we have our third lesson

Pearl and I set off yesterday morning to meet Nancy at her home in Hampstead, which is about 45 minutes from me on a good day. We left an hour ahead of our appointment since it was raining and and thus potentially not good. I strapped Pearl (in her travel halter) into the car and hoped I wouldn’t convey any of the anxiety I’d been feeling. The first time Pearl met with Nancy, Pearl lunged and barked like, I’m not exaggerating, a junkyard dog. I guess it was, in its way, the best introduction to the problem of Pearl’s reactive aggression. But I wasn’t looking forward to Snarly's reprising her role. Not only is such behavior startling, but it also makes my heart sink. So I get nervous about getting nervous and heartsick, part of the pattern of reciprocal anxiety that keeps Pearl and me in such crazed harmony.

When Nancy came out to meet us, wearing a rain hat, Pearl lunged and barked again, but not with the same abandon as last time. I settled her down, and within about 15 minutes, she seemed to like Nancy enough to wag and lick and to come to her when Nancy called. We had to work inside because of the weather. Clearly Pearl was doing better: she was less wary, more relaxed, and, as Nancy said at the end of our session, didn’t “stalk"her once. She did, however, try to bite her, but more on that later.

I had been working with the clicker, getting Pearl to touch a variety of objects that I held out and looked at. It took Pearl no time at all to master the skill, and Nancy was now building on it, getting Pearl to touch a long stick-like metal thing with a ball at the end of it. She also got her to put her head all the way into an oatmeal canister in one of several efforts we’re making to diminish Pearl’s fear of objects. Because Pearl is capable of lunging at people when they move, Nancy wanted to habituate Pearl to movement, so Nancy began to touch her own legs with the stick and ball object, walk briskly while clickiing and giving a treat every time Pearl touched the ball, getting Pearl to touch the ball on Nancy’s foot, shins, knees.

Then she wanted to see if Pearl would move between her legs so that she could further desensitize Pearl to human legs and movement. Nancy said, “She’s doing so well I’m going to push her as far as I can.” She lifted her leg to start the next move. . . and Pearl went after her. It was the exact move, in fact, that had gotten Nancy bitten the last time, though at that time she was merely attempting to tie her shoe. This time, Pearl’s bite was really soft, barely a bite at all. But there it was: at the end of about an hour and half of congenial petting, playing, and training, Pearl sparked.

“Talk me through this,” I said. “I know it’s unreasonable, but I have trouble not thinking that my dog just isn’t nice.” We talked about the book Culture Clash, which is terrific for destabilizing useless anthropomorphic notions about dogs. And Nancy reminded me that in the wild, Pearl’s behavior would keep her alive. “It’s what wolves do,” she said. Wolves react to anything new, anything they haven’t seen before,--like Nancy’s rain hat. We breed this out of domestic dogs, Nancy said, and Pearl’s behavior, her extreme reactivity, puts her on the very outer edge of domestic pet world, a world in which ordinary objects and a wide range of people are not supposed to be seen as threatening, but as normal.

I was thinking about the time that I took Pearl to the local pet store for a bath, and her response was roughly the equivalent to what a squirrel would do if you plucked one up from your yard and put it in a bath tub. And I was thinking that if I really want to get in touch with wildness—as I always imagine I do—then I had a pretty good example right in the house with me. But I was also thinking that Pearl is making real progress because of Nancy, whose skills are such that she could probably take on bathing squirrels if the spirit moved her.

When I left Nancy’s training room, I found that in my over-wrought arrival, I’d left some light or other on in my car and now had a dead battery. So out in the rain we stood waiting for the guy from the nearby garage to jump start my car. Not only was he a stranger, but he was wearing a hat, so didn’t have a chance: Pearl lunged and barked with such ferocity that he said “Oh my.” Then he stood way back. The car started right up with the help of the handy device he brought along, and Pearl I headed home, both of us exhausted for different reasons.

can a dog lose her mind?

“Is Pearl losing her mind?” asked Randy sheepishly, as if asking if a beloved relative had a drinking problem. “I don’t think so,” I said, laughing because the notion of a dog losing her mind struck me as improbable. Randy, our loving and gentle pet-sitter, was one of Pearl’s first visitors, sees her once a week, and has spent at least 10 days a year for the past three years with her when we’re away. In the last six months, Pearl had been hiding from him: the minute he walks in the door, he says, she runs up, wags hello, and then, in the same motion, runs upstairs and crawls (now laboriously because she’s full grown) under the bed, where she stays. To our immense chagrin, Randy reported that Pearl spent an entire week under the bed while we were at the beach last summer, emerging only to go outside and to eat.

If Randy is right, and 6 months is a marker, then Pearl became more fearful, more aggressive, and even less predictable at the time of her 3rd birthday. I certainly noticed that she nipped a guest when he reached for his shoes, that she was more fearful than ever on our walks, and that she continued, with Kosmo, to bark ferociously at anybody with the temerity to walk past the house. Did this mean she was losing her mind? Can a dog lose her mind?

Dogs are often diagnosed with forms of dementia as they age. We treat dogs in various ways for anxiety, obsessiveness behavior, and for other behaviors that seem to limit their capacity for enjoyment. But somehow the notion of losing a mind seemed a distinctly human construction, something we said—but perhaps less and less—to explain a set of circumstances that couldn’t possibly apply to a dog. Could they?

I might say, “I thought I was losing my mind” if, for example, I distinctly remembered putting my keys in my pocket, but when I reached for them, I found my pocket empty. Or perhaps someone says he knows me, but I don’t know him, could swear I’ve never seen him before. “Thank goodness I’m not losing my mind, “ says a colleague when he discovers that other people share his reading of a news event. So “losing our minds” these days is, as nearly as I can figure, a kind of Twilight Zone experience wherein our perceptions seem to have gone suddenly and inexplicably amok.

In this sense, then, Pearl’s perceptions of threats where there are none, fears of walking on Keswick past Oakdale (but not in the stretch before Oakdale), her recoil at someone taking off his shoes, her fierce determination to hold at bay anyone coming within twenty feet of her—all of these might resemble my sudden fear last night that all of those people mobbing the escalator were going to cause a fatal pile-up like the one that happened at Memorial Stadium in 1964.

So maybe dogs do lose their minds much as we do, temporarily if we’re lucky and without dire consequence now that we understand that losing our minds is not quite the same as losing our keys, now that our vocabularies are a little more discerning and a good deal more tedious. We all made it safely up the escalator last night, and I’m happy to report that since our new training regime, Pearl has rediscovered the pleasures of Randy’s company and the considerable advantages to Keswick in the blocks above Oakdale.

the tao of cute

The first time Pearl met her gentle, holistic vet, Pearl was in high Snarly mode.
“Good thing she’s so cute,” said Grace, homeopathist, as she watched Pearl run obsessively between the door and the window of her office, all the while letting Grace know that a move in the wrong direction would result in something decidedly unpleasant. The remark caught me a little off-guard, as did my own perception of Pearl, later standing outside the vet’s office with Patrick while I made future plans with Grace . As I looked out the door, and before I could fully orient myself, I thought “What a beautiful dog.” I was looking at Pearl, sitting high and lean next to Patrick, her fur aglow in the sun, but hadn’t yet realized it.

Pearl’s looks have been forced to compete with what I wanted her to look like, ie., like her predecessor English Shepherd, Lucy the Good. Lucy, sturdy of bone structure, fell on the large end of breed size. She was tri-colored, with a strong black saddle of impossibly shiny and soft fur across her back. She had freckles on her nose and legs and pouches at her cheeks. From the moment I saw her, I was smitten with her looks, even as her stomach sagged from giving birth and her tail, which would grow large and plume-like, was still skinny. I remember standing at the SPCA and proudly pulling her pouchy cheeks out: “Look at this!” I said, as though everyone would immediately see the extraordinary beauty of loose facial skin.

When my friend Randee, with her penchant for smaller dogs with furry muzzles, first met Lucy, she cupped her hands around Lucy’s face and said, “A face only a mother could love,” no doubt thinking that I agreed. But I agreed instead with a neighbor, whose funny looking dog Bob was an avid frisbee player: “I don’t choose dogs by looks, “ she said, “ but I would want your dog because of what she looks like.”

Pearl, on the other hand, is sable and white and as close to small as the breed gets. She’s also lanky and incredibly agile, with much thinner fur than Lucy’s and a tendency to sometimes smell like a dog, as Lucy never did. In other words, besides being the temperamental opposite of Lucy, she is also, breed limitations withstanding, her aesthetic opposite. So the idea that Pearl might be cute was something that escaped me at first and still has the capacity to catch me by surprise.

Is it, then, as Grace said, a good thing that Pearl is cute? The quality of cuteness, we are beginning to think is an evolutionary feature, the cuteness of baby animals a way of making them compelling to us, of making us care about them despite their tendency to offer us enormous challenges, to require of us immense energy and patience. “Cute” suggests many things, but perhaps primary among them, it suggests vulnerability. With vulnerability, need, and with need, the seduction to care for and about.

In the early days of Pearl, but with nothing very particular in mind, I made the picture below the screen saver on my computer at work. The picture was taken during the period when Pearl’s ears, which have now settled on both sides of her head, seemed to be traveling, so that on any given day you might find them anywhere. When I pointed the camera at her, she looked up, causing her errant ears to stand straight up, if floppily, on her head. Though I didn't think about it then, I see it now as a picture that catches something vulnerable about Pearl not otherwise in view at a time when she was all barking demands, snapping teeth, willfulness. And it’s a picture that probably kept me connected to her until she needed me less, or differently, when I could replace it with my current screen saver, a shot in which Pearl seems to be laughing--at me, of course, and not necessarily with me, but certainly not imploringly and certainly not with the kind of heart-melting cuteness that could save a person's life.

two dogs and a dirty stove

Last night, the oven reached that critical point of too many pizzas cooked directly on its racks. That is, when we pre-heated it for a Trader Joe’s chili relleno,the cheese bits adhering to the bottom of the oven started to smoke heavily. But it all began subtly, only growing eye-wateringly dense with smoke as the oven heated up. In the moments before we noticed anything amiss, Pearl ran to me—eyes wider than usual, ears pressed to her head, her whole body a curve of worry. “What is it, Pearl?” I, dull human, ask. I have seen and heard nothing to frighten her. She jumps up on me and paws me in a slightly fevered way, then turns around and runs. I watch her, puzzled by the extent of her fear, but unable to make out its cause. And given Pearl, it could be anything, really. She disappears, only emerging with prompting from under the bed in the front bedroom, her favorite place to escape a vast number of unsettling possibilities.

Pets have warned me about smoke before, most notably Gilly, kind-hearted tabby cat. I’m sorry to say that for a longish period of my life, I was afflicted by a pyromania solidly based in a lack of common sense. In other words, I regularly set fire to things through sheer stupidity (note: few actions put an end to a romantic moment as decisively as will setting the curtains ablaze). Gilly’s heroism occurred when I lit a candle too close to a lamp shade, and the shade, made of god-knows-what material, began to smolder. Seeing it—as I did not—Gilly ran back and forth crazily between me and it until, at last, I looked in the right direction just as the shade caught and produced a flame. Good Gilly!

But Pearl, it seems, is harder for me to read, her actions more ambiguous, and truth be told, I’d have trusted the 12-pound Gilly to pull my inert body from a flaming room, but very much doubt Pearl will find the self-possession to do so. Nonetheless, she was trying to tell me something, and what she was trying to tell me was worth saying.

Later, rellenos cooking happily while the ceiling and exhaust fans diffuse the smoke, we find Kosmo sleeping peacefully on the floor beneath the fan, its blades whirring gently overhead.