In turn, I saw so much fear in many of my clients’ dogs. Rather than interpreting their behavior as “dominant” or “aggressive,” I could see they were terrified, and that their behavior—whether it was biting or hiding in the corner—was the only way they knew to control what was happening around them. As I learned how to acknowledge and deal with my fears, I learned how to help them deal with theirs.
At one level, being a behaviorist is all about control. Control of your body, control of your emotions, control of the dog’s behavior, control of the client’s. I realize that sounds a bit draconian—especially given that the word “control” is often used now as a pejorative description. What woman isn’t afraid of being called a “controlling bitch”? But the fact is that we all want and need control. Much of growing up is learning to control our impulses; most of our social behavior is about controlling—uh, influencing the behavior of others. Describing an attempt to get your child to come home before curfew or your partner to hang up his clothes as “controlling” may make us uncomfortable, but that is indeed what we are all trying to do: control our environment in a way that makes our life better. Or safer.
Trauma survivors understand this in a way few others do—that a sense of control is essential to one’s humanity, and the loss of it is like losing yourself. Helping someone regain a sense of control is critical to turning him or her from a victim into a survivor. The opposite of being in control is being helpless, and that’s the last place that trauma survivors need to go back to. My work taught me to acknowledge fear, to use it and control it, instead of letting it control me.
Like us, dogs need a sense that they are not helpless victims; that they can have an effect on the behavior of others around them. Dogs can also be traumatized, in ways that profoundly affect their behavior. I now believe that many of the dogs I saw as clients were victims of some kind of trauma, whether from an attack by another dog, from abusive treatment by a previous owner, or from being pulled from the horror of a puppy mill. It is time to view them as we see survivors of war or of sexual and physical violence—not as examples of deficient individuals who should be blamed for their inadequacies or need for “dominance” but as individuals who can be healed through skill and compassion. These dogs need, first and foremost, the patience and understanding that provide them a sense of safety, and the belief they can have some influence on the world around them.
• • • • •
I see Willie as one of those damaged individuals, even though I have no idea why he came to me as if he’d experienced some horrific event within the first weeks of his life.
I have often wondered if I projected myself onto Willie, and my own fears elicited much of his behavior. My answer varies from day to day. Sometimes. Probably. A little. Maybe a lot. He showed himself to be remarkably fearful and reactive when he first arrived on the farm, but that doesn’t mean my own issues didn’t exacerbate his. If I have projected my own fears onto him in ways that I have not done on any other dog, then perhaps the universe arranged for him to come to me when I was ready to face my deepest fears. Sometimes I believe things like that happen. Sometimes I don’t.
All I know for sure is that young Willie arrived at the farm as if his brain were on the verge of panic at every moment. Through careful repetition and conditioning, he learned that he could control his environment in a way that kept him safe. He could get the “scary thing” to go away if he either stayed calm or looked at me instead of barking hysterically. Once he discovered that he had some control over the behavior of other dogs, he began to associate their approach with something good. Like everyone whose nervous system is stuck on alert, Willie needed both his internal and his external environment to change to rewire his brain back to normal.
No wonder we love each other so much.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It is late summer now, and the crickets are so loud this time of year that a visiting city friend once said, “My God, what a racket!” The only other sounds are from the three dogs who live at Redstart Farm: Willie, Tootsie, and Maggie. Willie is panting after a long run up the hill with young border collie Maggie, who is sprawled on the floor, her tongue lolling from running in the heat and humidity of a midwestern summer. Tootsie, a tiny Cavalier King Charles spaniel, is snoring loudly on the couch.
Tootsie arrived in 2012, after my unsuccessful attempts to find a second border collie to be a playmate to Willie and a backup sheepdog. I settled on finding a small lapdog who needed a home, and Tootsie fit the bill: As a docile female, she had a good chance of being accepted by Willie, especially since some of his good friends had been Cavaliers. After seven years of pumping out babies in the nightmare scenario of a puppy mill, Tootsie was rescued by the good people at Lucky Star Rescue and needed a home. Tootsie is resilience personified. Even after seven years in a crate little larger than a bread box, she adores people and is as calm as Willie is reactive. Tootsie’s motivations in life are clear: 1) Eat all the food you can; and 2) Live as much of your life as possible sleeping on something soft, preferably a person.
I couldn’t help her with unlimited food, since that would be no better for her than for the rest of us. But she snuggles in bed with me and Jim, and warms my chest and calms my soul when I lie on the couch every evening. She never startles when a truck goes by or if the breeze rattles a limb against the window. I call her my oxytocin pump. Tootsie gets lap time every evening, but as the night progresses, Willie and I still have our own private cuddle session. After attempting every night to insert herself between us, Tootsie gives up, walks up the tiny stairs that Jim built for her so that she can get up onto the couch herself, and takes yet another nap.
Of course, no one (and nothing) is perfect. Willie and Tootsie have lived together for years now, and after one brief and uneventful meeting, they do not acknowledge each other’s presence. In spite of my hopes that they would play together, they do not look at each other, sniff each other, or behave as though they have noticed that there is another dog in the house. On rare occasions one will surreptitiously sniff the other, then instantly turn away lest they get caught doing it.
Twice during her first year here, I caught Willie glaring at Tootsie with a tense face and hard eyes, a look that I am sure even a mill dog can interpret as trouble. But he didn’t repeat that behavior and accepted her into the house, even if he doesn’t interact with her. Willie ignores Tootsie’s barking, her incessant pushing in for attention, and even lets her climb onto his shoulders to get closer to our faces during greetings. He appears to perceive her as something one would rather live without but that takes little energy to tolerate, like stopping at a red light in traffic when you’re not in a hurry. I am grateful that they get along, if one can define “getting along” as pretending the other doesn’t exist.
After six months of training, Tootsie was housebroken. (One of my finest hours as a behaviorist: It is no small accomplishment to teach a small dog to never go in the house after pottying in her own bed for seven years.) She is also trustable off-leash in the yard if carefully watched (finest hour number two). She is not, however, the dog she would have been if she had been raised in a good home.
One of the symptoms of psychological trauma is “emotional numbing.” There is a part of Tootsie that is shut down, as if a closed window has swollen shut after a rainstorm and can never be opened. When I look into her eyes, something seems to be missing, although I can’t say exactly what it is. On the other hand, after months of standing in the backyard, confused and disoriented by the complexity of sights and sounds outside of a puppy mill, she discovered that she is a spaniel, and that the world is rich with the scent of squirrels and field mice. Watching her blossom into an actual dog from a sweet but traumatized puppy machine has been one of my greatest joys in life.
But now, two years after Tootsie’s arrival, there is another dog at Redstart Farm: Maggie, a four-year-old border collie, a small tricolored cutie with one ear up and one ear down. Maggie came to us after I spent
two years looking for our next border collie, and months of discussions with her first owner, a well-respected sheepdog trainer in Idaho.
Jim and I were gobsmacked in love with Maggie at first glance. She was everything we’d hoped she would be—sweet, smart, and responsive. But things did not go well when she first met Willie. It was not because of Willie. By then all the work that he and I had done together had paid off, and I simply never worried about him when he was greeting new dogs unless he was trapped in a small space.
But I had to force myself to breathe normally when the dogs first set eyes on each other. Was Maggie going to be the right one? Was the third time, please, please, going to be the charm? We let the dogs greet in a big fenced field, with lots of freedom and no sense of pressure. Willie trotted over on his toes, all Mr. Excited Anticipation, like a guy at a bar with high hopes and a fake gold chain around his neck. Maggie bolted away from him. Jim and I ignored them and kept walking down the grassy slope. Willie, bless him, used everything he’d learned over the years and responded perfectly. He turned away and peed the equivalent of a Facebook page on the frozen grass.
Maggie was too frightened to take the bait and sniff where he had urinated, but we kept walking forward. In a few minutes Willie tried to approach her again, stopping when she darted away. This time she didn’t run as far. We continued this dance for a hundred yards down the field, where Maggie finally stopped, turned, and looked directly at Willie. He turned to face her and dipped his body in the slightest of play bows. They stood for a second, staring at each other. Jim and I stood still, too, mesmerized, and then Maggie play-bowed to Willie and took off like the Road Runner fleeing Wile E. Coyote, her back legs running faster than her front ones. Willie ran after her, then she after him. For a good five minutes, they ran huge looping circles around the pasture, mouths open, tongues lolling, as happy as two kids sledding down a hill together, while tears streamed down my face because finally, finally, Willie had found a friend he could play with, and we had our third dog, and I knew, just knew, that she was the one.
If this were a movie, that’s where it would end, with the music swelling and everyone’s heart in their throat. But life never works that way. As expected, Willie became tense when encountering Maggie in the house, his eyes going flat when he saw her, even if she was in another room. Maggie was afraid of him if he came too close, even when he was being as polite as possible outside in the yard. She was even afraid of Tootsie and the cats for a few days. Although she had been well socialized to other dogs, she had never been away from her mother and her packmates, and I’ve learned that this makes a huge difference in a dog’s behavior. But nothing about her behavior was out of the bell curve; she was simply lost and afraid in a new environment without her family and friends around her. Everything I’d learned over the past decades told me that once she found her confidence, she was the right dog for Willie. The little voice inside me said, “It will be okay.”
It was. It took three short weeks for Willie and Maggie to become best friends. At first we used crates, gates at the doors, and leashes to keep them from being too close to each other in the house. We let them loose together only in the big pasture at the top of the hill, where they would run until their sides heaved and their tongues curled like spoons. We took them on leash walks into the village, where they forgot about being too close to each other while sniffing the urine marks of other dogs.
Now they are family. They play tug games several times a day, and walk side by side on the trail through the woods, mutually exploring the scents of passing deer, rabbit, and raccoon. They run together in boundless circles, Maggie dancing in front: “Ha ha! That was fun! Chase me again!”
In the evening, Maggie comes over to Willie and paws at him or tries to lick his face. Sometimes he gets up and plays tug with her. Other times he wrinkles his lips and tells her to go away. She does. Maggie’s temperament, along with her experience growing up in a pack of dogs, has resulted in brilliant social skills. Willie, on the other hand, had to overcome his own temperament, a hindrance to him in his early years rather than a help. However, all our work together resulted in a dog who knows how to respond with finesse rather than panic if another dog irritates him. That doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of being rude. He tries to herd Maggie while they’re playing, and he will nip at her face to try to stop her if we don’t make sure he has a toy in his mouth. He can get grumpy when he is tired.
He is also an idiot. There really is simply no better word for much of his behavior. As I write, he is recovering from serious injury number six. Or is it seven? I’m losing track. Even at the age of ten, Willie still uses his body like a drunken high school boy at his first rock concert, exuberant and out of control, slamming down the aisle of life as though he is immortal.
When I bottle-feed the lambs, Willie lies in the barn outside the pen. He would like to dash back and forth behind the gate, but I tell him to stay there while I do the chores. He does, but his body is tensed like a drum. As I leave the pen and come through the gate, I say, “That’ll do, Willie.” He could then stand up at a reasonable speed, turn around, and trot with me out of the barn. Or he could do what he does—simultaneously rise while throwing himself in a 180-degree turn and take two ground-gulping strides, all in under half a second. It is both impressive and ridiculous. If there were an Olympic event for Getting Up While Turning Around and Taking Two Strides in the Least Amount of Time Possible for No Reason Whatsoever, Willie would have the gold medal. There’s a price to pay: It’s tough on one’s body to live every moment of life as if in the finals of a life-changing athletic event. His body has paid the price for having an internal engine always set on “smoking.”
Until recently, watching Willie teeter on the brink of physical disaster exhausted me. Every time he leaped or slid or smashed into something, I’d gasp, my limbic system on red alert that something horrible was about to happen. But that was then, and this is now. Now I shake my head and say, “Oh, Willie,” and hope that he hasn’t hurt himself yet again.
There is another important change in his behavior aside from becoming comfortable with other dogs: Willie no longer startles out of a dead sleep for no discernible reason. This behavior had become rare after years of our work together, but it stopped completely within weeks of Maggie’s arrival. Perhaps, along with all the work we did together, he needed just the right dog in the house to feel truly secure. Our dogs may love us, but surely we are still aliens to them, creatures who constantly confuse them with our strange greeting behaviors and relentless need to go on long, slow walks while ignoring all interesting things. Something about Maggie’s presence has soothed Willie in a way that nothing else ever could. I wonder if Maggie is to Willie what Jim is to me—both of them inherently stable individuals who allow us more nervous types to let our guards down.
There’s no question that Willie loves Jim as much as I do. In one way, Jim is the opposite of Willie and me. Willie and I are the wind and the fire and the wildflowers; Jim is the earth and the water and the stately oak tree that stabilizes us both. I can’t imagine how I could love a dog more than I love Willie, and I believe that Willie loves me like life itself, but we cannot be for each other what each of us needs at our core—a sense of stability and security that allows us turn off our vigilance, take a deep breath, and nestle together, safe and secure.
Jim and I got married in 2012, after twelve years together. The little voice inside me finally said “Yes, yes” instead of “No, not again.”
I said yes to Willie, too, when I pledged to face my own deepest fears so that he and I could heal together. For that, I owe him more than I can say. If not for his fears and reactivity, I might never have been forced to deal with my own deeply buried past. I love him so much that my heart aches just saying it, even though sometimes I still have to go out of my way to forgive Willie for being Willie. But I have, and I do. When he crashes into the car that has been parked in the same place for the last four years, or strains yet another musc
le while scrambling up from lying down, for no reason whatsoever, I say “Oh, Willie. My Silly-Billie Willie-boy.”
• • • • •
Now, late in the evening, after the chores are done and the dishes are washed, you will find the five of us settled in the small living room in our old farmhouse. Willie and Maggie are lying side by side on the rug after a long, noisy tug game. Jim and I are on the couch, Tootsie snoring on my chest, my feet snuggled under Jim’s warm legs. Maggie lifts her head and licks Willie’s face. Willie is tired and wrinkles his lips the tiniest bit. Both dogs put their heads back down, roll onto their sides, and go to sleep. Tootsie, lying with her too-cute face and tiny white paws on my chest, is snoring like a three-hundred-pound drunk passed out on a bar. Jim turns his head to look at her, and we smile at each other as the crickets continue singing the sonata of life and the moonlight streams through the farmhouse window.
EPILOGUE
It is hard to send your dog to gather sheep you cannot see. It is one thing to send him down into a valley where you watch as he flows through the grass in a wide, open circle to the other side of the flock. It’s another thing entirely to send him over a hill’s rise and watch him sink out of sight toward sheep that are not in view. When your little dog disappears, it feels so sudden; first you follow his black-and-white body as it arcs through the green, becoming smaller and smaller as he runs. Then poof, abracadabra, there’s nothing there but grass and sky.
The Education of Will Page 21