subject: nothing much

I’ve been curiously unSnarlied lately, maybe because in general I’m just kind of lying low, a bit tired of worrying about dogs. At the same time, I’ve been especially grateful for both dogs now that I semester is ending and I’m looking at more days at home (yay!) and then again more days at home (sometimes a little disorienting and lonely). Last night Pearl and Kosmo were in particularly good moods, Kosmo determined to play and Pearl frequently on her back kicking her legs around as she hasn’t done in ages. They were relaxed and happy and thus so was I.

With her D.A.P collar and her latest homeopathic remedy, Pearl has had long moments of very peaceful sleep during which she gives off an energy that is bordering on the Lucy-like. This is entirely new and enormously heartening. It’s weak and fleeting, but it’s there. And since Kosmo’s recent blood tests revealed healthy liver enzymes, he’s cleared for regular Rimadyl, with the result that he’s spry and lively. (I know that Rimadyl is not without its detractors, but for now, I’m blocking up my ears to the criticism on the grounds that I can’t argue with his renewed energy, ability to rise from his feet without a struggle, and improved appetite for food and play.)

Meanwhile, I’m reading Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation, avoiding anything to do with slaughter houses, but finding lots of interesting observations on animals and on autism, both of which interest me inordinately. Tidbits that ring true: fearful animals are also the most curious, a claim that makes sense out of what have always seemed conflicting behaviors: if Pearl is so spooked—and she is—why does go right up to something that clearly unnerves her? Dogs are predators. You can’t tell me this enough; I have real trouble keeping it in my head. But somehow Grandin is getting it in there, where it’s rattling around with other observations—for instance, Pearl’s chase reflex, which is instantaneous and really seems to have a life of its own. And I love thinking about our lives with these predators who agree to live among us not only peacefully, but with deep, loving bonds.

kerfuffle

Bones are making them loco. Those great frozen raw bones that have given me many a peaceful moment, dogs happily gnawing away, have suddenly become the source of much snarling and snarking. Last night, a full-scale fight broke out, with neither dog backing down and both of them barking and snapping their teeth. Because of all the noise they were making, I couldn’t really tell what was going on, and probably the whole thing sounded a lot worse than it was, especially after Patrick and I joined the fun by shouting so loudly that my throat hurt for the rest of the night. But when Kosmo kept coming back at Pearl, who kept coming back at him, I did what you aren’t ever supposed to do, that is, get yourself in the middle of it because you might get bitten. Having never heeded such advice before to no bad end, I stuck my hand between them and.. . . got bitten. I had two small, shallow punctures and bruised bone that got swollen and hurt quite a lot under the circumstances, but not much in the scheme of things. Still.

Kosmo has never had a flap with anybody. Sometimes he irritates other dogs by trying to climb on them and sometimes he barks agitatedly at another dog, but his only “fight” occurred when the former neighbor’s dog rushed out and knocked him to the ground, her jaws at his throat. Lucy flew into the middle of things, knocked the other dog away, then backed her out of our yard and onto her own porch, where she remained staring at Lucy until Lucy took a small , purposeful step forward and frightened the dog into the house. Lucy, among her innumerable gifts, was a big, brave dog who knew so thoroughly how to handle herself that she never got into a single fight because she didn’t have to. And that last bit was a shameless digression into the virtues of Lucy, the scope and nature of which I never tire of detailing. And as you can see, Kosmo’s fight wasn’t really a fight at all because he immediately panicked and gave way. It was, if anything, an excuse for me to talk about Lucy.

For a long time, Pearl feared Kosmo. If he snipped at her for some infraction, she’d flee, then creep back and lick his face until he seemed molified. But right around the same time that the rest of the problems escalated—and if you believe in the notion, possibly when she reached “social maturity—she began to snip back. Encounters once barely perceptible to the human eye grew larger and louder, though never as large or loud as the this time, when, perhaps because she’d been stealing everything of Kosmo’s all day long (Pearl subscribes completely to the statement, “Everything here is MINE”) he finally snapped, literally. She reached in to take his bone and the kerfuffling began. Though I realize that blaming Pearl for the episode looks dangerously like canine profiling, Kosmo’s 10+ years of living peacefully does speak loudly for his general character. Unlike Pearl, he was not looking for trouble. On the other hand, he didn't walk away from it.

After the fur stopped flying, I felt bruised in more ways than one, and it seemed to me that Pearl needed to spend the night in the pokey, sleeping things off. Kosmo needed a long time-out and a chance to think about what he’d done. I also decided that all bones must go promptly in the trash can, along, alas, with the peace of mind they brought.

ten things to like about Pearl

1. When it comes to sports, she’s a team player. She never quarrels about what position she has to play. If Patrick and I are tossing the ball to each other and then to Pearl, she happily catches it and gives it back to the right person in the rotation. If we’re hitting a tennis ball with a wiffle bat (which is fun for about 4 minutes), she cheerfully scrambles to catch the hit ball, then brings it back to the pitcher.

2. She plays fair. When Patrick and I are both throwing her a ball or frisbee, she returns the object to each of us in turn.

3. She does all of the above even though she’s obsessed with balls and frisbees. She doesn’t like being left off the team, however, but that’s a matter for the other list.

4. No matter how excited she is, you can say, “Put the ball in my hand,” and she’ll put it right in your hand. If you drop it, she’ll get it and put it back in your hand. If you don’t want the ball and someone else does, you can say, “Give the ball to X,” and she will.

5. From a purely subjective point of view (that is, as far as I’m aware, no one else considers this a virtue), Pearl makes odd little noises in her throat when she takes food from my hand, little snorfling sounds that never cease to amuse me.

6. Because she knows the names of her toys, she can bring you a big rubber chicken with all the triumph of having done a job exceptionally well, which indeed she has; all you had to say was, “Pearl, go find your chicken.” For most of us, looking triumphant with a foolish yellow chicken in our mouths would be impossible.

7. No matter what hour of the night, if I wake and she sees me, she makes one of those little scuffy noises in her throat and licks my face.

8. Pearl is a world-class dreamer: she runs, she barks, she kicks, she furrows her brow—often and energetically, which is no wonder, I suppose, for a dog whose mind and body are as active as hers.

9. She will do anything for food. Which is also true of me.

10.She is always around, a good half of which aroundness belongs on the other list, but a good part of it belongs here, too, where it means that right now, she is sleeping on the bed next to where I’m sitting. If I get up and go somewhere, she’ll come along. Not everybody likes a dog who follows them around, but I have dogs (and cats, too) for just this reason-- for the sound of soft breathing just a few feet to my right, for the look of fur ruffling slightly in the breeze coming through the window.

on rereading Vicki Hearne

Vicki Hearne, whose death I have mourned extravagantly, does not like behaviorists, or clickers. She also declares war on any theorist who would scrupulously strip from observations of animals all “anthropomorphic” language—as though such a thing as an unanthropomorphized language were actually possible, come to think of it. But to Hearne, an animal trainer, the language that trainers use—a dog might be, for example, “courageous” or “shy”—forms a structure far more descriptive than the stripped language of the behaviorists, whose observations are saturated with assumptions but masquerade as neutral observance (I just editorialized, but probably not much). Hearne, in Adam’s Task, must counter a claim, for example, that an animal can’t hide—no kidding, the prevailing wisdom actually maintained such a notion on the grounds that hiding implies a sense of self that animals don’t have—with an unassailable reminder that prey animals wouldn’t last long if they didn’t know how to hide, an assertion so sensible that you’d think it woud hardly need stating.

Since the time Hearne wrote, behaviorists have changed enough that I can read Cultural Clash, the work of a behaviorist, and Adam’s Task without heaving one or the other against a wall or imagining that the authors might do the same to each other.. And after the overheated discourses that preceded behaviorism as a way to think about my relationship with Pearl, Culture Clash felt clean and head-clearing. To recap the previous training:

Overheated Discourse #1: Be the dominant pack leader. Correct your dog as decisively as necessary (prong collars, for instance) in order to show the dog who is in charge. A difficult dog is merely the result of a weak leader, all dogs being, presumably, inherently malleable. The problem with this form of training is that when you have a dog who by temperament requires not just a strong leader, but a trainer with exceptional professional skills, you are never permitted to imagine that the dog is even a part of the problem you’re having—you with your very much unexceptional, amateur abilities, the nature of which you have never concealed from anyone, least of all yourself..

Every situation is a test. Who goes out the door first? It had better be you. The dog is stealing food? It obviously doesn’t respect you. If you’re like me and incline to self-doubt and hand-wringing, this method is more fun than sitting in front of nuns at children’s mass and not lurching to your knees quickly enough. A side benefit of this plan is that for a spooked dog like Pearl, dominating can feel a lot like scaring the beejeesis out of, which was part of what happened to Pearl and made her worse.

So the behaviorist comes along and says the dog is stealing food because it wants the food and can get it. It flies out the door in front of you because it’s excited about going outside. You can see, I think, how liberating such a notion might be.

Overheated Discourse #2: This method reacts strongly to the other and with any luck at all will get you a long speech on how we would never think to put leashes on dolphins and yank them around. I have respect for the people who occupy these positions because they want, above all, to do no harm and because they appear to be prepared to do any action upwards of a hundred times if that’s what it takes; it’s a method strongly based on repetition. Unfortunately the very sweet trainer we hired began immediately to talk to Pearl in a high-pitched voice, making Pearl’s name into two shrill syllabus thusly: Perr raaaall. It was not, I thought at once, the way to talk to Pearl, who needs no cranking up whatsoever and who, I am inclined to think, is capable of seeing such behavior as foolish and irritating, as, not surprisingly, did I. After the speech about leashes and dolphins, we embarked on a number of well-meaning projects that involved my walking back and forth past strangers as many times as would stop short of getting us arrested, all the while stuffing treats into Pearl’s mouth in an effort to associate strangers with treats. If a 20 minute walk involved incidents, take ten 2-minute walks instead (one day I made it all the way to 5), not a bad idea except that it really did involve giving up a day job and, I was convinced, confused Pearl mightily, though she bore it with good humor. No doubt inevitably, the whole experience ended badly when the trainer, trilling Perr raaaall and trying to get Pearl to learn how to bow (don’t ask) finally incurred Pearl’s ire (I sat on the sofa holding my breath, absolutely certain that the trainer was going about things the wrong way), and Pearl chased her into a chair and wrapped her mouth gently but decisively around the trainer’s ankle.

I did not, however, see the trainer’s chairing as evidence that the method itself was wrong, just that the trainer wasn’t quite up to the task. But then again, neither was I, being perversely unwilling to spend hours doing the same things over and over again with minimal effect. Nor did treats make walking any easier: Pearl would walk beautifully next to me (she was always a champion heeler in class)as long as I gave her a treat; the moment I stopped, she pulled just as badly as she always had. So you can imagine what a relief it was to hear Nancy say, “Of COURSE you don’t want to take ten small walks every day. WHO WOULD?” or “OF COURSE Pearl pulls when she isn’t getting a treat. Why wouldn’t she?”

But getting back to Vicki Hearne, who is, I hasten to say, a very tough cookie in her own right, I find myself utterly absorbed in the world she creates, the determination she brings to understanding dogs and horses, to learning to talk about them in a way that is deeply humane and acknowledges both their interdependence and their autonomy. I haven’t said that Hearne is also a philosopher, a point of no small note, but perhaps a story for another day. For now, I return to Adam’s Task having no idea what Hearne would do with Pearl, currently downstairs barking insistently about something, but I’m absolutely certain it wouldn’t involve yanking or warbling.

some days are better than others

Pearl has always had good days and bad, with the bad days in the past being very bad indeed. What has always made some days difficult is the level of her pitch and the corresponding lack of connection: she’s revved up, insistent, rarely interested in doing what I ask. Since the new training, her bad days are not nearly as bad or as numerous as they once were. But yesterday was a doozy.

It began right away, with Pearl’s clearly needing to burn off some energy first thing in the morning. Though the Tug-a-Jug slows eating breakfast way down and makes her work for it, she was nevertheless on high speed while we tried to eat our own breakfast, pacing around and barking at the door. She didn’t have to go outside, we had already determined; she just wanted to. So eventually, but only after she settled down, (in case you're listening, Nancy), I stopped reading the newspaper and took her out in the yard to chase balls and frisbees. We played for quite a long a time, the first of many such outings throughout the day.

For the rest of the time, she bullied Kosmo, barked and clawed at the window when someone walked by (and before I could get into the room to stop her [hi Nancy!]), barked every time another dog in the neighborhood barked, and managed to behave so badly on a walk that we turned around and came right back after Pearl spent the first half block pulling and lunging at dogs and people. To cap things off, she met my hand with her teeth when I didn’t give her something she wanted, which is different from trying to bite me only if you think small calibrations matter. In short, she was obnoxious from morning til evening in just about every way she knows how to be. Bear in mind that she’s taking calming Chinese herbs, without which she is markedly worse, and wearing a D.A.P collar. And still.

Sadly, when Pearl has a bad day, I do, too. I slump around wondering just how much time and energy I can continue to put into making her reasonable. I get exhausted at the thought of working with her. I consider giving up—and to tell you the truth, I haven’t yet shaken that notion. But I wonder what “giving up” actually means, or can mean. I’ve already let go of any idea I had that Pearl would be a dog I could take on vacation or other outings, walk off leash, take along for company in the car—in short, do all of the things I’ve done with every other dog I’ve ever had. I’m working with her so that perhaps she can eventually be around people without trying to bite somebody and so that she doesn’t make our lives miserable by doing every day all the things she did yesterday.

Maybe I can give up on making her more sociable. She can continue to stay away from people who come into the house as she’s doing now: if you don’t get to be around people, you can’t bite anybody. And we can continue to monitor her so that she never again gets used to barking out windows or through fences.

It’s very hard not to read a bad day as evidence that no matter how much progress we make, real change hasn’t happened and won’t happen. Perhaps instead, I tend to think, everything is just precariously held in check, balancing temporarily on a thin line between the barely acceptable and the completely unacceptable. Some days, the slightest tip lands her back in the bad old days, rocketing around as if she’d never left. And there I am, right there with her, my own emotions tumbling with equal unpredictability into completely familiar territory.

reading, a bit of ranting, a wolf story, and a little snarly

If I get nothing else out of Natalie Angier’s NYT article, “Even in Animals: Leaders, Followers, Schmoozers,” I will always have this sentence: “Recent research suggests that highly sensitive, arty-type humans have a lot in common with squealing pigs and twitchy mice. . . .” I’m pulling that right out of context and flinging it into the wind. Do with it what you will.

Looking further into the article will cause a less felicitous reaction because, if you’re like me, you’ll be grinding your teeth at the headline and picture of birds lined up and saluting a strutting, fascistic leader bird. What, you will wonder, does this article have to do with the headline? I’ll tell you what: as the distinctions between humans and animals continues to blur, as the research in the article (and many elsewheres) suggests, we are finding fewer and fewer categories that make "human" a special instance. And if indeed, (don’t look now!) we are all animals of one kind or another, certain humans must scramble to find something in the research that helps to undergird that greatest of all sustaining hierarchies, the "natural" difference between us and them, fill in the us and them of your choice. I follow, you lead. I lead, you follow. By god, even the birds do it! So quit your complaining about the boss. I’ve skipped a few steps here, but you see where this is going.

The problem with articles like Angier’s, which is amusing and dimly informative, is that they necessarily oversimply what is incredibly subtle and complicated. Even if we get ourselves mesmerized by the leader/follower thing, we want to be very, very careful about what significance we give it. So, for instance, in studying geese, this result, “The only reliable predictor of goose leadership was boldness—the willingness to approach a new item like a scrap of carpet. " The bold bird is also, it turns out, the best at getting food. Other birds then follow this bird, the researchers claim, to get their own food. And pretty soon,the pictures claim, you have birds lined up saluting a natural leader. That is, they’ve formed a hierachy in which some people (or birds) matter more than others (because the cartoonish birds in the picture not only appear to be following, but also cowering , and they all look remarkably alike, undistinguished in all senses of the word).

That notion of the leader bird reminded me of endearingly wacky or wackily endearing Shaun Ellis (The Man Who Lives with Wolves) who writes about, yes, living with wolves. But not just living with, but living like, complete with eating what they eat (details that will stick with squeamish readers like myself) and trying in every way to experience life as wolves live it so that he can see them better, understand them more. He claims, among things, that when we think that the puppy who comes first out of its litter to greet us is the dominant dog, we are wrong; the dominant wolf, Ellis argues, would never be the one to encounter a new situation. The dominant wolf is always, first and foremost, protecting himself—and being protected by the pack—so that he/she is safe to procreate. Whether Ellis is right or not isn’t the point,. His rather large quibble with the standard interpretation reminds us that all interpretations are shaped by the structures we bring to them, the assumptions we apply.

So now that I’ve blathered on about everything but Snarly, I’ll end by saying that a dominance paradigm never worked with Pearl and was arguably the single most damaging relationship I formed with her. It exhausted me and frightened her. Does this mean that I now think of us as equals? I’m wondering: does it matter? We are, in Donna Haraway’s term, companion species. What we are trying to do in living together is to communicate across a rather large difference. I’m bigger, older, smarter in some ways, have more money, and can probably sing better than Pearl. What I understand less is what she can do (smell more and hear better, to name just two) that I can’t. As we live together, I’m trying hard to understand more about her, less about me, and a good deal about the two of us together. It isn’t easy, but it’s necessary.

ouch

After abandoning her Tug-a-Jug breakfast toy this morning (having consumed half of its contents), Pearl skulked into the kitchen. “What’s wrong, Pearl?” I asked. She held up the left foot, scene of so many sad encounters. I won’t repeat the foolish coo-like thing I did at this point until I caught myself, but I did take hold of her paw, check it for any sore places, put it back down, and eventually shut up. Later in the day—skipping ahead in the story—I was holding her leg and checking it out carefully, having remembered somewhere in the course of the day that the first manifestation of Lucy’s cancer was a limp. (Emotional memory is way ahead of cognitive memory, I’m told, and lots more precise.) Anyway, I think she’s probably pulled a muscle in her. . . hmmm. What is it? Leg, I guess, for want of a more specific word.

Again???? You might ask, not even knowing about the freak-accident slice that tore her leg open when she, speeding around the yard, made contact with a tiny edge of sharp rock and might have bled to death if Patrick hadn’t seen her do it and promptly applied pressure to the wound, holding on tight all the way to the pet ER. I should say that he was aided in his perception by Pearl herself who, he reported, stopped dead, looked up with an “Uh oh” expression, and immediately ran to him.

Pearl seems a bit hapless to me, though Patrick insists that it’s her athleticism that keeps getting her into trouble. His perspective comes from years of playing baseball and from spending a part of every vacation when he was a kid in the emergency room (something that would have led me to leave him at home, frankly). Nonetheless, we are fencing the other part of the yard to provide a less obstacle-ridden terrain for frisbee and ball playing. And now, of course, we’re letting her rest her leg by not tempting her into any games.

Pearl hobbled is a very nervous dog. When she’s not completely able, or, as Patrick says, at 110%, she clearly feels incredibly vulnerable, the frail, unsteady wildebeest being stalked by the predator. She spends every available moment under the bed and reacts spookily to almost anything I pick up, move, or carry. She reminds me a little of me in January 09, when an injury to my knee made me feel out of sync with my environment--so much so that I felt a little menaced by life in general, afraid to go out if I couldn’t move quickly and nimbly, if I couldn’t cross streets at a clip. It was a terrible month, after which I recommitted to a light box because I’d clearly fallen into that peculiar depression that comes with unstructured time (long semester break) and the steady retreat of light.

Some dogs seem to get depressed by an injury only if it lasts a long time, and some dogs, I suppose, might be capable of ignoring pain so thoroughly that they immediately reinjure themselves. Pearl notices, minds, and, much to our initial surprise, takes a pretty sensible approach to healing. But like everything else she does , she experiences injury in quick-time, reacting instantly with both physical and emotional signs, reorganizing the shape of her world in ways large and small, looking for comfort and safety in a territory that again seems full of danger.