Bones Would Rain from the Sky Read online

  A common response to Fruits and Veggies is a deeply empathetic understanding of how dogs feel on the receiving end of what we are try ing to communicate. Many participants report being seriously confused, and they appreciate that “Potato” is as meaningless as “Sit” may be to a dog. As one woman noted, “No wonder my dogs look confused.” Others figure out what each word means, but when asked just a few minutes later to perform Mango, Peach and Kiwi, often confuse which word goes with what action—even though they clearly understand the three behaviors they were taught. You can see them sorting through the behaviors, trying to remember which word goes with what action; they are often wrong. Real dogs of course have the same problem, though if they mix up commands, for example offering a down when they are asked to sit, they may be viewed as disobedient instead of simply confused or unsure. We often expect our dogs to learn and perform with far greater alacrity and precision than we are capable of ourselves.

  One man who had been working with a woman who used a lot of physical guidance and actually moved his body in specific ways discovered that he was increasingly angry about being handled while being told “Raspberry.” He did not understand what she wanted, and he disliked her attempts to force him into the position, however gently. Suddenly, he understood why some of the dogs he had worked with had twisted out of his hands or even growled—he had thought they were just being stubborn or had bad temperaments. Even years after the seminar, he still remembers his confusion and resentment. Before ever laying hands on a dog or trying to teach them something new, he thinks, “Raspberry” and is careful and considerate in his communications.

  But one of the most important messages people carry away from this exercise is an understanding that they began the game with assumptions about the willingness and intelligence of their “dogs.” Every participant starts the exercise with the belief (conscious or not) that their dog is willing, cooperative and intelligent. No one looks at their partner and thinks, “Oh, a sneaker-wearing pants-and-shirt type. I know they can be stubborn.” No one assumes that a lack of response is due to stupidity, dominance, submission or a desire to deliberately defy. Real dogs, however, are not universally extended the assumption that they are willing, intelligent and cooperative. More than one student has walked into training class on the first night and told me, “This dog is stupid.” They know this, of course, not because they’ve tried diligently to educate the dog but because the dog has failed to automatically become Lassie. The most important goal any instructor has is to open her eyes to just how willing and cooperative and intelligent dogs are when we are able to communicate effectively with them.

  Our assumptions and expectations about dogs can lead us down the path to pure frustration for both dog and trainer. But unlike the “dogs” in the Fruits and Veggies game, our real dogs can’t offer us feedback in English about how they felt or where we went wrong. But they do tell us—over and over again—using the eloquent language of Dog. Learning how to understand them requires time, practice, study and a desire to know more. Most of all, we must first believe that the animals have something to say. It’s strange how difficult that first step can be, though we already know from our human relationships that half of successful communication lies in our willingness to hear what someone else has to say. At work in every episode of Lassie was the understanding that this dog had something to say, and folks who knew her well regarded her communications as meaningful. This simple assumption—that something important can be transmitted from the dog to us—is an essential key to the understanding we are seeking.

  In Kinship with All Life, J. Allen Boone ponders the many stumbling blocks within himself that prevented him from connecting with the dog Strongheart. He realizes that the problems of communication were founded in his assumptions and ideas about animals, not in the animal itself: “And one of the most arrogant of these ideas was the conceit that while I… was fully qualified to communicate certain important thoughts down to animals, the animals… were able to communicate little of real value up to me.”

  While we might wish for a real-life Dr. Doolittle to help us talk to the animals, we don’t need one. We simply need to learn what Dr. Doolittle knew all along—the animals have something to say. Dog training places a heavy emphasis on communicating to the dog, and not necessarily with the dog. Though we spend a lot of time working to make our dogs responsive to what we have to say, a better approach might be to follow the advice of Saint Francis of Assisi: “Seek first to understand; then to be understood.”

  8

  PIGS IN POKES

  Listening means an awareness, an openness to learning

  something new about another person… listening with the intent to

  learn is an approach to a different type of conversation.

  ELIZABETH DEBOLD

  A WHILE AGO, I READ AN ON-LINE DISCUSSION between a concerned dog owner and a professional dog trainer. After describing the dog’s behavior in detail, the owner asked for specific advice on how to use a particular training technique. The trainer answered at some length, which prompted the dog owner to ask if it was important to try to figure out why the dog might be feeling the need to act in such a way. The trainer’s response was essentially that what the dog was feeling was not really important; only what he was doing mattered. This in and of itself is reasonable advice. But then the trainer went on to modify this by noting that it was not possible to ever really know what another being was thinking or feeling, and so we shouldn’t even guess. She admitted that perhaps “some” trainers with a real gift for reading body language might be able to make a pretty educated guess and be right most of the time, but most dog owners couldn’t (and, it seemed implied, shouldn’t bother to) develop that degree of skill. After all, the trainer concluded, if we do guess, “What if we’re wrong?”

  What if we’re wrong? So what if we are? Will the seventh veil of the temple rend because we’ve misunderstood another being? Will the stars fall from the heavens because we thought a dog (or a person or any other living being) meant one thing when actually they meant something else? This trainer’s response made me intensely sad. Within the context of a trusting, loving relationship, we needn’t be afraid to guess if our guesses spring from loving curiosity and an honest desire to know. If we are wrong, then we have a chance to learn. To my way of thinking, the ongoing process of learning to understand another being is a key point of any relationship, delightful, astounding and valuable beyond description, eclipsed only by the value in learning to understand ourselves. To me, a relationship is a journey into uncharted territories quite unlike the familiar convoluted trails of my own mind. Such a journey requires that I be willing to try—even stumble down—new trails. Within a loving relationship, there is no need for fearful caution, only respectful consideration. With each new person or animal I embrace into my life, I begin a journey with no clear map of where to go and what to say but nonetheless excited by the possibilities that lay ahead. Although it is said that every journey begins with a single step, reaching outward to another being is not so much a step as a leap of faith. Agnes de Mille noted that “living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how… . We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”

  To a certain degree, communication is a lifelong series of guesses. After all, one never really can know another’s precise thoughts or experience their exact feelings. But we want to try, and we hope desperately that others will care enough to try to understand us. On the purest level, communication is our attempt to leap across the chasm that divides us from other minds, other ways of thinking and feeling, other ways of knowing and seeing and understanding the world we share. From the very moment we can conceive of Other, we begin a lifelong process of reaching out, past the boundary of our own skin, searching for the connections that in many ways help define who we are. We communicate because the world within us is not enough; without others, we are incomplete. Only through what we learn in our most profound relationships can
we find the completeness in ourselves.

  To the extent that we’re trapped in our bodies and cannot even begin to communicate more than a tiny fraction of the internal, lightning-fast torrent of our thoughts and feelings, it could be said that all of us constitute “a pig in a poke.” Those looking on from outside the “poke” (sack) can only guess based on the gyrations and squeals precisely what might be happening to the “pig” inside. Quiet, for example, could be ominous. The pig might be dead, or merely sleeping, or waiting in silent frustration. Squealing could be pain, anger, or even a particularly loud dream. How then could we possibly know what was going on in that poke? We guess.

  How well we guess will depend on a number of factors. One is simply this—are we truly curious about the pig in the poke? If we don’t really care one way or another about what might or might not be happening with that pig in the poke, we will not devote the energy required to satisfy our curiosity. Another factor is experience—have we ever dealt with a pig in a poke before? Obviously, a first time Poker is going to have a different set of guesses than someone who deals with pigs in pokes all the time. Most important, though, is this: How much empathy do we bring to the situation?

  We can see the pig in a poke in a number of ways. One view is the purely mechanical: the pig is contained, thus we can do what we like with him, though we do wish he’d stop squealing. Another option is the pragmatic approach: We feel badly that the pig is contained, but we can’t waste time dreaming up better ways to transport a pig from point A to point B. We treat him fairly, expect he’ll get over it, and we do wish he’d stop squealing. There is also the empathetic approach: We try to imagine how it might be inside that poke, how we might make this easier on the pig, wonder about possibly better ways to transport pigs—and we do wish he’d stop squealing.

  The empathetic approach is, without question, sometimes very time-consuming. It requires that we work in slow, careful ways, going past merely treating an animal fairly as we achieve our goals and moving into working with that animal as a partner. It also requires a willingness to see the world from the animal’s point of view, followed by a thoughtful contemplation of that perspective. Empathy shapes our view so that the other’s perspective is included as part of our consideration; deeply felt, this may shift our own perspective and our goals considerably. The empathetic approach is the only one that allows dynamic quality of connection; without empathy, we are merely driving toward our own goals no matter how that may affect the other. Intimacy is not possible on such a one-way street. Although it requires more from us, in the end I think the results and the relationships possible when we work from an empathetic point of view far outweigh any drawbacks.

  Trying to step into another’s point of view, however, is sometimes more easily said than done. As a Cuban proverb sagely observes, “Listening looks easy, but it’s not simple. Every head is a world.” No matter how empathetic we may be, a lot of bobbles and mistakes can be made as we fumble around, trying to understand, trying to guess, trying to walk a few miles in the other’s paws.

  THIS LITTLE PIGGY

  When we acquired our first Gloucestershire Old Spots pig, a rare breed considered endangered in the United States, we decided that this pig needed to learn some basic life skills so that he could enjoy to the fullest possible degree the freedoms and delights life on our farm might be able to offer. After spending two weeks getting to know the little boar whom we named Connor (a grand Irish name for an intensely English breed; we are nothing if not perverse), we were satisfied that the lack of handling in his first few months of life had been largely overcome. The Old Spots legendary gentle temperament was shining through, and it was time to begin working with Connor in earnest.

  Time is always of the essence when dealing with species whose lives are, as Irving Townsend put it, “even more temporary than our own.” What it takes a human being fourteen years to accomplish between birth and the deranging onset of hormones, a dog accomplishes in less than one light-speed year. Miss a few stops along the way on that track and you’ve missed a lot; it’s quite safe to say that the first six months of a dog’s life can make or break the dog that puppy will eventually become. Canine developmental timetables make humans appear to be moving on a very slow, leisurely schedule. Pigs are also on the fast track developmentally, but they bring another dimension altogether to the challenges created by rapid development—the dimension of weight. It is not impossible for a young growing pig to add as much as two pounds a day, and that translates on an explosive and exponential scale to sheer power. With each passing day, Connor was more mature—you may read that as more fixed in his ways; it can be difficult to keep a pig’s mind flexible and accommodating. He also weighed more. A lot more. Now was the time if I was going to train my new pal so that he could enjoy walks in the fields and woods, and so that he’d be safe to handle, a desirable goal in an animal that may weigh close to a thousand pounds at maturity!

  In the end, Connor’s leash training began with several short sessions a day of having a soft cotton horse lead draped in a figure eight around his neck and behind his front legs. Once accustomed to that, I tried to steer him out of his pen and into the barn aisle, where we could stroll and practice this new life skill. Curious about the world outside his pen, Connor took a few steps forward, snout upward sniffing then furiously skimming along the concrete of the barn floor. He was having fun exploring and didn’t seem to mind the leash and harness at all. This is easier than I thought, I told myself smugly as I followed the porcine explorer. You would think by now I’d be a wise enough trainer to know that when anything—anything at all—is done with even a hint of smugness in the presence of an animal, the Dog God begins to chuckle just before all hell breaks loose.

  I tugged every so gently on Connor’s rope harness, thinking to encourage him to take another few steps, and then the squealing began. It was as if suddenly he realized that he was restrained in any way. Apparently, being steered or restrained is something pigs as a rule see as unreasonable; these guys are the Patrick Henrys of the farm animal set: “Give me liberty or give me… No, wait—give me liberty or else!”

  It is said that a squealing pig can generate sounds that exceed the decibel level of the Concorde Jet at takeoff. Whoever was man enough to discover this fact has my sympathy for what he faced every day on the job. I’m sure he also has a hearing aid by now. (Seriously, in a report of injuries sustained on the job, swine veterinarians reported hearing loss as one of the long-term effects of spending their days in the company of pigs.) Ever alert to the fine nuances of animal behavior, I could not help but notice the escalation of squeals from rather cute porcine mumbles of annoyance to full-blooded stop-every-cow-on-the-farm-in-their-tracks screams. I think that if I were a predator, such squeals would either scare the hunt right out of me or spur me on to new heights of savagery. Of course, if I were a piglet about Connor’s size and some evil wolf crept up and put a rope harness on me and tried to get me to stroll up and down the barn aisle, my screams would have another purpose: the piglet’s version of 911. Response is not by police or ambulance, but by Momma Hog, a fast-moving mountain of protection on little trotters. My estimates are that in fair weather under reasonable conditions, Connor’s screams could easily have been heard at least a quarter mile away. Thankfully, Connor’s sizeable mother was nearly a hundred miles away. It’s an old barn, and sound likes to stick around and ricochet from the concrete floor to the stone wall on one side to the soft, rotting wood of the haymow floor; I don’t think too many decibels escaped. (One of the roosters may now be deaf, though we can’t really tell. He didn’t respond to his name in the first place.)

  A believer in the value of an empathetic approach to animals, I tried to understand how this seemed from Connor’s point of view. (Trust me—empathetic thinking is not easily done under these conditions; my eardrums were vibrating in time with Mother Nature’s spokes-pig, a vibration that does not loan itself to thoughtful meditation.) I could understand that being
restrained from moving freely might be frustrating. So, abandoning even gentle tugs, treating him like a puppy being leash trained, I simply followed him, letting him set the direction. Up and down the barn aisle we walked, Connor squealing no matter what I did. Even when he was free to set the course, he was quite verbal about the whole experience, mollified only slightly by the occasional jellybean I offered when he stood mumbling to himself.

  I tried everything I had learned over years of leash training puppies and even full-grown dogs, halter training cattle and horses. And still the pig squealed, though it varied from full-blown “You’ll never take me alive!” squeals to more moderate “Damn you all” mutters. Why, I wondered, was this so difficult for him? It dawned on me that what was missing was the exact ingredient I’d reminded countless students of in training their dogs: relevance. From Connor’s point of view, this was not relevant to his life. There was simply no point in this senseless walking up and down the barn aisle. He’d already been there more than twice, and jellybeans weren’t very convincing reasons to continue. (Our other pig, Charlotte, has a more typically porcine view of food as possibly worth selling her soul for, and will work on silly tasks like sitting or waving just to get a gumdrop.) It’s very easy to forget that while we think something is fascinating or important, our animals may not. If we can appreciate that some of their complaints may be about how boring or pointless something is, we’ll go further in being able to understand what they have to tell us. Of course, accepting someone’s comment that your plan is boring or pointless requires that you’ve left your ego at home that day and does oblige you to figure out how to liven up the lesson.

  “The point, my dear pig, is that in learning to walk on leash and harness you will gain the freedom to go outside for walks with us in areas not safely fenced for you.” My speech, naturally, fell on deaf ears (his squeals may have affected his hearing as well, and if not, I encourage some scientist somewhere to find out why not). Verbal communications are rather limited when addressing animals—they’re more of a Missouri mind-set: “Show me.” So, I showed Connor why this was important. I took him outside the barn, a short trip made possible with a lot of jellybeans and careful use of blockades to encourage progress toward the barn door. Once outside, his squeals diminished as he began eagerly snuffling his way across the farmyard. By the time we reached the lush green grass of the lawn, he understood what the point was and settled down to eat his way toward the house. By his second leash-and-harness lesson, he complained only briefly when he first left his pen and until he reached the outdoors. By the third lesson, he stood politely while his harness was put on, and like an absolute gentleman, walked out into the sunshine with nary a squeal.