Bones Would Rain from the Sky Read online

  I think it is worth remembering that some of the most moving human experiences are the moments of inarticulate emotion, where words fail us or seem only something to fumble with while we search in vain for some new means to express what it is we feel. At such times, we may resort to precisely those silent gestures animals use—a head pressed against a friend, a hand laid quietly on a shoulder or leg, a body gently folded around the contours of someone’s grief and pain. We proudly claim language as that which sets us apart from animals, and yet, when language fails us as it often does in the face of profoundly moving experiences, the animal quality of pure gesture is all that we have left. To my way of thinking, it is not a sad commentary on animals that they do not have a verbal or written language by which to express their feelings, be that love or sympathy or joy or grief. It is, I think, a rather telling note that when we are most deeply moved, we return to the pure eloquence of communication that animals use all along. We are, sometimes, most eloquent when we are dumb.

  READING BETWEEN THE LINES

  Fortunately for us, our dogs are masters at reading us like books, though it’s obvious they’re sometimes hard-pressed to follow the plot. They’re also terribly good at reading between the lines. Our reliance on verbal communication coupled with a lack of awareness of how our bodies also contribute to what is being said leads straight to what dogs must consider very confusing conversations. “Come here,” we tell the dog who has slipped his lead. Assuming he correctly understands the phrase, the words register but are balanced by everything else he hears and sees: the anxiety in our voice (we fear he may run out into the road), the tension in our bodies as we lean forward toward him (a gesture that serves to push the dog away from us), the shift in our breathing (telling him something is alarming us, though he is unable to relate that to his actions), all the tiny signs of our growing frustration. Taken as a whole picture, this tense, anxious and possibly angry person grabbing for him contradicts the verbal direction to “Come here.” If the messages we send are not under our full control or awareness, we may be very surprised at the response we get from our dogs.

  When in doubt, dogs disregard words and believe our actions. If I cheerfully tell my dogs that they are very bad dogs indeed, they laugh. If I put a different inflection on it, speaking sternly, frowning fiercely, my dogs still laugh. They live with me, and accustomed to my dramatic moments, thoroughly educated in the art of living with a lunatic, they know that I’m as full of play growls as they are, and they recognize my mock warnings as just that—make-believe. Only when a stern tone of voice is matched with the hard eyes, tight jaw, tense muscles and very still posture of an angry me do they take me seriously. A dog who did not know me well might easily mistake my mock warning for a real one, just as we often mistakenly interpret gestures or words of someone we do not know well.

  Before we open our mouths, even though we’ve opened our mouths and long after we’ve opened our mouths, dogs are busy trying to understand the whole message. And they can only understand any of our messages as they are understood filtered through the canine point of view. What we say in actual words might read back nicely on a courtroom transcript where all but the most violent outbursts go unnoted. A stenographer does not make notations such as “sounded tense” or “in an annoyed tone” or “sarcastic.” In my experience, when people report to themselves or a trainer what was said in a situation with a dog, it is common for that report to be in roughly the same format as a courtroom transcript—all the subtleties and inflections are missing except for the really dramatic ones. But the dog takes far better notes than any court stenographer, mostly because he has a holistic recording device: the canine brain. Nuances of gesture and voice are strictly and accurately noted. Let’s look at a typical scene from the human “transcript” point of view, and then from the dog’s holistic recording device.

  Scene: It is a quiet house. A dog lies dozing at his owner’s feet while she reads a book. The doorbell rings, startling the owner. The dog is instantly up and trotting to the door, where he begins to bark. The owner quickly follows. She attempts to quiet the dog and get him to sit so she can open the door. She’s eager to sign for this month’s delivery of Doggy Digest, an edible magazine meant to be chewed by the dog after the owner has devoured the fascinating articles on “Fleas Flee” and “Top Ten Ways to Tell If Your Dog Is an Alien.” Here’s the transcript as our drama unfolds:

  Doorbell rings.

  DOG: Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark… (Continues even while owner speaks)

  OWNER: Quiet.

  DOG: Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark…

  OWNER: Quiet. Quiet.

  DOG: Bark, bark, bark, bark… (Deliveryman asks if he should come back some other time) growl, growl…

  OWNER: (to deliveryman) No, wait. (Raises voice to be heard) I said wait, please. Just wait a minute while I get the dog under control. (Addresses dog) Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. Hush.

  DOG: Bark, bark, bark, bark…

  OWNER: Quiet. Sit. Quiet. I said Sit. Sit. Sit. I mean it—sit.

  DOG: Bark, bark, bark. Yelp! (Owner has grabbed his collar) Grrrr…

  OWNER: Sit. Sit. Quiet. (Adds shake of collar to emphasize her point, and pulls him up)

  DOG: Bark, bark, bark… (Sits) bark, bark, bark…

  Now, let’s replay that scene told from the dog’s point of view: Doorbell rings. At the instant the dog hears the doorbell, he’s thrilled. Doorbells mean it’s time to play “What’s behind door number one?” Could be that nice kid from next door wanting to play; he can really throw a ball. Might be that nice guy that always has dog biscuits in his pocket when he comes to stare at the electric meter. Got to go check—could be an intruder who needs to be chased away from the door. There’s that guy that comes every day and pushes strange papers through the slot in the door. He’s easy to chase away: just a few barks, works every time. As the dog is getting up to respond to the doorbell, he hears a slight intake of breath from his lady. She is slightly startled by the bell, and the dog notices this. Aha, that caught her off guard too! As he trots toward the door, he begins barking, announcing that the visitor might or might not be welcome, but either way, he’s on duty to check all passes. Behind him, the dog is pleased to note, his lady is also hustling. Not much of a watchdog, but at least she tries. He increases his barking to assure her that he’s got it covered, and as usual, she chimes right in herself. Strange, he thinks to himself. Human barks are strange. You think they’d know that single-syllable woofs are easier to say—never could get my mouth around the Q sound—but hey, each to his own. Man, she’s revved today! She’s barking like a fool puppy, all breathless and high-pitched! The man says something, and the dog sees the woman get more frantic in her actions and sounds. Oh, boy! That really got her going. Wonder what he said to get her all riled up like that? She’s barking at him, she’s barking at me, and she’s moving around quick like—heck, if she had a tail she’d probably be wagging it too. Her barking’s getting louder, and—damn, here it comes—as always, she’s forgetting about the guy out there and turning on me. Barking right at me, like I’m the intruder! Ow! He wishes she’d be more careful when she grabs that collar. Twisting it like that really smarts. He growls a little to warn her to watch what she’s grabbing. Crazy lady—now she’s shaking his collar a bit, and pulling him up off his hind legs. Better sit down—when she gets like this, there’s no telling what’s next. But wait. There’s still that guy at the door. Bark, bark, bark…

  A different impression could be made on the dog if instead of joining him in his barking—as he is most likely to interpret our excited vocalizations and quick movements—we moved slowly, quietly and with an air of calm assurance. The sum total of our communication in the above scenario is not one of authority but one of excitement and arousal that equals his own and may egg the dog on—precisely what we hoped to avoid in the first place.

  Arrogantly (though we may not intentionally be so), we insist that regardless of the conflicts and mixed messages of
our communications, dogs somehow sort out what we mean and then obey. One training approach would be to punish the dog’s actions even though they are in response to our actual communication. But that would hardly be fair—dogs, like us, are not living in a vacuum. They are responding to the world around them and, when interacting with us, to the messages they receive. One of my cardinal rules for dog training is that if I see a dog acting inappropriately, my response is to look carefully at the person on the other end of the leash. Quite often, the answer for the dog’s behavior can be found there in mixed or unintentional signals from the handler.

  We are often imprecise or conflicted or careless in our communications, yet we expect our dogs to figure out what we mean and act accordingly. Faced with confusing or mixed messages, dogs do their best to figure out what is meant. Confused, they also often give up and simply do whatever suits them, an intelligent response to a situation where no one appears able to tell them clearly why or why not something should be done. Just like us, until notified otherwise, dogs shape their world to their best: advantage. They’re not being deliberately bad or trying to “get away with” something. They’re simply responding to a lack of clear information and taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves. We may find this quite annoying, particularly if we’re unaware that we are being confusing or sending conflicting messages. But think of this as tax loopholes. In the face of unclear tax regulations, humans often shape their interpretation of the rules to best benefit themselves. (When in doubt, do you send the IRS extra money?) Of course, we always have the fear of the IRS lurking in the back of our minds. For the dogs, sometimes we are the IRS, stepping in after the fact to sternly say, “That’s not what you’re allowed to do.” Like many a puzzled taxpayer, dogs might justifiably respond, “Well, then why didn’t you make that clear in a way I could understand?”

  When we fully appreciate the exquisite attention our dogs offer us, we realize we have to clean up our act; we, and not our dogs, are most often to blame for miscommunications. Faced with an audience that is listening very hard (unless we have systematically though inadvertently taught them to pay us no mind), failures of communications rest squarely on our shoulders.

  To understand our dogs, we need to learn to look for the whole picture and listen for the whole message the dog is trying to send. We do this for our human friends, but understanding the vast world of nuance and gesture in human communication is something we’ve been working on for a lifetime with countless people around us. We’ve been practicing with humans for a very long time, and still most of us have not yet mastered the communication style of more than a few close intimates. Given that most of us have but a handful of dogs in a lifetime, it is not surprising that we are often less than fluent in Dog. With limited opportunities to practice and only so many native speakers of the language to learn from, our ability to communicate successfully with our dogs and understand what they are trying to tell us will not come “naturally.” Like any foreign language, Dog takes time and practice to master. But this is joyful work, this exploration into another being’s world, and the rewards are countless. We need not be perfect, but we do need to deeply want to know more and then some.

  My niece Hannah’s dream of a dog of her own came true when she was nine years old and her family adopted Ben, a nine-year-old Labrador. A true gentleman in his manners and heart, Ben was the perfect first dog for a family of five despite his considerable size and, as Hannah noted wryly, his “goobers” of saliva whenever it was hot or he was watching people eat. In the first few weeks of Ben’s arrival, there were many phone calls back and forth to Aunt Suzanne as my sister and her family integrated this dog into their busy home. Of all the wonderful things that were reported to me, my favorite remains Hannah’s enthusiastic description to her mother of all the subtle ways she had learned to understand Ben. She described how she knew the difference between Ben’s needing to go out now and a need that could wait a bit if necessary. His woofs and barks conveyed a world of information to Hannah, and she understood his playful growl and the more serious “Someone’s at the door” woof of warning. In vivid detail, Hannah could pinpoint the slight shifts in the shape or expression in Ben’s eyes, the lift or droop of his ears, the lift of his tail or the madly delighted wiggle of his whole body. “I know what he’s saying, Mom, I really do. I’m knowing this dog!”

  And there, in a child’s pure knowledge and love, is the only magic any of us need to understand what our dogs tell us in so many ways, even when we are not listening. Hannah’s joy and curiosity, her complete willingness to study Ben with careful, loving eyes and to trust what Ben told her—without rationalizing or intellectualizing—is what made “knowing this dog” possible. To hear what our dogs say, we need to listen with a child’s heart, knowing past our minds, knowing with our hearts. But for many adults, this is a struggle; we have to learn how to climb down out of our minds and listen. If we don’t understand that we are holding our hands over our own eyes, if we assign magical powers to those we see who apparently can communicate, if we think this is a skill granted by the gods to only a few, then we will be forever in search of Dr. Doolittle or someone like him. But the truth is, all of us can learn to talk to the animals, and best of all, perhaps most important, we can learn to hear what they have to say to us.

  11

  TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

  The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the

  inside out, starting with himself.

  BLAINE LEE, THE POWER PRINCIPLE

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG DAY AT DOG-TRAINING CAMP, and Carson and I were both tuckered out after hours of learning about dogs, practicing obedience and a long swim in the lake. Joining some other campers in the lounge, we settled down to play a board game. Understandably not thinking much of the hard floor, Carson stepped up onto the couch, settling herself behind me as I perched on the edge of a cushion.

  “You shouldn’t let her do that,” another camper warned me. I was surprised—I had thought it pretty clear that clean dogs were allowed on the camp’s rugged furniture. “Oh, I know they said it was all right, but you still shouldn’t let her do that. She’s trying to top your scent.”

  For all the world, Carson looked like a dog trying to take a nap. If she was topping my scent, whatever that meant, it would be hard to distinguish that behavior from sleeping. Seeing that I was confused, the woman explained further. “You should never allow dogs on furniture or in your bed. That’s how they end up dominant. You know, alpha, top dog. When you let her put her scent on top of yours, you’re letting her be the boss.” The woman looked somewhere between horrified and disgusted that I didn’t understand these basics of dog behavior. But she persisted. “I’m not making this up. Wolves live in packs, you know, and the alpha is the top wolf. And dogs have packs too, and they need an alpha. If you let your dogs on the furniture, they think they’re alpha. But you should be the alpha. Otherwise, your dogs won’t listen to you. They won’t respect you.”

  “Are you saying that if I let a dog on furniture I’ll be unable to control them?” She nodded, evidently glad that I was catching on. “But if I can tell the dog to get off the furniture or out of my bed and they listen to me, isn’t that enough? Wouldn’t that show respect?” She hesitated. I turned to Carson and quietly asked her to get off the couch. Half asleep, Carson got up and moved to the floor. “I think she’s just sharing the couch, but she’s fine with giving it up if I ask. Isn’t that the point here?”

  “I guess so,” she replied slowly. “I suppose you might just be lucky—she’s a nice dog. You might be able to get away with it with one dog, like her, but if you had a pack of dogs like I do, you’d understand how important it was.”

  I apologized to Carson and invited her back up on the couch. She looked at me as if I had lost my mind, hopped back up and settled down with a sigh. I didn’t have the heart to tell the well-meaning woman that the other six dogs at home were equally nice, that they all get off the couch when
I ask, and that most of them sleep in my bed every night. I just smiled, patted my nice dog gratefully, and turned my attention to the game. While we played, Carson stayed comfortably tucked up against my back, looking like she was asleep but possibly hard at work topping my scent.

  Though her advice was filled with all-too-common misinformation about what constitutes the behavior of leadership, the well-intentioned woman was right about one thing. Unlike our human friendships, our relationships with our dogs include an obligation to provide leadership. Leadership is as important to dogs as food, water, shelter and love. It is, so to speak, the emotional air they breathe. If we are uncomfortable with issues of power, if we think that being humane means not setting clear rules for our dogs, we may ultimately be guilty of great cruelty. We may work diligently to provide the finest food and veterinary attention and do everything in our power to make their lives comfortable in countless ways. But we still may not fully meet our dogs’ needs. If we fail to provide leadership, we have failed our dogs. At the heart of many dog behavior problems lies a lack of appropriate leadership. Humans are not put to sleep for failing to provide leadership for their dogs; countless dogs have lost their lives for want of it.

  SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

  The dog’s need for leadership and our obligation to both honor and provide for this need has nothing to do with the whole dominion-over-the-animals approach brought to us courtesy of Judeo-Christian ideology. It has nothing to do with viewing the human race as superior and animals as inferior. This is not a matter of belief, though I’ve had more than one client earnestly tell me, “I don’t believe in setting rules for others.” Unfortunately for the dogs of such folks, the emotional response and “beliefs” have nothing to do with what the dog needs. If we agree to share a life with a dog, then we are obligated—if we are honest and compassionate people—to embrace and honor all that means. And in this case, we must accept that the canine’s deep need for leadership springs from the realities of canine culture, of life as a social animal. The moment we put on the collar, we have entered into a covenant that promises a dog that we will provide for his needs. All of them.