Talking to Animals

by Jon Katz

  In recent years, I have been writing about one of the most significant conflicts in the animal world, the movement to ban the carriage horses from cities like New York due to a widespread belief that work is cruel for domesticated animals like the horses, is even abusive.

  But the proponents of these bans do not seem to know that these horses have never lived in the wild, have been bred to work, need to work to be active and healthy, and adapt better than any other domesticated animal—even dogs—to urban life. What they do need is work and stimulation and shelter and healthy food and good medical care. And what people need, children especially, is more exposure, not less, to these magnificent creatures.

  But so many people do not know that because rather than communicate with the horses and learn to understand their needs, we project our emotions onto them and rush to rescue them, sometimes destroying them and their lives in the process. So there are good reasons for talking to animals. Their very lives depend on it.

  Since I’ve worked with her, Lenore has never wandered past her “spot,” she has never run into the road, she has never chased anything into the road. I have even tested her. I’ve put food across the road, tossed a ball across the road, run across the road myself and tried to get her to chase me. She has never once run across the road without an explicit one-word release command—“cross.” The point of single-word commands is that they are quick and simple for the dogs to understand amid all of our human chatter. That’s why herding dogs like border collies often have single-syllable names.

  Careful use of language is critical in learning how to communicate with animals. We humans tend to use too many words, many of which echo our frustration, anger, and confusion. It is important to use as few words as possible, and to associate them with the behaviors we need and seek.

  There are so many benefits to learning how to communicate with animals. Love, trust, a spiritual connection that goes to the heart of the human–animal bond. A connection to nature, to the healing and nurturing element of life with animals. Every time I listen to them, I learn about myself. I evolve and grow.

  This was the case with Red, a dog who had never lived in a house until he came to my farm. He was not housebroken; he had always lived outdoors. Linoleum floors terrified him. Red and I were perfectly suited for the great experiment we were about to undertake together, an epic journey into the heart of animal–human communication. He was a remarkably intelligent and adaptive dog, curious, eager to please, used to solving problems. I am an impulsive and impatient man, easily distracted. But Red and I fit together like two pieces of a puzzle.

  When he arrived on our farm, Red had to acclimate himself to living alongside three donkeys—guard animals who thought he was a coyote stalking the sheep—and Rocky, a blind Appaloosa pony who had lived alone in a field for fifteen years before joining our farm. Red had to learn to stay off the road, ride in a car, and become comfortable among people.

  He also had to learn the difficult and exquisitely precise protocols of animal-based therapy work. At our farm, we work with veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and when we are in session, he and I have to communicate in the clearest and most reliable of ways.

  We once saw a young veteran with severe post-traumatic stress; even the smallest noise or movement could traumatize him. Red approached him, and I needed Red to be very slow and deliberate in his movements. So I held my hand up to signal him to pause, and waved gently to get him to move forward. I said “ssssssssh!” in a soft voice so he’d know to be quiet.

  I didn’t have any commands for this situation—it depended entirely on our ability to communicate and our understanding of one another. Red approached the young man slowly, watching him, but also looking at me, listening to me. When he got close, he put his head on the young man’s knee and waited for him to respond. That way, the soldier had time to prepare for him. By the time Red approached him, the soldier was smiling, ready. I had not spoken a word or given a single command.

  It was a beautiful connection, and a successful therapy session.

  Red continues to influence my ideas about the human–animal relationship. Recently, I took him out for one of our daily pre-writing walks, this time in a beautifully tended local cemetery with tall trees and winding trails.

  Red has never been on a leash with me. He walks easily alongside me, moving as I move, keeping an eye on where I am. He ignores other dogs and does not run off after strange smells and sounds. It is a joy to walk with him. We walked far this particular morning. I was tired and distracted and didn’t at first notice the family of grieving mourners standing by a fresh grave a dozen yards in front of us. They were quiet, except for a young girl crying.

  Red is a sensitive dog; he intuitively avoids people who do not wish to interact with him or be bothered. But I saw him stiffen at the sight of this family. His ears went up, and he turned to look at me.

  I shook my head back and forth and held up my hand, as if to signal “stay.” He responded to that command, and quickly. In my mind, using the image-talking that had always worked with Red before, I projected him staying with me, walking past the mourners.

  I was moving off to the left when I saw him look at me again in a pleading and uncertain way, as if to get me to reconsider. I have learned over many hard years of work with my other dogs that it is important to listen carefully, to receive their messages. As Red looked at me, an image came into my mind of Red walking up to that young girl, of comforting her. It’s okay, he seemed to be telling me; she would welcome it, it would be helpful, she needs me.

  It was a confusing situation for me. I had a difficult decision to make. I would never want to be responsible for a dog of mine disrupting one of the most private and sensitive of human experiences—mourning at a graveside. It was a privilege to be allowed to walk in the cemetery with a dog; I did not wish to violate that trust. Yet I was hearing something from Red about his instinct, about human need.

  Because of their powerful instincts and exquisite sense of smell and sight, there are things dogs can intuit much better than humans. While humans are limited by words and visual cues, animals have so many more tools with which to read emotion. They can sense our moods a lot faster than we can sense theirs.

  Over time, I have learned to trust Red. I have seen him in his therapy work; he is exquisitely sensitive.

  So that day in the cemetery, I waited a minute, then dropped my head down and nodded. I pictured an image, what I wanted to happen—an image in which he went up quietly and approached the girl. I was nervous. I would be so sorry to have gotten this wrong.

  Red understood me, he understood that I was giving him the freedom to make his own decision. He walked quietly, tail wagging softly, across the dirt road and toward the young girl who was standing by her family.

  She looked to me like she was a teenager. She was sobbing, her head in her hands. Red went right up to her very quietly and put his head against her knee. Startled, she looked down, let out a gasp, smiled, and knelt to the ground.

  “Oh, hey there,” she said, and I saw a woman I took to be her mother look up and smile. Red leaned into the girl, and the two hugged for what seemed to be the longest time. I nearly cried myself, I was so moved by this tableau of love and comfort. Red knew what he was doing, knew what this young woman needed and wanted.

  He had let me know, and I had listened. It was a rich experience for me. I felt so fortunate to have a dog with such assurance and such a strong talent for healing.

  I walked on, and then turned and waited a few minutes. The young girl continued to hug Red. After a while, she stood up, leaned over to kiss him on the nose, mouthed “thank you” to me, and turned back to her family. Red did not need any command. He walked quickly back to me and we continued our walk.

  This kind of communication has been the most compelling and powerful experience in my life with animals. We know so little about the animals we live with. We often seem at odds with them and their powerful instincts. We struggle t
o make them obedient, but we often fail to see how much farther we can go than that.

  If there is a godfather of Talking to Animals, it would be the author and naturalist Henry Beston, who wrote the wonderful book The Outermost House nearly a century ago. Widely credited as being the inspiration for the animal rights movement, Beston called for a “wiser and more mystical understanding” of the animals left in our world. “For the animal shall not be measured by man,” he wrote. “In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. . . . They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

  This is the best statement I have ever read about animals, the wisest and most inspiring. I hope to answer Beston’s call.

  Beston was not a political person. He did not imagine an animal rights movement as it has evolved in our time, and I doubt he would have cared for it. There was nothing angry or judgmental about him. But he was very much on my mind when I set out to learn how to really talk to the animals in my world, my partners in the joys and travails of my life.

  I’ve worked hard almost every day for the past twenty years to look at my animals in a wiser and more mystical way. I listened to vets, and to behaviorists, trainers and breeders, rescue workers, and even animal hoarders. I spent thousands of hours working with border collies. I helped bring a dying donkey back to life, pulled lambs out of ewes’ bellies in the dark of night, grappled with the energy of goats, learned how to communicate with flighty and unpredictable sheep. I took notes every day and thousands of photographs as well.

  Animals, and dogs in particular, have become a complex and very emotional part of our lives. Complicated and expensive training manuals and videos are sold by the millions. Increasingly, we see animals as piteous creatures in need of rescue and intervention. We want them to have perfect lives, better often than we have.

  We are projecting our words, thoughts, and emotions onto the animals, medicating them for human-style neuroses, yelling at them in frustration. Animals are personified; we see them as versions of ourselves, with our thoughts and emotions. We approach animals mostly in terms of training them to do what we say, a system of communicating that has, to my mind, failed most people and animals in the most profound way.

  In many cases, standard methods of training diminish animals, treating them as spiritless, stupid, and clueless beings. This does a great disservice to them and to us.

  For me, communicating with animals is a sacred challenge and responsibility. It is never about obedience; it is a spiritual and mystical thing. It asks us to change much of what we have been led to believe about how animals think.

  The possibilities and rewards for people who learn to talk to their animals and listen to them are beyond the imaginations and experience of many of us.

  Humans and animals have become painfully estranged from one another. There are very few animals who will not flee at the sight of a human being. We have pushed them out of our lives, and often out of our world.

  There is a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals to be had, but it can only come if we can learn how to talk to them and listen to them. There are so many benefits to learning how to communicate with animals. Love, trust, a spiritual connection that goes to the heart of the human–animal bond. Every time I listen to them, I evolve and grow.

  1

  Talking to Lucky

  I always have the same dream about Lucky; I’ve had it on and off for nearly sixty years, since I was eight or nine years old. In the dream, Lucky is curled up in a ball in a cardboard box in the basement of the school where I first saw him. He is small, white, sweet; he chews on my finger, wags his tail. “Hey, Lucky,” I say. “I’m taking you home. Talk to me.”

  These were the first words I ever remember speaking to an animal. I still carry this radioactive seed of memory. The image of this tiny little creature, looking up at me with hope and love, struggling to lift his head up to push against my hand, has been etched in my consciousness more than any other childhood memory. At the time I didn’t know that he was responding to me, but I would come to understand the message soon enough: “Remember me,” he said. My life with animals began with Lucky.

  Attachment theorists would say it began some years before that, in the earliest stages of infancy, when lonely and frightened children first experience animal dreams and fantasies, and embrace the idea of animals as beloved and special friends.

  But my conscious life with animals began with Lucky, when I was a miserably awkward and unhappy student at Summit Avenue Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island.

  I lived on the poor end of the east side of Providence, an Irish and Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Providence was a stern, gritty Catholic city. The Providence public school system was the gateway to education and assimilation for the children and grandchildren of immigrants, as public schools were for so many American children.

  Summit Avenue School was an imposing industrial brick structure typical of urban public schools at the time. The halls were wide and shiny, filled with echoes. Boys and girls each had their own entrances and play areas. The teachers at Summit Avenue seemed old and severe to me. There was always tension between the children and grandchildren of immigrants and the children of those who were here before them. Classes were generally joyless affairs, lots of lecturing by humorless teachers and the scratching of chalk on a big green board. It was our duty to go and learn, theirs to try to ram some information into our mostly unreceptive brains.

  I was lonely and strange and without a single friend in the school or outside of it. I was frightened much of the time, a bed wetter, and a physically awkward boy. I was terrified of a lot of typical adolescent activities—gym, recess, speaking up in class, getting vaccinations, doing homework, walking home alone, speaking to girls.

  My family life was difficult—with my parents quarreling constantly—and I was afraid to go to school, where I was often chased and beaten up by bigger, older kids who ridiculed me and made it necessary for me to take elaborate and circuitous routes to get home safely. Many afternoons, I hid in the vast cemetery near our house. I had no friends, and was almost paralyzed by any kind of social interaction.

  And then there was the abuse that is so often linked to bed wetting. Sexual and physical and emotional, it shaped so much of my childhood and my life. The point isn’t what happened to me, but how I have moved past it. Lucky was an angel who came into my life to help me move forward, away from all of that darkness.

  The story of Lucky and me began at school one cold gray New England morning. My classmates and I sat shivering at our desks while the ancient radiators hissed and creaked and began the long process of warming us nearly to death in our seats. It was there I learned to drowse whenever anyone gave lectures or speeches, a habit I carry still.

  I was sitting at my shiny brown school desk, staring at the carved initials of countless hapless students who had come before me and doodled their initials for posterity. I was already nodding off as the interminable daily announcements began over the school loudspeakers.

  I paid little attention to the morning announcements, which were followed by a mass declaration of the Pledge of Allegiance, and a scratchy record playing the national anthem. But one announcement that morning made me sit up and listen.

  “Students,” said Miss McCarthy, our teacher, “one of our families has a seven-week-old puppy that needs a home. The first student who arrives at the boys’ entrance on Monday morning at seven a.m. can take this puppy home. Mr. Wisnewski, our janitor, will be present.” Our teacher explained later that the puppy would be at the boys’ entrance because it was understood that no girl would wish to get up so early and walk to school in the dark.

  It was a different world, of course. No discussions, parental notes, or permission slips
were required. No one wanted to know if we had a fence, were home all day, believed in spaying or neutering, or had even consulted our parents. If you got there first, you could have the puppy and take him home, no questions asked.

  I wanted this puppy more than anything; it seemed I had been waiting my whole life for him. He was mine. I had to have him.

  We had once owned a German shepherd named King, but I was very young at the time and had nothing much to do with him. My father let him out in the morning, and in at night; he slept in the basement and never set foot in our house.

  My parents did not spend money on dogs. King was not neutered, he was not rushed to the vet when he got sick; he holed up in the basement until he got well. There were little Kings running around all over the place. King was never walked or put on a leash, and my father would have chopped his arm off rather than walk around the neighborhood picking up poop and putting it in a plastic bag.

  One day King did not come home. There were no posters put up in store windows or on telephone poles. He was responsible for himself. A neighbor told us months later that she had seen him get hit by a truck, his body hauled away in a garbage truck. King was never mentioned again.

  We did not have warm and open discussions about things like dogs at the dinner table in my house. My father was not around much and paid little attention to domestic life. My mother worked, cooked, and ran the house.

  I knew the decision about Lucky would be up to her, and I also knew I would be getting that puppy no matter what anybody said.

  I found my mother in the kitchen after dinner—she always seemed calm and happiest alone in the kitchen doing the dishes, singing and talking to herself. I told her about Miss McCarthy’s announcement.