knowing full well that their first job is to get around behind the flock and bring it to you, no matter how far away. But this time Willie wasn’t doing the work. He wasn’t doing anything. While I whistled for him to get moving, he stood immobile, looking at me as if he had just woken from a deep sleep and had no idea where he was and what he was supposed to do next.
Dogs don’t always listen at sheepdog competitions. This is hardly a surprise to anyone who has ever owned a dog and called for Chester or Misty to come into the house instead of rolling in a puddle in the backyard. What is surprising is that sheepdogs listen so well. The dogs work far away, off-leash, and using nothing more than a series of words and whistles, we ask them to stop, speed up, go ri
ght, or circle left around a group of fast-moving animals. The dogs can be three hundred yards away, or five hundred yards, or even half a mile, in some of the rarefied trials far beyond the ability of mere mortals like Willie and me. A quiet whistle is all it takes to bring the sheep back into a straight line or slow the dog from a trot to a walk to keep things under control. The dogs love to work; they crave it like a drug. What’s more, they want to work as a team with you.
Of course, dogs and handlers aren’t perfect, and sometimes when a dog ignores his handler, the handler switches from whistles (“Tweet, tweet!”) to words (“Walk Up!”) to something outside the usual repertoire (“HEY! Are you listening to me?”).
Handlers who are watching often smile when they hear these phrases of frustration. We’ve been there. We know that an unresponsive dog is either listening just fine but choosing to ignore his handler (“I’ve got this, just shut up and leave me alone”) or is too panicked to take in any information (“Oh God, I’m out here all on my own, and the sheep are going to get away any second now, and I can’t let that happen, and I can barely think, much less listen”). But I’ve never seen a dog at a trial stand behind the sheep with his head up as if he had virtually no idea what to do next.
Willie’s indecision went on for an eternity. I whistled, I called, and I whistled again. He stood as if transfixed, looking straight at me from two hundred yards away. Eventually, the sheep drifted off on their own, and Willie began to follow them. Finally, he woke up and took charge of the flock, responding to my every signal, and brought them straight to my feet. We were about to begin the driving portion of the course when the lead ewe, an old girl who had seen more than her share of sheepdog trials, flattened her ears and bolted off the course. Willie tried to contain her, but she knew she had him beat. Willie knew it, too. I suspect she’d figured him out at the beginning, when he abdicated responsibility; she’d just been waiting for an opening. I called Willie, and we walked off the course.
I felt awful. Sick-to-my-stomach awful. I wasn’t angry at Willie, although I was sad and confused, I felt an outpouring of love and sympathy for him that was overwhelming. He’d looked so helpless.
I was also embarrassed. All handlers have had a dog not listen to them at a competition, but I knew no one whose dog stood motionless while the handler whistled, yelled, and flapped her arms to no avail. I felt helpless, too. Why had he just stood there? What had I done wrong?
When things go poorly, it doesn’t help to have a reputation as an animal behaviorist. Two people, bless them, had come up to me during the trial and said, “Oh, you’re Patricia McConnell! I’ve read all your books, and I love them! You’re my hero!” Right before Willie and I ran, a nationally famous trainer came up and said hello, loaded down with a new massive camera lens, all the better to record our run. Ouch.
Afterward, I ruminated for a couple of days. I had some ideas about why Willie had done what he did. He probably hadn’t been able to hear me and was afraid to act on his own. He had become more hesitant and less confident after his year of immobility when his shoulder was hurt. His personality made him easier to handle during his recovery than many dogs would have been, but it also meant that his sense of autonomy was easily squelched.
After his shoulder was healed, I put him in a few small sheepdog trials where he did well at the beginner’s level, although he seemed to have a new kind of hesitancy that I hadn’t seen before. The next summer he strained his iliopsoas muscle and had to go back on-leash for three months. That might have been the last straw in Willie’s sense of independence. After he recovered, he began looking back at me more often while working sheep: “What should I do now?” I encouraged him, buzzed him up, let him drive the sheep faster than usual to make it fun and exciting, to keep him focused on the sheep and not me. He got a bit better, although there were still times when he would stop and turn to look at me: “Okay? Am I doing okay?”
That may have explained, at least in part, why Willie did what he did: a stiff wind had come up that made it especially difficult for him to hear me, and he was hesitant to take initiative without hearing my signals. However, the sick feeling in my stomach didn’t go away after I had sorted out the probable causes of his behavior. My distress felt out of proportion to what had happened. Willie hadn’t done well at a trial. He probably couldn’t hear me because of the wind. So what?
Perhaps I was feeling distressed because I was humiliated by our performance. It is never fun to fail publicly, but it may feel worse when others have high expectations. Sheepdog handlers know that the skills that I used to work with aggressive or panicked dogs have little to do with training and handling a working sheepdog in a competition, but the public doesn’t know that. People often expect my dogs to be nothing less than perfect in every situation.
I remember one morning when my dogs flushed a deer while we were on a walk in the woods with friends. The doe bolted away within a few feet of us, her white tail erect and waving from side to side like a flag. The dogs shot after her, at full speed within two or three strides. I sang out, “Lie down!” and they hit the dirt as if they had fallen out of the air, and what was more, they did it happily. I teach a “flying lie down” as part of play, so the dogs had learned that it was fun to lie down as fast as they could while running away from me. Still, I was filled with pride and gratitude that morning. Look at how good they are! I’m so proud of them! I thought. The people walking with me didn’t even pause in their conversation. “Of course your dogs would be that good,” they later told me when I asked them about it. “What else would we expect from the dogs of a professional dog trainer?”
Still, disappointment and humiliation didn’t seem like the real reasons that my gut was in a knot even days later. As I lay miserable at two in the morning, I did the only thing I could think of. As the moon shone through the window, I began the loving-kindness meditation: “May I be safe. May I be healthy and happy. May I live my life in peace.”
I’m a lazy meditator, and I tend to meditate only a few minutes at a time, in awe of people who spend fourteen hours a day at retreats in painful positions while focusing on nothing but their breath. After repeating the few sentences for a mere five minutes, I suddenly saw the word “helpless” in my mind and realized that I had found the core of the problem. Whenever I told my friends what had happened, I had described Willie as “looking so helpless” and myself as “so helpless, standing there at the post.”
Helpless. I must have said that word a hundred times. Willie looked helpless. I felt helpless. Helpless, like when a man fell out of the sky and died at my feet. Helpless, like when I was raped by the Vietnam vet. Helpless when someone I had trusted as a young teenager violated me in my bedroom and took away any sense of security that I had. That was the problem: Feeling helpless is awful. This was not about Willie; this was about me.
• • • • •
Here is what I am learning about trauma: It is not something that you can close the cover on and then put it away like a book on a shelf. Recovery is an ongoing process that requires courage, honesty, and a kick-ass support system. Whatever happens to you during and after a trauma doesn’t disappear as if it never happened. It just gets easier to deal with, if you know how to face it. Stuff comes up—it will always come up—and you have to look it in the eye and back it down, like a dog standing nose to nose with a ram. But you can do that if you’ve done the work beforehand, if you have a good support system, and most important, if you have faith that what you need is inside you. You just have to take the risk to find it.
• • • • •
Willie ran in another sheepdog trial not long after the one where he’d frozen in place. I almost didn’t attend, worried that he didn’t want to compete anymore. But he’d done well at a clinic between the trials, so I decided to try one more time before retiring him from competition.
Each dog entered in the trial got two runs. In Willie’s first run, he began with a wide and lovely outrun, gently got the sheep moving
, and brought them in a dead-straight line to me. Almost perfect. We worked together to drive them away in another straight line to freestanding gate panels about a hundred yards away. Everything was going beautifully. And then Willie stopped again and didn’t move. At least I assume he stopped. He was out of sight, behind a copse of trees, but I could see the sheep standing still for the longest time. They finally wandered into a thicket of willows surrounding a stream. I had to leave the post, walk a couple of hundred yards across the field, and work with Willie to herd the sheep out of the thicket. He had to push them across a deep creek, the water up to his shoulders as he pushed them back toward the field. I was perplexed by why he had stopped again—I suspected because he couldn’t hear me again—but this time I saw it as an interesting intellectual exercise rather than as reflection of my worth as a person or a metaphor for feeling helpless.
Willie kicked butt on his second run. It was our best run ever. We worked together seamlessly as partners: He was precise and responsive, and I timed my signals (finally) so that the sheep moved in perfect lines around the course. It was gloriously fun. There is little as seductive as the feeling that your dog, the sheep, and you are all in the same groove—your dog using his power and maturity to move the sheep gently and carefully through a prescribed course; the sheep relaxing as the dog takes charge; you using your experience and timing to help your dog be at his best. When it works, it feels frictionless, like the kind of mental “flow” that psychologist Csikszentmihalyi talks about—a state in which you are completely, blissfully absorbed in what you are doing.
The Education of Will Page 19