Born to Bark Page 14

  Quickly I grabbed another treat and said, “Flint, sit!” and moved my hand with the food over his head, toward his rear, and in a straight line between his ears. His eyes were glued to the treat in my hand, and as he tipped his head back to keep it in sight, he sat again. Yet another piece of treat and another perfect sit. After two more tries, I left the treat in my pocket and simply moved my hand in the same motion that I had used when holding the treat, and when I said “Flint, sit,” he sat. At that moment the voice of the cowardly lion announced, “Hey, stupid, why didn’t you think of this before? This is fun. We don’t need no wrestling match.”

  I had inadvertently stumbled upon what is now called lure training, using food as the lure. People like Ian Dunbar would later independently formalize this concept and give it a name. With their insightful refinements, lure training became a mainstay in positive dog training methods. For me, however, it was a private miracle. I could easily lure Flint into a sit, a down, or a stand position by moving the food in an appropriate path. After the initial training, I could phase out the food lure and replace it with an occasional treat as a reward.

  The following week, we showed up for our dog class and Flint was a star. Shirley came over and asked me what I had done to improve his behavior, and I explained my lure training to her, demonstrating the movements for each command.

  “That’s just bribery!” she objected.

  “I look at it as well-earned wages for doing the work that I want him to do,” I replied.

  Later that same session, the lady with the Newfoundland, Admiral, was having trouble getting him to lie down on command. He was way too large and strong for this small woman to simply push him down. Shirley walked over to me and, smiling, took Flint’s leash and said, “Show her how to use food to get him down.”

  I did and Admiral followed the treat in my hand as I moved it in a downward arc toward the floor and said, “Admiral, down!” The moment that his belly touched the floor he got his reward and followed it with a large happy thump of his tail, that rang off the wood floor.

  That interaction with Shirley really shows the essence of the club. I was there to learn how to train my dog, but the instructors were willing to watch and adopt any techniques that seemed to work well, without worrying about the theory behind them or who had first suggested them. They were always attending workshops and seminars from successful dog trainers to learn new methods. In this way, the world of dogs was very different from my academic life, where eminent colleagues would defend an abstract conjecture simply because it was their own personally derived theory, without much concern for whether it worked in the practical world.

  I don’t want you to misinterpret either my skill at training or the ease of training Flint—even with food and lots of positive rewards. Lure training has its limits, and I have never figured out how to use it to keep a dog in one place for a long time. The “stay” commands in obedience competitions require a dog to sit or lie down in a given place while his handler moves a distance away from him. The dog then has to remain sitting for a minute or remain in the down position for 3 minutes until the handler returns. At a distance of 40 feet or so, you can’t effectively use food lures and rewards to keep the dog in place, especially if other interesting stuff is going on around him. So the training reverted back to the old-fashioned procedure of simply manipulating the dog into position and correcting him every time he moved. I got a lot of exercise doing this.

  “Flint, sit and stay!” I would command and then walk 40 feet away. When I turned, I would see him prancing over to April, a poodle he loved. Racing back 40 feet to retrieve my dog, I put him back in the starting place. “Flint, sit and stay!” Walked 40 feet. Turned to see him walking away to check out the Labrador retriever sitting next to him. Raced back 40 feet to retrieve my dog. Put him back in the starting place. “Flint, sit and stay!” more forcefully this time. Walked 40 feet. Turned to see him tentatively walking toward me. Raced back 40 feet and again, put him back in the starting place. “Flint, sit and stay!” with the best imitation of a British sergeant major’s voice that I could muster. Walked 40 feet. And repeated these corrections until the instructor decided to move on to the next exercise.

  Although I could get frustrated at times, I tried to keep my sense of humor, knowing that Flint would learn eventually. Not so for one woman in my class who had an Australian cattle dog named Mate. One evening when the dogs were in a long line practicing their sit-stay exercise, Flint and Mate were sitting next to each another. Flint got up and wandered over to say hello to Mate. The cattle dog also stood up in a friendly manner and wagged his tail. His owner shrieked at me, “Get your animal away from my dog!” Her loud shout startled Mate, who had been happily getting acquainted with Flint. He slicked his ears down and raced to the far end of the room with his owner in hot pursuit, seething with anger. She dragged the dog back to his original position and continued ranting at me.

  “You are ruining my dog’s training! Your dog should be expelled from this class! He’s a juvenile delinquent!” As her voice rose in anger, Mate cringed, obviously assuming that her hostile tone was aimed at him. From that moment on, the cattle dog, who had been working quite well, became unreliable in his sit-stay and down-stay exercises. He would watch his owner intently and, whenever she became tense or upset, he would break from his position and run. There were lots of opportunities for this fearful behavior because his owner became hypervigilant. If Flint would simply look in Mate’s direction, without moving, she would raise her voice at me again, “Stop your dog now before he does it again!” which would cause Mate to break from his position, immediately followed by his owner chasing after him and grabbing his collar and dragging him back to his place.

  Shirley decided to separate Flint and Mate to calm the situation. Flint was at one end of the line and Mate at the other with eight dogs between them. Nonetheless, when Flint would start to fidget or squirm, Mate’s owner would shout at Shirley, “Do something about that nasty dog! He’s making Mate nervous! Does he have to be in the same room with civilized dogs?” At the sound of his mistress’s angry voice, Mate would then break from position again.

  I did learn something from all of this. Clearly, Flint was no threat to Mate, who was twice his height and weight. Mate’s real problem was his owner’s anger. As her anger grew, Mate began to feel that something in the situation was unsafe, and the last thing that a dog wants is to be a stationary target in unsafe circumstances. The wild ancestors of dogs always preferred to run away from danger if that were an option, and so Mate expressed his discomfort by breaking from his sit or down position.

  Observing the situation with Mate caused me to rethink what I was doing when Flint moved away from the place where I had told him to wait. As I repeatedly placed him back in position, I would order him to stay with an ever more forceful tone of voice. After he’d break several times from position, I probably sounded like a marine training officer putting the fear of God into a platoon of raw recruits. Perhaps I was making Flint insecure by my voice tone. If he couldn’t run, then he was probably reasoning that the safest place in a time of potential trouble was by my side rather than across the room lying still.

  So I changed my strategy, carefully giving all of my commands in a calm, businesslike tone. If Flint broke from position, I would simply put him back and repeat the command in as bored and emotionless a tone of voice as I could manage. Eventually, he learned the exercise well enough to allow us to move on to the advanced beginners’ class, and after repeating that class only three or four times, Flint had graduated to the point where he would stay in position perhaps four out of every five times. On that fifth time, however, he would happily prance off to explore the world or to greet the other dogs in the class, as if he had never been trained at all.

  Flint was not fully reliable, but I was feeling better about his performance, so we took the opportunity to move into the novice class, joining dogs who really understood what was expected of them. Apparently, th
e club’s instructors were also feeling good about Flint’s performance, because Shirley and Barbara Baker came up to me one evening and said that Flint was doing well enough that they thought I ought to put him into competition.

  I glanced down at my dog, who was spinning around at the end of his leash trying to convince a Shetland sheepdog to play with him, and asked, “Really?” There must have been something about the tone of my voice, or maybe Flint was just escalating his request to play, but at that exact moment he barked happily.

  Shirley said, “You see, even Flint agrees,” and the decision was made.

  CHAPTER 11

  BARKING TO SAVE THE WORLD

  Day by day, Flint was behaving more like a classic terrier. The root terra in terrier means “earth” or “ground” and is associated with a genetically wired set of behaviors to follow game into its burrow and to either flush it or kill it. Old-time breeders often say that what a terrier needs is “coat and courage.” His heavy, hard, or wiry coat protects the dog from abrasion as he plunges through rocky areas and down into the lair of a fox or badger. His courage allows him to work completely alone when entering a burrow after his prey, where all is in darkness underground and retreat is difficult, if not impossible. Here the dog’s life might depend on his fighting ability. Many terriers have died underground, locked in a final struggle with their quarry.

  Flint’s courage was undeniable. The size of his opponent or the severity of the threat made no difference. One day we were having a new refrigerator delivered. I opened the door to find two men negotiating a hand cart loaded with the refrigerator wrapped loosely in plastic sheeting that was flapping in the breeze. Flint interpreted this as some huge beast that was invading his home territory and started to bark. When the plastic-wrapped monster did not back up or stop its flapping, he charged it, leaping into the air and hitting the appliance hard at a height of around 3 feet, and sinking his teeth into the plastic wrap. Unable to free himself, he hung with his hind legs several inches off the ground and his upper jaw entangled in the plastic, growling angrily.

  Imagine the courage needed for a dog that stood 13 inches at his shoulder to take on a flapping monster 5 feet taller than him. As I gently worked his jaw out of its entanglement with the plastic wrapping, I spoke reassuringly to him.

  “It’s all right, Sir Galahad,” I said. “This dragon won’t hurt us.” I then clipped a leash onto his collar and invited the men into the house.

  Flint quieted down and watched as they unwrapped the refrigerator, accompanying their activities with low, rumbling growls. His eyes flitted back and forth between the pile of plastic sheeting on the floor and the big white rectangular thing that now stood in our kitchen, until the men exited with the old appliance and the plastic wrap.

  When I had closed the door on the departing crew and unclipped his leash, Flint immediately dashed back into the kitchen to stand in front of the new refrigerator, staring at it and softly growling. Then he barked twice and waited for a response. When none came, he eased his vigilance (perhaps the monster was dead), but for several days afterward he would occasionally glance at the new refrigerator and give a little threatening growl that seemed to say, “Stay dead, you big beast!”

  Then there was the first time Flint encountered the great dog beast in the sky. In Vancouver, electrical storms with lightning and thunder are relatively rare, and Flint must have been around a year and a half old when he encountered his first. I was sitting at my dining room table surrounded by many sheets of data from a research project when suddenly Flint froze. He spun around, looked up, and then dashed toward a window with such fervor that I stopped my work to watch him. A moment later, my own less-sensitive human ears picked up the rumble of distant thunder. Flint was growling and making a low throaty sound much like the sound of thunder. Suddenly, there was a bolt of lightning followed by a burst of thunder to which Flint responded with angry barking.

  Many dogs have a fear of thunder, which sounds to them like the ferocious growls of an enormous dog or similar animal that is threatening to attack them and that is far too large to fight off or defend against. The idea that thunder was the sound of dogs growling has made its way into a number of myths. My favorite comes from a tribe of Plains Indians in the Northwestern United States who told stories of the Fire Cat, a puma who is the Sun’s pet. When the Sun is shining, Fire Cat sleeps and absorbs some of the Sun’s fire and heat, but when the Sun disappears because it is obstructed by storm clouds, Fire Cat becomes angry and unleashes the fire he has stored in the form of bolts of lightning. If not stopped, he could burn out great forests and plains and destroy everything on Earth, so the Great Spirit created the Thunder Dogs, whose job it is to chase away the Fire Cat before he does too much harm. That is why every lightning bolt is followed by the clamor of growling Thunder Dogs who have come to drive off Fire Cat. It also explains why the noise of the Thunder Dogs’ warning growls can be heard long after there are no more lightning bolts—they are making sure that Fire Cat has run away to hide and will stay away until the Sun returns.

  After another flash of lightning and burst of thunder, Flint barked angrily again. Instead of cowering from the great dangerous dog growling in the sky, like any sensible dog his size might, my courageous little terrier had appointed himself a member of the Thunder Dogs, Guardian of the Earth, Enemy of the Fire Cat who was raining lightning upon the helpless denizens of this world. I got up and went to the window just as another lightning bolt struck.

  Flint barked again and I joined in, shouting, “Get away, Fire Cat! There are too many brave and strong dogs here, and we will bite you if we catch you! Ruff-ruff-ruff! Get him, Flint. Ruff-ruff-ruff!”

  Flint barked again at the thunder, and I joined in, shouting, “Get away, Fire Cat!”

  Flint looked at me with his eyes alight and his tail straight up in the air and then ratcheted up the level of his barking and growling. Then Joannie came into the room.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Flint and I are helping the Thunder Dogs chase away the Fire Cat before his lightning can do anybody any harm,” I replied with a smile.

  “You’re teaching him to bark at lightning and thunder?” she asked.

  “It’s the sacred duty of any brave and noble dog.”

  “Is it the sacred duty of their university professor owner to bark at the sky as well?”

  “In times of danger every citizen must contribute what he can.”

  Joan looked at us and asked, “I can accept living in a madhouse, but does it have to be such a noisy madhouse?”

  “We’ll stop as soon as Fire Cat has gone away,” I reassured her.

  For the rest of his life, Flint would growl at the sound of thunder and bark at the window. I was not as brave as my dog, however, and rather than upset the woman I love, refrained from helping the Thunder Dogs—at least not when Joannie was within earshot.

  In addition to coat and courage, terriers need to bark. A functional terrier must bark when the least bit excited or aroused. Because the earliest terriers didn’t bark very much, hunters would attach bells to their collars to help them locate their dogs underground so they could dig them out if they got stuck in a burrow. A lot of terriers choked to death when their collars caught on snags or because the hunters could not hear the bells underground, so hunters bred terriers to bark whenever they were excited.

  Unfortunately, the excited barking of a terrier is a behavior that would not endear a dog to Joan, who prefers dogs that pay attention to humans, are strongly inclined to do what they were told, and work silently. Joan cherishes quiet, order, reliability, predictability, and unobtrusiveness in her own life and expects these qualities in dogs, so she was completely unprepared for a terrier like Flint who barks at any change in his environment or at anything that has raised his excitement level. Joan was certainly not amused when he created what would become his favorite game, The Barbarians Are Coming! It always began with him leaping into the air with a furious round of ba
rking explosive enough to be heard throughout the entire house. He would then rush to a door or window or leap onto the highest surface he could reach, the bed or sofa, where he kept up the cascade of noise until I did the modern equivalent of grabbing bows and arrows and rushing to the ramparts to defend the realm. The game always started when the house was quiet—when Joan was reading, sewing, or napping. It could also be played in the dead of night when Joan and I were sleeping. Careful investigation would often reveal that the triggering event was something like the wind brushing some tree branches against the house or a noisy vehicle traveling down the nearby street.

  When Flint’s barking one night awakened us at around 3 A.M. Joan turned to me angrily and hissed, “Why must he do that?”

  “Joannie, terriers are bred to bark. They have to bark so that when they are underground in a burrow the hunters know where to dig them out and uncover the fox or badger they’ve cornered.”

  My historical explanation was lost on her. Joan bolted from the bed and stood glaring at me, then turned and angrily shouted at Flint.

  “Stop your damned barking. There is no badger under this bed—look for yourself! And if there is a fox or a badger under there, you just keep that information to yourself. This is a bedroom—not a burrow!”