Bones Would Rain from the Sky Read online

  You can’t talk about it later when a dog tells you something is wrong. Right there, in that moment, when things have slid off balance, when communication is most essential (but also most often missing), the dog needs an answer, a resolution to the conflict. Without ego, a dog stands before you without caring about who is watching or what they might think of you or him. He doesn’t care that the clock is running or that the competition is lost or that the neighbors are looking on. He only cares about what is happening between you and him, and more than anything, he wants it to be right again. This does not feel good, this anxiety, this fear, this strange behavior from someone he trusts, someone he depends upon to lead the dance. And so he tells you in every way he can, his eyes troubled, “Something is wrong.” To hear him, we need to quiet the roar of our ego and silence the critical voices eagerly reminding us that the clock is ticking, that people are watching, that we look like fools, that we do not belong here, that we are failures. When we hush our own minds, we can hear the pure sweet sound of a dog urging us to make this right. Now. And when we learn to do this with our dogs, it spills over to other relationships. When we hush the noise in our own minds, we remember that life is short and that the connections with those we love are precious; to live most fully, we need to address disconnections and distance between us and those we care about as quickly as we can. As our dogs remind us every day, now is always the best time to make things right. Like his honesty, a dog’s immediacy is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. Incapable of deceit, unable to understand the future, the dog lives in the now and expects that we will meet him there.

  I once heard a psychologist discussing parent/child relationships. She pointed out that one of the greatest gifts any parent could give a child was simply to be genuinely glad when the child came into the room. Thinking about this, I realized that this is the gift our dogs give us over and over. If I step out to pick a few sprigs of parsley from the herb bed just at the edge of our front steps, I return to cheerful greetings and wagging tails. My dogs are glad to see me though I was gone only a moment. I thought about my own son and wondered how many times he had seen a clear welcome on my face when he came into view. With shame and regret, I thought of how many times I had greeted him or John or anyone else I loved with less than gladness.

  Looked at one way, it is easy to sneer at the dog’s glad greetings as the product of a dim memory or a simple mind. But I know my dogs have very good memories and that they are intelligent beings. I’m not willing to discount this gift of immediacy; it grounds me in the reality of here and now. And I’m definitely not willing to dismiss the gladness in my dogs’ eyes when they greet me. If Robert Frost was right, and home is the place where they have to take you in, then may home always contain a dog who loves you so you are sure of one glad greeting at least.

  10

  WHAT I REALLY MEANT TO SAY WAS…

  The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that

  it has been accomplished.

  DANIEL W. DAVENPORT

  THOUGH I’M SURE SOMEWHERE in the Dog Trainer’s Ten Commandments there is a warning against the sin of coveting thy client’s pup, I just couldn’t help myself. Truth be told, I coveted Dodger, an eight-month-old mixed breed with astounding eyes and considerable intelligence. His owner Jennifer told me that Dodger was “hyper,” an awfully vague description that further questioning proved to mean he was easily excited at certain times, such as when she went to unhook him from his dog run and bring him into the house. She was also concerned that he was possibly aggressive, since in his excitement he frequently grabbed her hands and legs with his mouth. In the last two weeks, Jennifer had found herself not even wanting to bring the dog into the house. She was afraid and upset that the family companion she had hoped for was slowly turning into an unmanageable monster who weighed sixty pounds and was still growing. She knew Dodger wasn’t stupid or mean. In fact, he had done very well in training class, quickly catching on to every new exercise and working well for her at home once she had him calmed down and on leash. But his increasingly fierce behavior deeply worried her.

  As we talked, I turned Dodger loose in the room, watching him as he explored. After a few minutes, he had thoroughly investigated the room and, finding it rather dull, returned to sit next to Jennifer, following the conversation with his remarkably intelligent eyes. Each time his name was mentioned, his ears perked up slightly and his tail wagged, but when nothing more was directed his way, he resumed his post as attentive listener. A few more minutes passed and, now growing bored, Dodger decided to leap up and visually confirm what his nose had already told him: There was some particularly delicious food on the table. As he placed his front paws on the table’s edge, Jennifer scolded, “Dodger!”

  Instantly the dog’s head swiveled toward her, alert, ears up, tail wagging. I noted how responsive this dog was, and how willing he was to forego the attraction of food for an interaction with his owner. “Dodger, get off!” Dodger’s tail wagged harder, but his front feet stayed right where they were. Pushing back her chair, Jennifer reached for the dog, trying to push him off. In Dodger’s eyes, there was an unmistakably gleeful light. Rolling his head back and to one side, he responded with a paw slap toward Jennifer, his tongue lolling goofily out of the side of his mouth. She shoved him again, and again the dog waved his leg at her, slapping a big paw down onto her forearm. She moved closer, trying to grab him gently by the collar, and as she did this, Dodger grabbed her arm in his jaws. Now able to dislodge him from the table edge, Jennifer found herself half kneeling in a wrestling match with the puppy, who alternated between wrapping his paws around her arms and grabbing at her with a wide-open mouth. The entire time, Jennifer was keeping up a string of increasingly louder and more breathless commands: “Off! Dodger, sit. Stop that. Off! Sit. Sit!” Finally, Jennifer was free and sat back in her chair looking flustered and exasperated. Dodger stood watching her hopefully, his tail wagging happily. “Do you see what I mean? That’s what happens.”

  Knowing that the scene would be repeated, I quickly told Jennifer that the next time the dog did that, she should sit still and say nothing. I would handle it. Before I could say another word, Dodger heard an imaginary bell signaling Round Two and, with a gleeful look directed at Jennifer, put his front feet on the table again. Immediately, I gasped as if shocked beyond all belief, and Dodger, surprised, dropped back to the floor. The moment his feet hit the ground, I quietly told him he was a good dog. He wagged his tail in agreement. For a few seconds, he looked back and forth between me and Jennifer, puzzled by the silence. Then the bright idea crossed his mind: He could start the party again by putting his feet on the table! Once again, paws on the table, another horrified gasp from me, followed by silence. This time, he kept his feet on the table, turning his head to look at Jennifer and then me. Clearly written in Dodger’s expression was puzzlement—this was not working the way he had thought it might.

  Another idea flashed into his mind, and he noisily slapped both paws on the table edge, looking at us for reaction to this. Disappointed when we did not move or speak, he sighed and settled back to the floor. Instantly, I told him he was a genius, something he already knew but enjoyed hearing anyway. Tail wagging, he immediately leaped up on the table but, hearing my gasp, froze. He stared at my face for a long moment, and then, in slow motion, he sank back to sitting on the floor, his eyes never leaving my face. The instant all four feet were on the floor, I praised him. “I’ve got it now!” was written all over his face as he came to bury his head in my lap for some much-deserved loving before he voluntarily lay down with a satisfied sigh. I gave him a chew toy, and he settled down to amusing himself quietly.

  Jennifer was speechless. Her “hyper” puppy was lying quietly at our feet, and I had never once touched him, nor had he tried to “attack” me. Dodger was not aggressive, or even hyper. He was simply responding to Jennifer’s communications. To his doggy mind, her shoving and breathless verbalizations were an invitation to p
lay. He quite correctly read the gentleness and lack of threat in her behavior, as I had when the first wrestling match occurred. (If she had been angry or threatening, I would have intervened on behalf of both woman and dog.) Like many dogs, Dodger enjoyed wrestling games with people, since they mimic the often-fierce play dogs use with each other. As he would do with another puppy or dog, Dodger had slapped her with his paws and grabbed her hands and arms, but very gently. Far from dissuading him, Jennifer’s attempt to push him away was an enjoyable activity, a game for the dog. What Jennifer intended to convey was “No, don’t do that!” But only her words said that, and only to someone who understood English, which Dodger did not. All of her actions invited play, and the puppy was glad to oblige. As the old joke notes, “Ah, your lips are saying no but the rest of you is saying yes, yes, yes!”

  What was missing from the conversation was any clear way for Dodger to understand what Jennifer really was trying to tell him. Though without question her tone of voice was disapproving, nothing else in her communication gave the puppy the idea that he was wrong. A fair canine interpretation of this whole message might be that the “disapproval” in her tone of voice was nothing more than mock growling, part and parcel of canine play. Dogs interpret messages in context, weighing all signals together to arrive at their interpretation. The clear delight in Dodger’s goofy, playful expression was a tip-off that he found the entire process quite enjoyable.

  When Jennifer understood how her actions were sending the opposite of what she meant to say, she was able to use her body like a switch to turn Dodger on or off depending on what he was doing. If she did not like what he was doing, she verbally indicated her “shock” with a dramatic gasp or her displeasure with a short, curt phrase and absolute stillness in her body, messages Dodger understood quite clearly. From his canine perspective, there was no invitation to play in those gestures. Dodger quickly figured out which behaviors resulted in Jennifer shutting down and disengaging from him, and which behaviors earned him her attention and praise. (Simple dog math: If you do this, this happens.)

  The language of Dog is not unlike our own human language. It is filled with nuance and subtleties, the sum of which—examined within a given context—provide a total communication. Like our dogs, we can communicate volumes without uttering a word, though doing so with great clarity requires awareness of our own bodies and the subtle meanings behind gestures. Ask any man about the Look and you’ll be talking to someone who understands that when a woman’s eyes get sharp and narrowed and the corners of her mouth grow a bit tight, there’s been a shift in the winds and wise men ought to take heed. (All those mirrors at the perfume and makeup counters? They’re just for perfecting the Look, and those smiling salesladies are actually instructors; the Look requires diligent practice to master.)

  Even if the technology were possible, there would be no point in Dog Radio. Though verbal communications are part of the dog’s language, it is rare that dogs communicate solely through verbalization. To the best of my knowledge, communications that take place between dogs who are not in visual contact are limited to simple phrases. For the dog talking to another dog, purely verbal communications are not terribly precise or useful for sending complex messages. In canine language, verbal communications without the accompanying visual cues are useful only for transmitting simple messages: “Where are you?” “Hey, look, someone’s here!” “Go away!” “I’m hurt.” “I’m lonely.” A rough analogy might be what we could communicate using a brief telegram—a crude message lacking nuance or complex themes.

  In reasonable weather, our back door stays open so that the dogs can come and go as they please into the large fenced yard. Often, while we watch TV, one dog will slip out without the others noticing (or perhaps they simply don’t care), and while investigating the yard, will discover a deer tiptoeing past in the field or hear the coyotes singing up on the ridge behind the farm. The alarm is then sounded, a long, strung-out series of woo-woo-woo-woo-woos mixed with a few definitive woofs, a vocalization meant to alert the others in the pack that something’s afoot but at a distance, not an immediate threat. ( This is different from the very specific, brusque warning barks that warn someone approaching the house that they’d best have an invitation.) The reaction from the pack is an electrified response, and all dogs leap to their feet and shoot out the door to investigate. Once outside, they too can look and listen and smell and know what the alarm-sounding dog was talking about.

  The dog understands communications from us as a whole picture that includes all of our nonverbal messages as well as our spoken ones. Far beyond learning what exact words and phrases mean, dogs listen carefully to the whole picture of what we are telling them. The canine language is an elegant and precise one, where context and congruity—and not the spoken word—reign supreme. What sets a skilled trainer apart from the average (and often frustrated) dog owner is the congruity and clarity of their communications with the dog. This does not mean that they say “Sit” or “Heel” with better elocution. The difference is that the message they send is clear, with total congruity in their tone of voice and their whole being—mind, body and spirit.

  Endless books primly advise us that dogs don’t really understand what we’re saying. While it is true that a dog does not learn the meaning of words in the sense that he can use them correctly in a sentence, he does certainly learn the names of things. There are those who snicker as they point out that a dog could learn to sit when he hears “frump” and point to this as proof of the dog’s stupidity. Of course, if these folks were learning another language and their teacher decided to teach them how to say “Your mother is a pig” when what the folks thought they were learning was “Thank you very much!”… You get the point. Dogs quite agreeably work hard on figuring out what we mean by the torrent of words that pour forth from our mouths every day—and they wisely discard most of those words as meaningless to them. In the end, even the most brilliant of dogs are working with a crude vocabulary not unlike a tourist in a foreign land. And just like the tourists, dogs learn the words and phrases that have the most meaning for them: “Where is the toilet?” or “I need a drink.” (Granted, only dogs would actually link these two phrases into one meaningful question.) Looked at in a certain light, this points to a very practical intelligence at work that probably prevents dogs from dying of boredom or going mad in the face of our seemingly endless babble.

  Countless authors of dog-training books as well as trainers themselves urge dog owners to remember that their tone of voice is all-important. If we view dogs as non-English-speaking guests in our world, then it’s easy to understand how important tone of voice can be. Depending on my mood, I find the whole tone-of-voice advice bit hysterically funny or deeply sad because it reveals an underlying truth: We’re in need of being reminded how to speak to our dogs. Why does this advice about the tone of voice even need to be said? Isn’t tone of voice important in all our conversations, at least the ones in which we are addressing someone we love? I doubt most of us would appreciate having our friends and family come up and bellow “I love you!” in a belligerent tone. If we snarl “Give me the salt,” our loved ones might understandably take offense, though they still might pass the salt. I haven’t seen any child-raising books that feel the need to urge mothers to use soft, loving tones with their babies—“After thorough study of the vocalization patterns of maternal behavior in a wide variety of cultures, it appears that babies prefer not to be shouted at for any reason.” Nor have I seen any dating advice that tells a man that he’ll get further with a woman if he refrains from shouting in her ear and slapping her on the back like one of his buddies down at the bar. If we want to be successful in our relationships, we shape our conversations to reflect the love and respect we feel for the other.

  Unless we’ve lost all basic civility (been to Long Island at rush hour?), unless we no longer care about the person or the relationship, unless we have lost control of our own feelings, we don’t interact with others th
at we care about in harsh, demanding tones, ordering them about in peremptory ways. And we certainly don’t like it when we’re addressed that way; it is not a loving or even a respectful way of conducting conversation. One clear warning sign that trouble is brewing in a relationship is the way in which we communicate. We no longer speak with love or patience or respect in our voices. We grow shrill, angry, demanding, dismissive, impatient; we don’t listen. (And we may get the same in return.) If we love our dogs, if we respect them, if we view ourselves as being in a relationship with them and not just as being their drill sergeants or keepers, then our verbal communications to them need to be as loving and respectful as to any human. This seems to me to be at the very least simple common courtesy. Within a loving relationship, it is more than that—it is a critical ingredient without which we may not succeed. And when we lose our way, when we find ourselves shouting at our dogs or treating them in ways we would resent for ourselves, we need to hush so we can hear the echoes of fear or anger in our own voices.

  Of course tone of voice matters. In the tone of our voice, regardless of the words we use, there is a world of information. Dismay, anger, happiness, alarm, frustration, fear, sadness, surprise, encouragement, confusion, warning, urgency, approval—all these and so much more can be communicated just in the tone of voice. Our voices can be marvelous tools of communication, allowing our dogs to hear clearly what we are trying to say. But focusing on our tone of voice without also learning to control the rest of our bodies is pointless at best, and terribly confusing to the dog. Dogs just don’t buy the “do what I say and ignore what I do” garbage humans hand each other. It is the whole message of voice and body that tells a dog what is really being communicated. Although we humans pride ourselves on our linguistic skills and often believe that we communicate mostly through a verbal/written language, the truth is that we’re not all that different from dogs and other animals. Nonverbal signals comprise an amazingly high percentage of human communication. Some researchers estimate as much as 80 percent of our communication is contained in our gestures and body language.