Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Tomorrow I leave on summer vacation. I use that term loosely. For we are going to Ohio. This is not most people's idea of a satisfactory summer holiday objective. Winter, fall, or spring, either. I alone know the charms and hidden beauties of this heartland nowheresville. You guessed the punch line: I grew up there.

But it took having a dog to discover its urban wilds, the parks clinging to the precipitous banks of the rivers that made northeast Ohio the hotspot of a new industrial age. The dog I'm not referring to is the childhood bichon, Tarara Bheumdier (my mother has a finely tuned sense of humor, as evinced by her name for this poor small creature), for whom I will always carry a heavy load of guilt and simple love intermixed. Most dog owners today also carry similar burdens for their inadvertently maltreated childhood dogs. See, she was never off-leash in her entire life. That should be a punishable crime, by the way: if you never let your dog off-leash you should be made to forfeit, oh, I don't know, cigarettes after sex, or the new HBO series you would decline your best friend's wedding in order not to miss.

It was Mercy that made us discover Akron's great parklands. She was the cartographer of the most important places: wherever we went, we would stare at maps until they revealed all their largest green blots, indicating parks uncut by roads. Because Mercy demanded her wide off-leash runs--she was a terror without them--and because of her style, which meant that most of the time we had no idea where she was, just that she was assiduously tracking us. We would lose her someplace behind us, and she would eventually bound out onto the path far ahead of us, having drawn a great circle in the woods. Satisfied, she would disappear again.

But on this trip, Nelly will not be able to explore the trails at the great Oak Hill, in the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, or the Metroparks that hug the banks of waterways that sometimes smell highly suspicious. My favorite of these alas has dual perils: a police firing range across the street--not well situated for a dog who at the classic age of three developed a sound sensitivity that appears to be worsening--and prime rabbit habitat in the thicket of brambles by the edge of the Little Cuyahoga. It's a beautiful walk. But I don't walk without dogs anymore.

No, Nelly will stay here, first with one posse--Jolanta, with Juni and Izzy--followed by another, Janet, with Dixie and Willy. That's because of a Boston terrier.

When we had had Nelly for only a month or so, a little puppy who could fit into your palm, who slept next to my face except for the twelve times a night she woke, my father became gravely ill. We all rushed to Ohio, and we would have been sunk were it not for the fact that my sister had fully suburbanized. She had twelve-foot-high solid picket fence around the backyard, ready to repel invading armies (squirrels with two-inch muskets? boys wielding slingshots, trying to figure out how to get back to the 1935 Sunday comics?). While we spent ten-hour days at the hospital, Nelly and her "cousin," Monty the Boston terrier, spent their raucous days in the yard, chasing each other from one end to the other. I could tell by how far Monty's choked snorts of breathing carried through the bugless utopian air how much fun he was having. (Remind me to regale you with my unsolicited opinion on the ethics of breeding dogs who can't breathe properly, cope with normal extremes of temperature, or deliver their own young.)

The next time we visited, six months or a year later, Nelly was growling and lunging at her beloved cuz for such crimes as looking at a toy from across the room, or walking through the kitchen while Nelly manned her fortifications under the dining table.

The third time we visited--Merry Christmas, all the bells are ringing--we had apparently brought Cujo. When she spotted Monty through the glass door (and mind you, she was in his house while he was outdoors), her fangs were positively dripping. But whose dog was this?

That put an end to sweet cute Nelly, my darling Jelly Belly, my kind-hearted Little Lulu, being welcome in upper-middle-class Akron. But why can't we all just get along? Nelly is keeping her own counsel on this matter, and will sleep with a succession of friends here in firmly middle-class New York State for the next eleven days.

Perhaps her change of heart partakes of the same twist that visited my odd and echoing brain the other day when I paged past a newspaper ad for the movie "Hairspray." The banner quote read, "So joyful, so full of enthusiasm!" or so says A.O. Scott of the Times. What I saw read, "So joyful, so full of euthanasia." Like mother, like daughter.

Time Travel

Love and constancy. So simple, so necessary. So effing impossible to attain. Except if you're a dog. Then they come easy. Like scenting an ancient fish carcass from a quarter mile and applying it to the neck with the abandon of a fifteen-year-old girl at Macy's perfume counter. Love and constancy are as central among doggy attributes as teeth and tails.

What kind of idiot would not want a dog therefore? We're all a bunch of broken toys, wind-up keys askew, lurching from one bang-up to another, hurting and being hurt, sometimes smashing our heads onto sharp corners. The one thing we desire most is the one thing we most frequently sabotage. I'm thinking love is very much like the rear end of my station wagon on the day at the hardware store when I used it to express my innermost state. I put the car into reverse, applied the accelerator with a certain impatience, turned the wheel, and forgot that small detail, looking behind. The truck I hit had its own very long emotional history, so I did not need to go tell the owner that I had added another concavity to the many eloquent stories already recorded there. I did, however, have to pay $700 to remove from our car the marks of my own symbolic act.

At the New England Border Collie Rescue fundraising event ("Dog Dayz") my son and I went to this weekend--a living museum of the canine world's greatest works of art--I wondered about the advisability, or inevitability, of attempting to re-create the past in order to repair some big life dents. With one of these dogs in my life, I would have a shot at bringing Mercy back. And of returning to a time when, I foolishly persist in believing, hope and happiness, love and constancy, prevailed. You already know the end of this story, don't you?

My gambit is a little more circuitous, though. I want to try to help my son to repair the ugly dings he has lately acquired. The paint kit will be black and white, with a plumey tail--or, to put it another way, the dog I want, but now the dog he needs.

The seed was put in my head by our trainer, who noticed how much my son enjoyed playing agility with Nelly at the annual K9Crazy Playskool Christmas party; he still speaks with pride of how he got her to go through the candy-cane weave poles, even though it had quite a lot to do with a certain piece of hot dog. (Well, for me too: as I've written previously, my relationship with Nelly, as well as with my son, or my parents for that matter, is not so much a love-and-constancy thing as it is actually a food-provision-creates-love-and-constancy-mythology thing. But I'm in a nostalgic mood right now.) Wouldn't it help him mend, she said, to work with Nelly in class by himself?

Never give me an idea. Because it gives me an even better one. I saw how I could now have it all: the second dog I wanted, only it would "belong" to him, because he could name it, train it, and feed it. Of course, the responsibility would be mine--no eight-year-old could take it on--but with that last item in the list acting as magic potion, this dog would want to lie at his feet the way Nelly does at mine. In that simple act she gives me something I have never had before, and something I do not wish to live without.

This ridiculous idea was quickly squashed by the pragmatic heel of my dear friend (and dog trainer) Jolanta. She didn't know it, but she also might have saved me from walking into some deep psychic waters. I remained unaware that they would darkly close over my head, even though I had found myself floundering in them just last week.

I was driving away quickly, as if pain were a locale. When I reached Brooklyn, I would finally escape it.

The customary route is now the Battery Tunnel. But it costs money, and suddenly I was seeing before me a new life in which I would sit up late, stacking pennies into red paper rolls. Now it was late Monday night, rain-slicked, and the Brooklyn Bridge was empty. Free, also.

I followed the way off an old map stored in memory. Because this was the route of a thousand trips--after dinners, after parties, after movies; in the back of a cab with my head on someone's shoulder, or in a car I drove carefully, trying to stay in lane after a cocktail or two, so I could get to the place I used to call home. I can't remember. Maybe I heard this in a piece of song that floated by once, at twilight, say, and I'm imagining it was mine.

The front tires hit the upswing, and that's when I knew I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have gone anywhere near our past, which resides at the junction of physical place and embroidered memory. Now my old life was rising up before me, all around me. The lights of Brooklyn were almost singing, sirens of synesthesia in a mind neurologically altered by pain. They drew me toward the rocks, and I thought I was lost, until I looked through the windshield and saw myself, taking the corner at Douglass and Third Avenue, Mercy at the end of the leash. I was hoping she would squat soon, so I could get home, put on my pajamas, maybe watch the 11 o'clock news in bed together. Then I vanished, because I could no longer see through the windows. The rain. Or no. Not the rain.

So dangerous to go back. But I can't say I am sorry even now, when remembering the remembering makes me cry once more. I have a need to feel this way, I think. I know I will come danger's way again. Not now but someday soon, I know I will get another dog, for something to recall in the future, and for my son.

Babes

Nelly had a very Nelly day today. And I had a very childish one. That is, I was conversing a lot with my child today about Nelly, about animals and why they do what they do.

I gave my son the second-grade version of the ol' Cycle of Life rigmarole: everything is food for something else, and some things are food for lots of things, which is why so many of them are born (rabbits, mice). I couldn't remember what eats hawks. Then my son asked what eats humans. Hmmm. Something needs to get on the case immediately. Not much anymore, sweetie, which is the short answer to the long question of why I can't let you ride your bicycle on the road, or be my little man and take out the garbage all by yourself as you plead--too many of us.

We talked about the only controls there are on the human population: disease, natural disaster, and war. This wise seven-year-old proclaimed war a bad idea, and wondered why someone didn't just stop it. Indeed. However, he allowed, there had been three necessary wars: the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. I countered with something that just occurred to me in that moment (and you're going to be amazed how smart I am!): if someone could have, would have, rearranged the economic system of the South, so that the great plantations that were unworkable without masses of slave labor would no longer require it, the war might have been averted. Do you think the people of the South were genuinely more evil than the abolitionists of the North? Or is this great monument called Morality nothing but expedience in regal robes?

It will come as no surprise to the average church-goer that we are proud of our virtues, and ashamed of their failures. Because fail they must. "You're only human," your friends will soothe. But that is merely a half-truth: you are an animal in an environment that continually rewards or punishes you. And everything you do--whether you build a curlicued fable about the story or not--is in service to naught but your survival, your DNA, or your pleasure.

It's all about the resources, baby. I am an acolyte in the Marvin Harris Church of Economics Rule All Behavior (aka cultural materialism). If you possess a nose for truth (and to me truth is the only perfume worth smelling, the most sensually exciting substance on the planet), try reading Harris's Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches or Cannibals and Kings. See if there aren't vast clouds of sweet-smelling truth issuing from these books. His explanation of the sacred cows of India, for example, could not ring any more of truth if it had been cast of bronze and came with a clapper. These cows (and they have to be these cows, because another breed would not be suited to the requirements of their hard lives of labor and sporadic food) are resources in a very particular environment. The religious proscription against eating them is fol-de-rol applied later: the real reason they don't eat them is because they'd be eating the one possession they have that will enable them to survive.

Wars, man's inhumanity to man (TM), systems of governance and rituals and institutions and all manner of inexplicable behavior--all boil down to resources, presence or lack thereof.

Why didn't anyone stop those bad wars? Good question, darling. [Perhaps because they were all started by men, whose emotional development almost always seems unable to progress past the age of eight? Just kidding.] My son's face brightened. "Maybe I could stop wars!"

And you know what? In that moment something filled me with a proud spreading warmth, and I believed: yes. You just might grow up to be humankind's impossibility. For you are my child, and there is nothing you could not do. First, however, you might want to think about becoming a behavior analyst.

In some ways I think that children are idiot savants. Or at least they are keen watchers, like the dog. They see a barely perceptible tremor pass through an isolated muscle in the face, and they know it means something. Their sensorium is more acute than that of the grownup, and we have forgotten what it is like to see through youthful eyes.

Children do know things we don't. I have seen a child recoil in fear from a dog who was threatening harm (and perpetrated it, too), even though the dog's benighted owners never could figure out what signal preceded his bite. (The dog was ours, another lifetime ago, and is the subject for another time, provided I can gather the courage to revisit a black dog named Roscoe, sweet and sad and violent and treated therefore to the ultimate violence in return.) Smaller children, say under three, may not have developed this ability to react with appropriate fear--and I would guess this is the age group who most often visits the plastic surgeon after a session of ear-pulling. It would make sense that we would go through developmental stages of fear formation: Mercy up to the age of nine months thought children were cotton candy for dogs. Then they became like, um, snakes are to me. They make me scream, notwithstanding that they live in my house. But my three-year-old boy gleefully reached for one on the lawn.

It was a Nelly day because she has learned to jump out the car window if it is not rolled almost all the way up. She exercised this new agility event as I was dropping off at a birthday party--went and immediately offloaded the indigestibles from her colon right before the front door with the hostess looking on, then dashed around to the back looking for digestive system replacements (birthday cake would have done just fine), then ran in the back door and caused much squealing among the diminutive guests. I caught her as she sped through the kitchen in search of that cake.

At home, she got out of the car, and stood still as a stone as she spied a small brown furry creature down near the barn, who likewise froze, but for different reasons. Then, white blur.

My son asked, "Mom, what is Nelly saying?" I told him she was saying exactly the same thing he says when he see one of those pictograms of a soft ice cream cone as we drive by the dairy bar. Words wouldn't work as well. She said, I said, Yum.

Forgiveness

And if you have ever had a moral pointed at you,
you know it is not a completely pleasant feeling.
You are grateful for being improved, and you hope
you will do better next time,
but you do not want to think about it very much just now.

--Edward Eager, Half Magic

Sometimes the learning curve isn't much of a curve; it's a gentle incline, or it looks strangely like the pattern on a tic-tac-toe board. And sometimes it rockets so fast your head is five miles above your body, which wanly waves, "hey, wait up!" from a distance so great you can't really see it down there.

It may seem as though life, or events, has done this to you, but part of what you may learn with such velocity is that you always do it to yourself.

That is all I might say for now about my experiences this week. I hope to reunite my head with my body soon, whenever I can get a winch and tackle that long.

A similar situation may be encountered if you happen to get a border collie in your life. Last evening, at the end of a rail trail walk--Nelly on leash since the turn-around point, because not even I am immune to successive achingly hard lessons--there was an older (oh, OK: older than me) woman who was walking from the other direction. I could tell, even from far away, that her white and brown dog had that border collie look: flag of a tail, springy step. The woman, too, could see that we were related by the blood of our dogs. And perhaps something else. We had each put up our dogs in our respective cars when she approached. I could tell instantly that this woman, out alone for a walk with her companion at 7:30 on a Saturday night as I was, was lonely. We people think we don't show what we are, so long as we concentrate to make a smile. But the heart beats in a transparent chest.

So we trade origin stories--hers came from the prison system in Zanesville, Ohio, a place I know well (Ohio, not the prison system), and I tell her about Nelly's parents from West Virginia. Naturally, we both found our dogs on the internet, that which brings together and puts asunder in equal measure, if you know what I mean.

She left me with the bumper sticker sentiment she had recently read on a car at the grocery store parking lot: "I got a border collie--what was I thinking?"

Either something, or nothing. Either you were lured into such foolish acts unawares, as I had been. Or you knew you were doing something self-destructive and you didn't stop, because there are times when self-destruction is exactly what you want: the more of it you taste, the more of it you crave, like an amount of ice cream you recognize as disgusting but the sicker you feel, the sicker you want to feel. (The human mind is a very strange thing.) If you loved a border collie once, then you will have to love one again. It seems a minor problem that they are generally smarter than you. It is not a minor problem. It is a rather large one. But don't worry: you will learn nothing from it.

Because we don't learn unless we want to learn, or unless we have been kicked so forcefully we are helpless not to.

From Nelly's point of view, I punish her several times a day. I forget myself, say "Good dog!" and reach to scratch behind her ears. As if it's a good thing. In her language, of course, I have just threatened her with bodily harm. As soon as I see her duck her head from my reach, I feel Homer Simpson-ish: Doh! I have very nicely made a poisoned cue out of "good dog." And I wish I had a coin for every person who believes their rescued dog had to have been abused by being hit by humans' hands in a previous life--Look: he always flinches when patted on the head!

When Nelly was on the elimination diet for her nonexistent allergies, I had to force her mouth open and shove a pill down her throat a couple of times a day; I was not allowed to give her anything but her kibble, so the Way of the Cheese was forbidden to us. I had to drag her from where she cowered in her crate--oh, she saw the evil in my eye at bath time--and put her under running water and neem oil shampoo. You don't know pathetic unless you've seen a wet 20-pound border collie mix with pink stick legs looking at you with pleading eyes: Will you stop torturing me now? Please?

Then she is back once more at my feet wherever I sit. She is adhering to her necessary schedule, which dictates that by 10:30 p.m. I go upstairs to provide sufficient bolstering on the bed. She looks into my eyes and licks my nostril as if I had never caused her such distress. Over and over. She lets go.

So this may be what I am meant to learn. I have no misconception that Nelly is truly forgiving me, or even that it is in the canine cosmology to do so. And I'm not even sure that I am doing the same to her after an episode of bolting in which I hear her yipping off into the distance after some creature she means to catch, and I have to go pick up my child in five minutes, and it now means wading through a sea of poison ivy and then a swamp to find her, but only after a half hour of cursing and catastrophizing. By the next day I see her smiling at the door, and I take her for another walk.

All I know is that this functions as forgiveness. And that behavior is everything. This is what I will remember in my new life to come, the one that has apparently just begun. Together, Nelly and I walk with Blake: "Mutual forgiveness of each vice, / Such are the Gates of Paradise." You, too, can visit paradise. So far as I am aware, it is located somewhere in my house.

Sleeping Dogs

To be self-contained is a goal and a satisfaction. You have everything you need because it comes with you at all times. Everything else, then, is fillips upon the solid foundation of self-hood.

Not that I've achieved it. Though I have produced a fair quantity of sweat in that direction. But my dog is already there. I was thinking this last night, as I lay in a different bed at a friend's house. Because I was there, Nelly accepted this new place with no questions, hopping up onto the tall bed as soon as she saw me get into it, then turning around once, forming that almost perfect oval into which everything is tucked. She let go with a sigh--a sound that to me is ineffably sad, as if she'd said "Oh, well" to a lifetime of slights. But I know it doesn't carry emotion like that, although it may well be expressing satisfaction at being self-contained.

I myself have been suddenly thrust into a crash course on getting to my goal, because my world has just been detonated. The structure I had built, stone by stone, not consciously but merely by existing in the same space as another person, for seventeen years has just been announced a falsehood. Or something, since I may not have fully understood the explanation given me by someone who for the first time I have known him looked at me through eyes filled with cold hate. They scared me, those eyes. They were just like the hard, blank eyes of a dog who is about to leap, his mouth full of death.

And so everything I have known, and have wanted, is about to vanish. Life will be rebuilt from the ground up, absent the person I had pledged to do it with. And we had done it officially, the ancient way (something now bitterly regretted, I am given to understand), till death do us part. Actually, we were true to that part: the death that has occurred is of a life of shared hopes. They hit the earth with a dull clang.

And death is also appropriate to recall, because the immense pain--where a thin, sharp blade keeps going in, over and over into the same infected wound--is matched in memory only with one other. When my dog died, it had the effect of altering reality. The clouds seemed to stand still and stare. The blue and green outdoors vibrated, until I thought something was the matter with my eyes. I would see the wind lift the leaves of a bush and the sight gripped me. It was May, and the mourning doves came to torment only me: whoo-WHOO, whoo-WHOO with the volume knob stuck all the way high, so it echoed and echoed and echoed inside my brain and I wanted to shout Stop! Don't you know that I can't stand it? That I can't stand your reminding me every second that I live of what I lost? I can't stand it.

I feel this way now. It is impossible that this could be happening, this death of a life together. But now, as then, I have to accept that it is. Otherwise I will get lost in the hall of mirrors that is the recurrent waking dream: I am going to look out to the end of the drive, and I will see Mercy standing there, and she will be coming home from a long journey away.

But death is final. There is no heaven. When Nelly sleeps next to me, I touch her in the night. I am somewhat comforted.

["Nelly's World" is going on hiatus for a week or so. Please check back then!]

Impatience

Last night I read myself to sleep with Jon Katz. Or at least that was the intention, until I had to sit up straight to relieve the lurching in my stomach, and I was riffling through the pages to get past the disturbing image of a large man throwing a fit of anger and ignorance at a border collie, perhaps the most sensitive dog ever created by man.

I had resisted reading Katz for a long time--writers like me are the most sensitive people ever created by man--both because of this insecurity (What if he writes about dogs better than I can ever hope to?) and because everybody said I just had to. That is the surest way to get a person like me to never do something. Remember this.

If A Dog Year had been a movie, I would have been crying out, "No! Don't do that!" and "You blooming idiot!" to the screen. I might have turned it off or hidden my face in my hands. I can no longer witness suffering. And the bar on what constitutes suffering keeps getting lower. What has happened to me in my old age? My gut has gotten more and more tender, so that nothing more potent than the worldly equivalent of yogurt can be digested by it. I wonder how I will be able to re-visit Greece, the land of my ancestors where I had a rollicking junior year abroad lo these many years ago. Now, I fear, I would wander the rocky landscape with face averted, unable to watch anything but my own sandals, lest I see the overloaded donkey flogged, the mange-filled stray with his ribs showing and eyes pleading, the silver sharks with torn flesh, gasping to death on the deck of a boat. A beautiful country, reduced by me to the misery of its animals. There are other places in the world I daren't even think for one second about visiting.

All my life I have been labeled "too sensitive," but now it's beginning to get me in trouble. Everywhere I turn, my eyes fall on the dog who is being jerked by the neck, and who in an unseen second says, with his eyes, with his body lowered, "Why" or "That hurt" or "Please don't," and the message goes unheard. The human who is supposed to be caring for him does not even understand that something has been said--that something has been felt. Of course, I used to be one of those people too. One who operated from the inchoate assumption that dogs' necks are different from ours.

That is what makes this state of affairs worse: who now could have assigned me the role of judge? How have I come to feel as if I'm drowning in a sea of ignorance and pain created thereby?

My other label is "impatient." Perhaps the two things, sensitivity and impatience, go together. Because empathy with the pained is so unpleasant, I am impatient to have it end. I want people to look down at their dog and smile, because they have just noticed the good thing the dog has done, and then pay the dog for it. It's so simple, but it's a huge paradigm shift [a cliche, but the only thing that fits] for people who live in a punishment-ridden society, with parents who punished, and friends who punish, and a government that punishes. It's amazing to see how hard it is for people to do--even people who are in the midst of a dog-training session they paid for (as I was at yesterday), hearing a good trainer telling them that they have always have a choice to reinforce the good (she said, "Listen to what your dog is telling you, because he's telling you things all the time. But a dog who is continually ignored will stop speaking, and will start making decisions on his own") or to wait for something bad to happen--we only have eyes for this!--and then demand the short-cut to stopping it. The people all stood around while this was being told to them, jerking their dogs periodically, and nodding.

My Daughter Is a Predator

Every once in a while we get reminded that our projections are just that--an image we have placed on top of something. Something that then reasserts its independence against our will, and the paper tears, revealing its thin falseness. We project out of desire, or need, or pathology. And then one day, we are brought up short.

How often this happens with our dogs! I have a friend who got a new dog, after losing her first, deeply loved companion (they are sometimes called "soul dogs"; it's what Mercy was to me). Similar breed, of course: we are always looking, not for a replacement, but for a revivification of the dead. I am not breedist, except when it comes to border collies; I believe wholeheartedly in rescue, yet I have been tempted to buy, but only by a border collie. So there it is. Intellectually we know we have no business going back to the past, but we can't help it. We'll always want them back.

So this friend is slowly bonding with her new dog; it's tough, because the new one isn't the old one. Then suddenly, the new dog up and does something the old one never did: she attacks a playmate. And suddenly her dog is like a stranger to my friend--a stranger she isn't sure she even likes. And then she feels guilty for having this feeling. But she sees a distance between them now: the projection has been torn away. The new dog is, in fact, a new dog, with drives and desires that have nothing to do with the woman who keeps her.

Mercy was certainly a killer--woodchucks were an easy mark--but the chase part of the procedure was most alluring to her. Nelly, though; ah, little Nelly is a killer. She is driven to finish the job. As well she might. She is a dog, a wolf in pet's clothing.

Nelly is also a lapdog. When there is a loud noise, she leaps into my lap (uninvited--hot coffee whoops). I look into her sweet brown eyes and see a tender thing, a creature who needs my solace. And bingo: projection. "Nelly is such a sweet widdle thing!" So bonded to mommy!

Yes, but even more bonded to her genetic makeup. For her, prey trumps everything. And she is a formidable serial killer. One memorable day last winter, we were taking a walk together. Oops--my projection; that is what I thought was occurring. From her point of view, I had driven her to a place where she could hunt. And that is what she did, in some impenetrable briars, for three and a half hours. Darkness fell. Cold embraced the world. And I thought, This could go on all night. I pulled the car around to the point nearest the rabbit habitat and sat there, thinking about leaving her for the night twenty miles from home. I thought about lying awake all night worrying. I wondered if she'd really finally go lie down in the cardboard box I would leave for her, as suggested by the neighbor men at whose house I went to use the phone, lured there by the smell of my scarf. Feeling despair, I was just about to start the car and leave for home, when I saw a flash of white next to the bumper. Nelly, rabbitless. This time.

She has gotten her bunny, twice; one young woodchuck; numberless shrews; that hapless squirrel; and a ring-necked pheasant, the most tragic of a tragic lot. I didn't want any of it to happen. I suspect she has set her cap for a cat, too, but I am trusting that the cat's claws and similar weight will put it in the winner's corner, unless it is old and decrepit. And around here an old cat allowed outdoors has already been selected from the menu by a fox, a coyote, a fisher, an owl.

What I am worried most about, though, is Nelly's love of chicken. The kind that still wear their feathers. And I don't think this is because she sometimes gets some Bell & Evans in her bowl. (I'm sorry, I have to snicker derisively at the worried owner who thinks that giving "people food" is going to make the dog steal from the fridge; or similarly at the one who thinks if you give raw meat, the next thing you know they'll be killing all sorts of wildlife they wouldn't have if you just gave them that smelly brown stuff--it's not an animal! it's dog food!--from a can. I mean, think about it for a minute.) Now I have two friends who keep chickens, and if Nelly is ever around if they get out of their pens, they'll be ex-friends.

We went over to Bonnie's house yesterday, to take a little walk back into the woods. But once Nelly saw the new chickens behind their frighteningly flimsy fence, she dove into action. Hey, at least we finally found out where she had previously escaped from Bonnie's fenced yard--at 80 mph she showed us, running right underneath two different gates, both into and out of the yard, in her frantic search for the way to that delicious meal.

She can't help herself. She is not herself when she sees prey. Or rather, she is most herself: she is no longer my projection, sweet innocent girl, one who curls up with a sigh against my leg in bed, of whom I can imagine only ice-cream dreams. She took one look at those chickens and the hind brain came to the fore. I cannot let her have the chance to be near them again. Because where Nelly has the will, Nelly will find a way. And then the feathers will fly.

Climbing

The most arresting thing the great Jean Donaldson said in all seven hours of speaking at a seminar I attended yesterday at the Albany Obedience Club was not about Nelly and her ilk. it was about me.

In a fascinating overview of evolution, genetics, and how they affect behavior in general and canine behavior in particular, she told us about the Medawar effect: what happens to an organism after its reproductive period is over is invisible to evolution. It just doesn't give a hoot what illnesses you gather unto your bosom. You don't matter anymore.

Oh, the tragedy. I am about to vanish!

We were a group of about forty (though maybe it was seventy, or thirty: I can't estimate to save my life), sitting in our folding chairs in the large space that on other days echoes back the bark of dogs in agility practice, or the bark of people giving obedience commands--or so my prejudice against competitive obedience imagines it. (When I was a girl, and dreaming of having my first dog, I knew I wouldn't TRAIN it. I would have a NATURAL dog, not a robot who existed to do my bidding. That was the dichotomy, as my fervid little brain had it. Ha-ha-ha. Oh-ho.)

Needless to say, the audience was almost entirely female. This has been the case at every dog conference and seminar I've attended. Anyone want to hazard a guess why? Maybe because women are charged with--and wired for--nurturing and educating offspring? Thus we would illustrate another example of animal biology that Donaldson put forth: a slight "misfire" of an instinctual behavior, which happens to all sorts of creatures. In this case, our instinct to mother is triggered by the wrong species, by a dependent who is not genetically ours.

In person, Donaldson was far less prickly than she is in print. She was extremely generous in not offending (though her message was always clear, if you knew how to hear between the lines). The only time she allowed any righteous anger to boil over was in talking about breeders who allow or encourage the reproduction of spooky, fearful, or aloof traits, the kind of thing that's described as a breed characteristic, as in, say, "cautious" or "not easily socialized to strangers." Think Akitas, for instance. This she viewed as nothing less than criminal. She said, about those breeders, "I'm gunning for you," her voice tight with barely suppressed rage. "I've been cleaning up your messes for thirty years." The deliberate breeding of such an animal (sixty or more pounds of reactivity, armed with tearing teeth) is akin to selling a Beretta to any member of the general public who has a notion to buy one.

At the same time, given the fact that there are probably some 40 million dogs in this country, there are at most 12 to 20 killings by dogs per year. The incidence of bites is in fact decreasing, even as the dog population keeps rising and we live in ever closer proximity to them. So why the hysteria about a "dog bite epidemic"?

This is what gets dogs killed by the thousand, even though parrots and horses bite people all the time and are never euthanized for it. I suddenly saw where Donaldson was going when she asked why. What a mind. What an answer. A fear this unfounded, this primitive, she believes, could only be inborn: a residual fear of wolves, fanged predators, left over from the last evolutionary bottleneck for humans 100,000 years ago. We have not changed essentially in that long. It's too bad we can probably not count on a time that distant in the future, when we will have established a more reasonable fear of things with wheels or of bathtubs, since both of them kill exponentially more people than do dogs.

I love going to these seminars. I love seeing women (because that is what most of them are) who are barreling into science and the truth, armed with big questions. That's because the answers to them are required by the well-being of the creatures we care for. Who says we're not animals?

I drove home and picked up some Mexican takeout on the way. We ate out on the stone patio on a lovely summer evening. We wandered down to the garden to see if anything had escaped the cutworms and the teeth of the deer. I glanced up to see Nelly taking a little stroll on top of the dining table. She had just eaten an entire package of sweets. Pistachio-sesame-toffee-white-chocolate. They had looked quite good from the picture on front.

Bad Dog (Trainer)!

Training is hard work. It was so much easier when I didn't know anything.

Clicker training, as Polly showed it to me, was a cinch. Nothing to it--Mercy does something you like, click!, give her a piece of food at some point afterward, bingo, she remembers it for all time. (Well, Mercy did, anyway.)

The only difficulty then was remembering to bring the clicker with you. (In the Good Old Days, they had to be purchased in a toy store [mine was an alligator], not from the bin on a PetsMart checkout counter, or included with every swag bag at every seminar you attend, so now you have twelve.) Come to think of it, remembering to bring a clicker is still a difficulty.

The past ten years, though, have done everything in their power to make clicker training the arcane art is really is, and I've discovered I'm no artist. After shaping or capturing (those are technical terms, kids!) about five or six little behaviors with Nelly--Ask Nicely; High Five; Roll Over--I've virtually stopped teaching her new ones. Need I mention that Mercy knew ten times that many, including Shut the Door (with her nose), Circle Right and Circle Left, Stop, and dozens more cute tricks both useful and ornate? It suddenly seems so complicated, after all the explanations.

My timing has always been perfect: perfectly bad. I moved to Hoboken just as it was about to take off real-estate-wise and drop me in the dust; same for Park Slope in Brooklyn; same for where I live now. Just made it!--not. Thus I jumped on the clicker training bandwagon right as it was trading up to a sleeker and faster model of conveyance, and I feel my skills are not quite adequate to this Brave New World of Positive Reinforcement. Now, it appears, you can't have bad timing, or you'll mess everything up: there are studies that prove you have an optimal three seconds (or is that two?) to deliver your reinforcer. Scads of books now contain complex and lovely recipes for Cordon Bleu behaviors, while my abilities are back in the Betty Crocker mix phase. There's ClickerExpo, where the most brilliant minds in the business are up on stage wowing you with the remarkable--nay, incredible--things that can be done with operant conditioning. And the the audience is just as awe-inspiring: handicapped folks who clicker-train their own service dogs; people who have fallen in love with animals whose behavioral difficulties, such as aggression, have driven them to find the only way to keep their beloveds alive.

All this has combined, I admit in shame, to shut me down. I haven't picked up a clicker in months. My timing, or something, is literally so bad that whenever I try to shape a new behavior, Nelly shrieks her impatience at me. (Um, yes, that's an aversive.) It all seems so difficult, and complicated, and scientific to a science-studies nincompoop: schedules of reinforcement, quadrants of operant conditioning . . . My brain starts slurring its words. And suddenly I get very lazy.

So now I've reduced my world to saying "Yes!" as an ineffectual reward marker--ineffectual because, of course, I use it twenty times a day in other contexts, and it ensures worse timing than the more precise click. It's the only cure for "forgetting" the clicker, though. I also make sure to get Nelly to sit and be quiet before I open the door for her to go out, but deep inside I know I'm probably reinforcing a behavior chain (she screams, then sits and quiets)--I know only enough to know I'm probably doing everything wrong, but not how to do it right. Or perhaps, as I suspect, I am lazy and dispirited and impatient. Training is hard work.

Chew on This

The closest thing I have to a religion is nutrition, according to one of the greatest authorities on such things (my husband). In my personal life, I hope to offset my secret fondness for Little Debbie products with a judicious deployment of beans, brown rice, and salad greens. It all began twenty-seven years ago, when I stopped eating meat. I just couldn't bear the thought of chewing and swallowing the corpses of sickeningly abused animals. But that's just me. Anyway, this development alarmed my mother, who thrust at me a copy of Diet for a Small Planet. It became my first bible (see above).

Polly, that great seer and Mercy's trainer, did the same for me in terms of canine nutrition. Under her guidance I read Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats, and soon we were home-cooking our dog's food--meat, oats, and greens, a recipe derived with help from M.F.K. Fisher. (I'm sure, had Mercy known about the horrors of factory farming, she would have been sympathetic, to a point. She was that kind of dog. But she would have still eaten it.)

Further inquiries into the matter of canine nutrition brought us to the brave new--or, rather, old--world of raw meat and macerated vegetables. Once our dog went on a BARF diet, I never looked back. Why would I, with her gleaming white teeth (oh, all right: gleaming white broken teeth [learned the hard way about giving marrow bones to a dog who never says quit with anything remotely edible]), sweet breath, shiny coat that never needed bathing. Well, apart from those days when she daubed some doggy Chanel No. 5 behind her ears: carrion that was past its eat-by date; human shit that lurked in the denser bushes of Prospect Park.

The vaunted dog-human bond is really a result of a simple act: one party providing food to the other. I know this is not a popular view, but it's one that I've arrived at after careful thought. My extrapolation--that the love of a child for a parent is also fundamentally built from food--is not going to be more warmly embraced. But my relationship with Nelly is all about feeding her. I show my concern for her well-being by giving her the soundest, freshest, most wholesome meals I can. (And I do this for my son too, to my husband's consternation; he thinks I'm a freak. See above.) I take delight in her delight at crunching bone between her teeth; she enters a state of bliss I see at no other time, her gaze turned inward, her concentration pure. I also train her, and reward her, using food. Nothing else cuts it for little Nelly, except food on the hoof. That trumps everything for my petite huntress.

I can't not participate in this joyful giving. That's why the past four months have been dreadful, and the past three weeks a torture. In March, Nelly started scratching herself, more than a dog normally does, that is. It escalated. The floor was covered with her hair. Her normally glossy ears were soon nearly bald. I could see pink, inflamed skin.

The logical thing to do, obviously, was throw money at it. Piles of money I didn't have. A vet in Ohio, on a visit. My vet here, three times. Tests, pills, fatty acids, ointments, shampoos. I went online and spent hours I also didn't have. It had to be allergies. As her misery increased, the vet convinced me that I had to try an elimination diet. I spent $80 buying cans and kibble from him. No more fresh meat. No more turkey roll or cheese treats. No sardines, eggs, yogurt. Only dead, processed food. I felt as if I had been told my child could no longer have oatmeal or apples, but must eat only Twinkies. For the sake of his health.

How was I going to get Nelly back on those ill-advised off-leash walks? I always brought chicken jerky and cheese--sometimes even Vienna sausage!--and this ensured her return in almost all cases but the presence of rabbits. Now I was going to give her a piece of kibble? Wow. What a reward.

The past two weeks, she took to incessantly licking her legs, opening sores on her joints. Finally my vet said he had exhausted his ideas. It was time for a veterinary dermatologist.

Also known as More Money.

How much I did not know, until I drove the eighty-five miles to her office, and stepped in. Uh-oh. Oriental rugs. Flat-screen TV. Granite counters, large staff. Fancy-pants individual-cup coffee brewer: Help yourself! It's "free." My heart truly fell in the examination room when I saw the personal framed photos of show jumpers. Those take big bucks to maintain, let me tell you. And I was going to be buying their hay and bell boots today.

The doctor was impeccably thorough. She had studied Nelly's chart. She asked a few questions, then examined her quickly. She took three scrapings from her ear, and in a few minutes called me outside to look under the microscope. Something was moving on that slide. "Your dog is absolutely loaded with scabies."

At that moment I wanted to throw my arms around her and say, I love you, and I'll even love your bill! The remedy was fairly simple, she said. Of course, it's possible you might have to be treated for scabies, too. (They are primarily carried by foxes, the vet tech told me; and now I am not surprised, because we are a hot spot for red foxes. Nelly even routed one from a den near the barn, and they did an intricate, fascinating ballet together in the front yard as we watched, breath caught, from the window, until the fox finally escaped over the fence. Thankfully Nelly did not follow.)

I paid the bill--what's $380 between friends?--and went out to the car. Then I thought of something and ran back in. "Say, can you please ask the doctor: Can Nelly go back on her normal diet now?" Yes, came back the answer. The feeling of relief was almost worth the money.

Last night she dined on lamb, beef heart, yogurt, and vegetables. I could taste her pleasure.

Behavior >>> Behaviorism

Guilt is such a great thing. It has the power to transform reality. You know you're not the only one to have made whatever egregious mistake you've made--but guilt makes you the unique malefactor!

So. I got mad when I was pushed to the edge by my toddler, who yelled "No!" to whatever simple request I made ("Come on, honey, it's eleven at night! Time to sleep"), or--my favorite--who would follow me brandishing a book, after I'd read endless numbers of books endlessly but had to take a break to, say, make a meal for the famished. "Read!" he would demand in increasingly loud tones. If I persisted in my efforts to feed my family, a now-sobbing three-year-old would then hurl the book at my knees.

(When he was much younger and stayed quiet in the Baby Bjorn only so long as I was moving, moving, down the sidewalks of Brooklyn--a shrill wail would erupt the second I put my hand on the doorknob of a shop or coffee bar--I imagined the ideal gift for him: a miniature buggy whip, the better to drive his mother on.)

I became a frustrated, tired old yeller myself. I got so angry when he spilled a cup of juice (I mean, the sixth cup of juice that day, after having pitched a fit about being too old for sippy cups and "Yes, I am too going to take it in the living room") or refused to pick up his toys. By god, I was becoming the frightening mother I remember shrieking at the childish me. And none of this was making me feel good. And none of it was working either.

It came very late in the game, the realization that I abjured this kind of punitive, aversive, and, let's face it, out-of-control behavior toward my dogs, but I practiced it freely with my child. I certainly knew how terrible it looked when I saw it: watching people screaming at their dogs, for no good reason (or for bad: they had neglected to train, but expected compliance all the same), in the park had made me feel sure I was really watching a thinly veiled home movie of their own treatment as children by their parents. And when I saw other mothers berating or belittling their children in public, it made my stomach churn.

What was I doing? It was crazy, and I only hoped I hadn't fucked up my child for good, made him insecure, or self-hating, or fearful.

I was certain I had. But a program of positive reinforcement, begun now, might wipe away the memory of some of that embarrassing and damaging stuff. Once again, the aforementioned Jolanta, exegete and guide to the world of being humane, informed me that indeed, people used clicker training on their children, only they might seek to hide it a bit, because the rest of the world seems to find it hard to think of a human as just another mammal. Hmmm. Strange. She told me of an online list called Clickakid.

Turns out I was hardly unique. There were lots of people out there who marched around with treat bags and clickers, giving their dogs the opportunity to learn advantageous behaviors in order to supplant the troublesome ones, all with nary a jerk or a yell. But they were still doing it the old-fashioned way with their kids, until one day the bolt of lightning arrived.

So, some days I put away the bait bag filled with cubed turkey roll, and I pocketed a bag of M&Ms. We had a bad situation out there on the tee-ball field: tantrums, unwillingness to listen or work or try, whining that he wanted to quit. But after making a list of goals together, my son and I headed out for the second game. Any effort he made in the direction of one of his goals got a thumbs-up--a visual Click!--and I ran out as soon as practical to deliver a reinforcer in the form of a sweet. I could see the other parents looking at me: What the hell is she--the candy pusher? Call child protective services!

The day of the third game, I couldn't find my son when it was time to leave. But he was way ahead of me, out at the end of the drive, having opened the gate so we could drive. "Mommy, I don't want to be late for tee-ball!"

Now if only someone would clicker train me.

Reading Dogs, Dog Reading, Part 2

There is more to be said on the subject of books. And don't worry, I'm not going to say it all.

I just feel that if Jean Donaldson is in need of some sandpaper for her rough surface, her opposite number, Patricia McConnell, could borrow a few splinters from the author of The Culture Clash. In both The Other End of the Leash and For the Love of a Dog, you can practically hear McConnell going back and forth, back and forth with the finest-gauge polisher. There are the preambles meant to catch the reader's interest by using Personal Illustrations; the hyperorganization; the sense that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Heck, here's the whole bowl.

Not that her books aren't still valuable and interesting for the general audience. I read 'em. I learned stuff.

But the book I pulled out of the pile today is the real thing: alive, full of teeth, inviting me down on the floor for a sweaty wrestle. As well as inviting me to feel relief and kinship: Holy shit, this person has walked much the same path I have been on.

I am aware of how that sounds. --"I am thinking the same exact thoughts as this celebrated, famously smart author!" But I can't help that. Because we essentially are, me and Vicki Hearne. Much as I also hate to think it.

If I had read Adam's Task before I wrote my second book, I wouldn't have been able to comment on how people who called the horse known as Clever Hans a fraud had missed the whole point: the abilities of the horse were truly astounding, even though they were the not the ones that people had been hoping for--the ones that people themselves have. No, the horse did not know mathematics, but his powers of perception were so much more subtle than our own we appear not even to be able to appreciate them. Hearne says exactly this in her first chapter, so I couldn't have said it myself ten years later without appearing to have stolen it from her. Had I known.

The reason I never read this book (published in 1982; my own in 2000) was that I was afraid of it. Afraid it would make me mad, and being mad is often, though not always, an unpleasant sensation.

My fear was based on hearsay: Domesticated animals, I was told Hearne believed, are happiest when they have a job to do--a job we can give them. This struck me as bunkum. Hurtful bunkum. Animals' "jobs" are exactly what ours are: to live. Domestication has occurred too late in the evolutionary continuum to make real functional difference. Contrary to the wishful thinkers, dogs don't do things to "please us"--they do things to serve their own ends, even if it sometimes appears they do our bidding willingly. Yeah, if doing it gets them something they need/want; or, alas, to avoid something they don't. Trust me on this (or trust Jean Donaldson).

I was moved to write about Hearne--and to jump up and down about Hearne--on the basis of the first fourteen pages. Her task is to widen out the discussion of animals, and to understand why the discussion has heretofore been kept artificially narrow. That's the question I find most interesting in all the world, and to hear her say it, in her clear and lovely prose, is like eating a meal after a fast.

But when I saw the dedication of this book, I almost couldn't make myself go farther. "For Dick Koehler, who taught me how to say 'Fetch!'" Dick Koehler, son and flag-bearer for William Koehler, originator of the Koehler Method, a system for abusing dogs in the name of training.

I am here reporting on Koehler on hearsay, too, because I don't know what it's going to take to make my stomach strong enough to read him first-hand. I have my reports on good authority, though, from a gifted trainer and brilliant friend, Jolanta Benal, who has educated herself in what not to do by direct encounter with this old-fashioned brutality, unfortunately still used today. You can dismiss everything he says, even if you don't know what he says, on the sole basis of his advocating "hanging" dogs--lifting them off the ground by the neck until they nearly lose consciousness (a miscalculation there, and they'll lose more than that). This is sadism, pure and simple, not dog training.

I've now gone a few pages into the second chapter of Hearne, and again I have to pause and let go: She's completely, strangely wrong that dogs "respect" our language. Huh? She says a police dog "understands many forms of human culture and has his being within them." This is not possibly true. There is nothing in a dog's development or biological capacities that would have caused this to come into being. We may want it to be so (in which case, Hearne is as guilty of anthropocentrism as those she often complains so eloquently about) and it may sometimes look like it is so (because dogs are such subtle sign-readers that they, like Clever Hans, appear to be "understanding our culture" when in fact they're trying to manipulate the human into giving them something good and tasty), but neither make it true.

Such misreadings, through the prism of our own desires, are worse than mistaken. They are dangerous. To the dogs we profess to love.

Fish Are Off-Topic

Happy Birthday to Us: What started out 230 years ago as a grand experiment in democracy, and the sort of battle in which one feels happy to root for the underdog, has turned itself upside down. The United States is now a corporate dictatorship and a mean bully (with a lot of competition in the arena) to the rest of the world. (This, by the way, is a fact.)

An appropriately American story appears on the front page of the New York Times today. Apparently the sturgeon of Florida have a habit at this time of year of leaping from the water. I dunno, some weird biological thing. Anyway, sometimes they have the gall to do it right on top of the many people who are plying their right to overrun every inch of space on the planet. And these boaters get hurt. Some terrible cynic might think, "Hmmm. Not entirely bad, in a general, not specific way: one of the very, very few incidents of another species taking some well-earned revenge." Not like, say, Florida's manatees, who graciously stay underwater, so they can be shredded to death by boats' propellers.

The American way of dealing with any problem of our own making: Kill them. Deer eating your hydrangea? Kill them. Geese making a mess of the condo's "pond"? Kill them. Wolves eating the elk you want to kill instead? Kill them.

Some day, someone is going to stand up and say, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear: There are too many humans.

Every problem begins and ends with this.

Pack

It is morning in Dog World. The dog (also known as The Lawmaker) has been fed, before any human of course, has been outdoors, and is now curling up on a pile of faux shearling for the postprandial nap. And this is when the person rushes to the computer, eager to check, not how Tokyo opened or the weather or the news from Aunt Marge, but when today's walk will be held.

Just as we do with our own children, the mothers of Dog World can see how fulfilling it is to our canine charges to have what are called "socialization opportunities." We can just call it playing with the pack.

Things develop for our dogs just as they did for us freshman year of college: we eye one another while brushing our teeth in the dorm bathroom the first morning, and by lunch in the dining hall, we've selected our likely allies. We have to, or we won't survive the first term.

Our dogs do it not by slyly eyeing the cool factor of the would-be friend's wardrobe, but by smell, and most of all, by proximity. Throw some dogs together for a while, particularly early in their lives, and they form a pack. Mercy had Smedley, first, and I knew her feelings for him by the motor in her tail. If she liked someone, her beautiful sweeping flag went back and forth, back and forth. But if she loved someone, she gave them Propeller Tail. All the way around, describing a full circle. And if they were an intact male, why then she made her whole body a propeller, or a top: lowered nearly to the ground, she would spin herself around while her tail went full circle, powered by the fumes of powerful pheromones.

Nelly has propeller tail for her mixed pack: four dogs. There's Willy the labradoodle (his owner, my friend Janet, wishes you to know that he was not purchased as a designer dog, or at least not by her; she is his third home). Dixie is Willy's "sister," who was found roaming the back roads of Ulster County by a dog warden savvy enough to have Janet on speed-dial. Dixie is a dead ringer for the dog star of Because of Winn-Dixie, and is now the star of many of her own personal dramas, usually involving people getting near the car when she's in it.

Not pictured now but soon will be are Nora, the first Leonberger I have ever met, and her housemate Malcolm, a flat-coated retriever who one day to his surprise found himself in the local SPCA. Bonnie is the person who rescued them both. Possibly because of their proximity to the members of her pack, or perhaps because they themselves are honorary pack members in her eyes, Nelly gives propeller tail to Bonnie and Janet as well. She also, um, screams. This is how Nelly expresses herself. She can't help it. She can't help it!!! Did I mention she's a screamer? Our trainer has dubbed her Sarah Bernhardt.

Nelly's pack is all four to five times her size. Do you think she knows this? Bonnie, before she got to know what stuff the indomitable Nelly is made of [something hard, but that screams], was worried that her dogs might "hurt" Nelly. Ha.

Today's walk was through a lovely bit of the earth's surface called Poets Walk. And the dogs were poets, feeling every mode of physicality, investigating every molecule of nature in their reach. They bounded across fields, disappeared into woods, paused in surprise as the Amtrak train roared heedlessly into and out of existence in a matter of seconds, yards away. In the small picture is the pack, before the walk. And in the big one is the pack after the walk, in Janet's car. Their tongues tell the story. It was a good day. From their perspective (always), and from ours (no one ran away, or ended up in the middle of the road, horns blaring, using up one of their 190 lives).

The walks started out for the dogs. But they ended up by addicting the humans. To see your dog this happy--it's a way of living, and of being happy yourself.

Reading Dogs, Dog Reading

The past few nights have been given over to the cozy pleasures of James Herriot's Dog Stories. I can still remember the sensation of private thrill when, decades ago, I sank down in the couch in the den to watch the man I thought was me: a fictionalized rendering, very PBS, of a Yorkshire vet in the Good Old Days.

I had wanted, like every other little girl who didn't know what to do with her overspilling passion for animals, or rather, those animals that weren't involved in either telling me what to do or making me feel bad in ever more inventive ways, to be a vet. By high school I had grown up enough to realize that it probably wasn't the tragedy- and drudgery-free endeavor I had dreamed, and also that biology and chemistry were not my friends. But I'd loved to watch that show based on James Herriot's books, imagining myself as the person who was immediately needed by the bitch about to whelp, the poor deformed calf, the lame drayhorse.

His book of stories is just like that, and you get the picture from a compilation of reviews this bestseller received, lined up on the first pages of the mass market paperback: "touching" is, hands down, the prize winner in the adjectival sweepstakes. And they are indeed touching. Unforced, unshowy, possessed of a modest dramatic arc in each. Comfort food.

There are stories that remind you why, sometimes as your dog is just, say, sniffing around the bedroom floor, you are suddenly gripped with an emotion so powerful and ridiculous-sounding it should always be kept to oneself: Oh, how I love you! This is triggered, strangely, by the way her back feet sort of turn out, a detail you've studied absently for uncounted time, and it ought to embarrass you to realize it's very much like the same blood-red feeling that flattens you when you see your child walking down the sidewalk toward you, sun in his hair.

Well, we won't go on about that any more, shall we?

There is a stack of books in my bedroom so high that if one more were added it would fall over (for those prone to mathematics, that's exactly nineteen books and one pamphlet). I keep pulling books out of it and getting partway in, and then for some reason feeling reluctance to read all the way straight through. I am not a quitter, contrary to my father's continual assertions. I will finish them. It's just that they give me too much to think about, and there are so many waving arms to this octopus I am trying to wrestle with--dog training; behaviorism and its history, implications, and future; humans' often bizarre attitudes toward the other animals (as well as to themselves; hence, the existence of Republicans)--that I go a few chapters in, then pick up something apparently unrelated, and go a few chapters in there, too. In search.

One book I did just get to the end of is the revised edition of Jean Donaldson's The Culture Clash. I read a borrowed copy of the first edition many years ago, in Mercy's youth. One image got its sinewy fingers around my neck and squeezed. It was the part imagining a planet where humans are kept as pets by the more intellectually advanced creatures she named Gorns. Sometimes the Gorns do awful things, inexplicable to the humans: they suddenly punish them for peeing in the their water-filled porcelain bowls, or for eating pizza or trying to communicate with other humans. Some Gorns keep their humans chained outdoors and alone, so they become "socially starved" and even more unmanageable to the Gorns.

Donaldson's depiction, from the "companion animal" eye view, of what it's like to be kept by another species that doesn't understand the first thing about you (what you need for a fulfilled life; what you're trying to say so desperately) and that insists you live on their terms without ever having told you what those terms are, is heart-wrenching. The rest of the book is mainly sound science and common sense and dog training. It's also disorganized, and so blunt as to feel almost aggressive. (You can feel her boiled-over frustration with people's general stupidity about dogs, and if timing didn't permit her to actually write the revision as a direct rebuttal to Cesar Millan, then she was prophetic, because it reads in places as if she were in the ring with some of his insanities.) Finally, it's not about writing, even though some of her themes are worthy of Tolstoy. But I am in complete agreement with everything she says. It may well be the most important dog book ever written. And to think it was first published ten years ago: amazing on two opposing counts, one being that it makes the heart sink to realize that, although Skinner's operant conditioning has been known for at least fifty years, and Pavlovian conditioning for not less than a hundred--and discovered with dogs, for chrissakes!--Donaldson still has to remind people these are very useful tools. The other amazement is that ten years ago, she was in the very vanguard of a movement that since then has taken off and produced dozens of books. Not to mention conferences that twice yearly gather hundreds upon hundreds of people willing to pay, well, hundreds upon hundreds of dollars, to learn from trainers and researchers how to apply this science to their animals, and to the human animal too.

It's getting late, and I can't read when my eyes get this tired. Nelly has already decided to turn in. She lies at the foot of the bed, and I look over to see with bemused disbelief what she has chosen for a pillow: her dear head snoozes upon a copy of Murray Sidman's Coercion and Its Fallout. There will be more about books to come.

In/Out

One day fourteen years ago, I stepped from one world into another. At the time, I was not aware that I had done it. But I accomplished a very neat sci-fi trick: I stayed the same, physically, but I passed through an invisible wall separating one planet from its double. On this new planet, I would live as a Dog Person. (Previously, I had been a Person.)

This happened by walking into the Chester County, Maryland, humane society, at the culmination of a bed-and-breakfast weekend celebrating our first anniversary. All weekend long we had found ourselves engaged in a surrogate shall-we-have-a-baby discussion, though we wouldn't have known it. We were having the shall-we-get-a-dog discussion, because the other one was too blame scary. Our visit to the Eastern Shore had been literally haunted by dogs, which we took as a sign: the B&B had a resident labrador retriever; the farm where we went for a trail ride had just become home to a clutch of those Rolypoly Cute Puppies (TM), each a different color; when we went for a walk in an old graveyard, a beagle watched us from behind a stone. He was, I know now, an emissary from this other world.

As I am wont to do, I insisted upon carefully drawn up lists of pro and con. And then, because I already know what I want, I crumple up the opposing list and say the hell with it. If the humane society is open on our way home, I said, it'll be the final sign.

The black ball of puppy ferocity came home with us, and was named Mercedes for about two minutes, then became Mercy. Only she didn't have any. Our first "child" was about to become the product of a broken home. If we divorced because of her, though (she was not, ahem, a "husky/lab" mix as the shelter had said; she was almost pure border collie--does that explain it?), I was going to take her with me. I had already become her mother, even if I could barely stand her baby behavior, and would have demanded custody because I now could not stand the thought of living without her. I had started to put my foot through that invisible membrane, into the next world.

We had to hire a trainer, or a magician, or someone who could get this puppy from hell to stop chewing the electrical cords, the furniture legs, our shoes, our limbs; someone had to teach this dog that the hours between two and six a.m. were not intended for a command performance of her circus act. They were for sleep goddamn, goddamn it.

Nothing mystical was intended by the universe, I am sure, but it so happened that the friends we asked for advice helped change everything, in a spectacular way that is still, more than a decade later, changing everything for me. First, they lent us a video by someone named Dr. Ian Dunbar, and there was nary a rolled-up newspaper in it. It was, rather, kind of nice. We didn't have to hit our puppy, or show her who was boss; we had to give her treats, and we had to teach her that hands reaching into her food bowl presaged good things like the addition of a tasty tidbit and thus did not have to be shredded by little teeth.

The list of trainers these friends provided was sinply a list of names. And we simply, for no good reason, picked the third one. Polly.

A day later, an impish, pleasant woman was sitting on our kitchen floor while Mercy used her to practice one of her tightrope routines. Suddenly, Mercy yelped and backed away, looking surprised. What happened? I asked. Polly smiled beatifically. "Mercy nipped me, so I nipped her back." Holy cow. I hadn't seen a thing. Subtle, this was.

After talking with us for quite some time, Polly solemnly told us she had arrived at a diagnosis. We held our breath as she pronounced it: "Mercy needs the Park Cure." Oh my gosh. The Park Cure? Was it really that serious?

The next morning she picked us up in her Mazda and drove to Prospect Park, a few blocks from our Brooklyn apartment. I maybe had been there once or twice. Before we left the car, I started to afix Mercy's leash. "Oh, no," Polly said. "Let her out, and start walking." What? My little girl, whom I had never "taught" to come back to me? Wouldn't she Run Away? "Teach her that it's her job to know where you are, not the other way around." Polly knew things I did not know. Mercy followed me.

How can I tell you about how that park became our real home? How, when Polly became my friend, and her dog Smedley became Mercy's first great love, all I wanted to do was be with them? Every minute of the two hours we spent there each morning was like the great book of all knowledge being opened before me, and Polly reading bits of it out loud. She had gone to Wolf Park to observe wolf behavior. She had studied with Ian Dunbar. She had read everything serious written on dogs up to that point (which was nowhere near what it is now). She taught me about a new thing called clicker training, and it took Mercy three times to know the clicker was "charged up," and thereafter she learned new behaviors on the first trial. Soon I had about forty-five words or phrases she responded to. Polly showed me how to teach Mercy to "spell"--I'd say, "D-O-W-N," she'd do a down, and people would gasp. People are so silly. Her intelligence startled both of us: "Mercy is a Maserati," Polly said to me one day. "She is as fine-tuned as an Italian racing engine, and as easy to mess up." Thereafter it was engraved in my soul: Mercy is--was--a Maserati.

A couple of nights ago we went to see a movie, Paris Je t'aime, an indifferent and sentimental compilation. The best section in it was the monologue of a somewhat sad, middle-aged, Middle American woman visiting Paris for the first time and revisiting the what-ifs of her life. It was meant to be a tip-off to the sorrier aspects of her personality that she felt she could not leave her two dogs--clearly meant to be child surrogates--for more than a week. How pathetic, we are meant to think. At one time, I would have. When I was much younger, I remember thinking how yucky it was that some people seemed not to have relationships with people, but only with their dogs.

That was then. This is now.

Education

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Or maybe, only if your name is "Melissa." Last name "Pierson."

Nelly and I proceeded jauntily on our walk down the road. I was planning on a good hour, wherein we walk on-leash for about a half mile, then we loose the restraining device in order to trespass through some lovely woods for thirty minutes, then I spend ten minutes swearing at myself for my rank idiocy in not installing a foolproof recall in that white blur that's now only intermittently visible far off in the distance. She occasionally turns to see what I'm up to, and if it's looking for her, that's her cue to go flying off after something she pretends requires her immediate attention. Then I get tricky, employ some bit of blind luck, and get her back on leash, then we go home. Successful walk, exactly as planned.

This time, we weren't more than five minutes from the house when I spy what seems to be a "learning opportunity," aka sqashed squirrel, ahead in the road. I have been trying to compose a long poem about roadkill for some time, and may yet do so, but until now my efforts have been pitiful, filled with self-righteous anger--all I mean to point out is how curious it is that these relics of former life so often end up in supplicating positions, their paws outstretched in permanent prayer to a heaven that--whoops!--didn't see them. Over time they merge with the pavement, a patch of skin whose fur rises momentarily as a car stirs it into being by rushing past, then flat and gray once more.

This one was, I now have reason to hope, a little fresher. Nelly strained at the end of her leash (I have also been lax in teaching proper loose-leash walking, which I would have been forced to do had she been the fifty-pound dog I had wished for; instead, I rely solely on my laziness and some equipment in the form of a front-clip harness). Just prior to the walk I had finished my second reading of Jean Donaldson's fierce and inimitable The Culture Clash, about which I will have more to say. In the last chapter she states unequivocally that one must run through the "grades" of training: don't ask a kindergarten dog to do graduate-level work, or he'll fail. So what did Melissa think to do in this perfectly timed situation? Well, since I do precious little training, I felt I had to use what the universe offered. I thought, "What a splendid opportunity to use the Premack Principle!" [This is--cribbing here from a psychology glossary--a principle of operant conditioning identified in 1965 by David Premack. It says that a behavior that occurs reliably, or we might say, "naturally," can be used as a reinforcer for a behavior that occurs less reliably. Your kid wants ice cream? Of course he wants ice cream. When he cleans the toy room, the sudden appearance of a sundae will guarantee future toy-picking-up behavior.] Needless to say, I did not (because I could not) use it in a way that would have really benefited my desires for Nelly. I should have (if I could have) gotten her to come toward me before going to something she really wanted. But all I could do, and it was difficult enough, was to get her to sit. Bingo! I let her go to the squirrel.

She couldn't believe her luck. She picked that baby up, and then all she wanted to do was trot right home with it. I obliged; after all, this was her reward. Plus, I smugly recalled, this is a dog who primarily buries things. There's a rubber frog squeaky toy emerging from the dirt under the yew right now. The first piece of raw food I ever gave her, a chicken gizzard, was stared at for a while, then dispatched to the potted palm. I often find her bones buried in the couch, in our bed.

My dear, dear Nelly. Always with the surprises. That's her with her prize, up top. Soon, all that remained was a tail and a glistening sac of--what? I daren't ask. Even the head, a crunchy accompaniment to a fine, ripe repast, gone. Now she lies in her favorite spot of an evening, at the feet of the computer user. Every now and then a delicate . . . odor arises from her hindparts. The miracle of digestion, a little lesson in biology for me. Perhaps I have learned something more, too, eh?

What Nelly does not know at this moment is that as of tomorrow, her diet is going to get a lot stricter. Not only in terms of extracurricular snacks. But all that lovely raw meat, the lamb and chicken and beef bones, all the yogurt and fish and eggs, all that beautiful variety that made mealtimes a delight--no more. Processed kibble and dead cans. Doctor's orders.

Speak Dog

Let me be a heretic, from the point of view of a literature major, a writer, and, according to most, a member of the human race. "What sets people apart from animals," a stentorian voice is proclaiming in a voiceover to the National Geographic documentary showing a sea of humans moving down a city sidewalk (obviously this makes us highly eveolved, the ability to have made such a thing as a sidewalk, not to mention a city), "is the use of language."

Well, this is the Melissa Show, and I hereby give you the gong, Mr. Deep Knowledge. Other animals may not have speech, but they sure as shooting have language. We just don't happen to comprehend it, so in our highly intelligent human way, we say they don't have it. The reason we don't get it is that it's a physical language, and we are so mouth-oriented we even assume our pets are born knowing English: there's the guy talking to his dog--"Hey, now I thought I told you to come here!"--and looking miffed that his dog didn't answer back in a nice way.

The fact that we don't believe animals (I mean, other animals) have language puts us in the position of colonialists who find the natives to be little more than savages, speaking as they do in those unknowable grunts. But logic (oh, precious, precious logic) decrees that it is impossible for humans (and especially highly social ones) to have developed language alone among animals. Please, put this idea through the logic mill and see how it turns out.

Then I defy anyone whose logic is still malfunctioning to sit through a lecture such as the one Suzanne Clothier delivered recently in Saugerties, New York, and come out of it with an intact belief that canines don't talk. I only left there thinking I didn't know the half of it--and I already knew I didn't, due to my appreciation of, nay astonishment at, Brenda Aloff's extensive Canine Body Language: A Photographic Guide, which I believe should be the operating manual that comes with every puppy. She flashed slide after slide of dogs interacting, clearly communicating definite and not always simple information, on which she had overlaid colored lines to highlight the aspects of the body--compression, angle, tension, orientation--that were doing the talking. And she narrated each one: "Helloo! Wanna play, wanna play, wanna play?" [you can hear the black lab's accent here, right?]; "Listen, idiot, you obviously don't know how to ask politely. Get out of my 'personal space,' OK?" No matter how baroque, how TV sitcom, how Ann Landers it sounded, I would bet my last dollar that that was exactly the substance of the conversation.

She said that, in her experience, it was pathetic how few dog trainers, much less simple dog owners, knew the first thing about reading dogs' language. I believe it, too. It's horribly sad to think of a dog, or anyone, desperately trying to convey something to a person who can't hear them. For the emotionally unstable among us, it's a recurrent nightmare. And we make our dogs live in it all the time.

Ah, but our language is the language of Shakespeare, Milton, and Eliot; it has risen so high! Yes, and physical language is the language of Balanchine and Goya. Right? Go to the dog park. You might see some beautiful ballet there. Right now, Nelly and I are going to take a walk in the cornfields. I pray the rabbits are hiding and the fawns are well taken care of. Or else Nelly will have something quite concrete to say to them.

After a Dog

I want to go where Nelly takes me. This is literal and metaphoric both. I want to see her up ahead on the trail, stopping suddenly, perceiving something I am too witless to see, then go crashing off after it. (I hear the chipmunks laughing at her: haha you can't catch me! Until, one day, she'll get one, just as she got one of the squirrels I believed were safe from her always: he made the mistake of trying to climb the side of the woodshed as if it were a tree, which of course it is not, being much smoother. He went flipping out into midair, and she was on him the second he hit dirt. He passed into nonexistence faster than a blur. Nelly is an efficient, if serial, killer. At least she had the decency to give him a Christian burial.)

People spend a lot of money and time to go to an ashram to get what I get from a thrown-away border collie/dervish mix rescue every day out in a field.

But Nelly takes me other places, too. Internally, she sometimes leads me to those squirm-inducing psychic rooms I do not otherwise want to enter, whose walls are painted with ugly questions about my sanity, my abilities, my obsessive fears. She takes me to the dark heart of my impatience. Or to the feeling that time is running through my hands and I am not doing anything completely enough, either working with my dog or accomplishing work worthy of the label "Day Well Spent." Certainly, though, following Nelly has helped me to master procrastination.

[A non sequitur here, but one I can't resist, since it is one of the topics that I mean to take on here at some point: The coyotes, as I write this at 10 p.m., just began howling in the acreage out back. There is no way to tell you what this sound fills me with--sadness, happiness, wonder, longing, and a whole bunch of questions. Were they celebrating something? Why had I not heard them in two months? Where did they go, spring break in Cancun? The sound clearly brings out something atavistic in Nelly, because she rises slowly to her feet, legs compressed in tension, and lets out a low, wavering howl herself. This is not anything she does in response to any other sound but this, and I don't buy that it's a reflex. I think it's a signal from that part of herself that belongs out there in the dark with the beautiful hunters. The ones who are three times her size.]

One place Nelly has led me is intellectual. Specifically, to the science of behaviorism, but not so much its content (I struggle with it, having the sort of mind that can't keep terminology straight) as the truly bizarre human behavior it triggered. I believe B. F. Skinner was right. Everything he said and formulated was right. In exactly the same way that what Copernicus said was right, despite the fact that the merchants of the status quo were vitriolically upset by his beliefs. That they denied it did not mean it was not true. The same absolute obviousness most of us now feel adheres to Copernicus or to Darwin also appears to me to adhere Skinner, and what he posited about how organisms learn and thus live in the world. It's the same obviousness that radiates from the Democrats (for the most part, though don't get me started on their co-optation); better yet, let's say "from Dennis Kucinich." So why the great resistance, people? I will leave this question for now with this: It's all about resources. Just happens to be one of Skinner's points, backed up by anthropologist Marvin Harris, if you want another side to the story. To distill it down to its simplest factor: If you want to understand why people resist the truth, look at what they stand to lose.

The next subject to which Nelly will lead me, I think, will be language. Hers, ours, and the apparent incompatibility of the two. (This will draw a line back to what I learned by hearing Suzanne Clothier speak the other day.) But first, Nelly is leading me, backwards all the way, toward the bathtub. There I will douse her with neem oil and hated water, in the vain hope of conquering the allergies that have made our lives a small misery for the past four months.

Small Package >>> Big Things

A dog is a vehicle. And a vehicle takes you on an odyssey. Of course there's never any way of knowing where you're going. This strange fact about life sometimes hits me on the back of the head, and some days I wail David Byrne-like, "How did I get here?" How was it that I found myself yesterday not doing any of the million three hundred sixty-seven other things I could have been doing, but rather, sitting all day on a folding chair in a firehouse with fifty other people (mostly women; almost always mostly women in these things) who paid $100 to listen to Suzanne Clothier tell us about dog behavior?

There was another dog, long before Mercy, longer before Nelly. She was not a transformative event, however; instead, she was a Christmas present. A bichon frise--my mother insisted upon a dog who would not leave hair on the living room carpet, as well as one with the cachet of rarity (this was 1967)--who arrived from the breeder smelling of baby powder. She was the soul of sweetness. And how shockingly we repaid her for it. The paperback book on dog care we bought instructed us on training matters: a rolled-up newspaper to swat her for any infraction; accidents in the house required us to force her nose into it, no matter that it was after the fact, no matter that the only thing she learned thereby was that her people went inexplicably nuts sometimes and hurt her. She stayed sweet. This is the rebuke that returns, stinging, in my memory of her.

I don't know if it's any excuse that pretty much every dog training authority in those days gave the same advice. So it had to be correct. (We are always looking for someone whose voice carries the ringing tone of certainty. It is a sound that so fills the head it silences any squeaking sounds of protest that might arise there.) So we left her as a small puppy, crying awfully, down in the kitchen alone at night, with an alarm clock for company. I put my head under my pillow to drown out the sound. When I attained a defiant age, I would sometimes provoke my mother's ire by bringing her up to bed with me. Where she belonged all along.

I could tell you more about how we, assuredly fine people, treated this beautiful white creature. Only I can't quite bring myself to say some of it now. I have to wonder if every hour I now spend in seminars with famous trainers, people who have studied canine behavior and language, needs and modes of learning; if every dollar I spend on books and treats and clickers and toys and agility classes, is really an attempt to atone for the unintentional misery we brought to a small fluffy dog, dead now for years.