Bad Dog (12 page)

There’s a Texan mother and daughter across from me at dinner, and it turns out the daughter will be in my class.

“I want to do the CGC,” I say.

“We have that,” says the daughter, a languid, worried-looking, Polish-Hispanic woman of about thirty. “We have that on both my sheperds. I don’t know how. One of my dogs nipped at another dog during the test.”

“Oh my God, we almost failed ours,” says the woman on my left, a retired schoolteacher named Beth who runs a big dog training center in North Carolina. “My Bobo was doing great until the separation and some kid walks by eating a hot dog. He almost tackles the kid to the ground. It was incredible—”

“Many a perfect two hundred obedience run has been ruined by a hot dog,” says a voice from the end of the table. He’s a big, wearily handsome young guy wearing a leather cowboy hat he never takes off; all week, people just call him the Cowboy.

We overeat and talk entirely about our dogs, and I’d be lying if I say I feel entirely at home.

We have a common cause, of course, but these people are a lot more knowledgeable than I am. I silently vow to keep
my mouth shut and listen, as they advise newcomers to do at twelve-step meetings—a vow I break right away.

Beth is talking about a Bernese mountain dog in one of her classes. She says, “The owner just did not have control of that dog. Their previous one was real mellow, but the next one they got was a total maniac and—”

“Hey!” I bark, spraying remnants of my Jell-O pie. “That’s like me. I got one of those. I’ve been trying for a while now and can’t get her to do much. She untrainable.”

Awkward silence.

Right away, I realize what I’ve done: committed the beginning dog trainer’s crime of blaming the victim; the problem, they’re all thinking, is clearly not with the dog.

“In eight weeks,” Beth continues, “that Berner earned her Therapy Dog.”

The rest of the week, I try to act more like a lawn than a mower.

I
HAD HEARD
there are more than one hundred dogs at the camp, and the dining room is wall to wall with trainers. Though I scan the crowd, I can’t see our hosts—the great Jack and Wendy Volhard.

The Cowboy says, “I hear Jack was a judge for, like, twenty years.”

“AKC?” Beth asks.

“No, humans. A circuit court judge.”

“I hope he doesn’t judge my dog,” says the Texan girl.

“Oh, he will.”

“I saw them speak once,” says the woman on Beth’s left, a meek-seeming personal assistant named Kelly who was too afraid to bring her dogs and so is attending camp as an observer.

“Where?” I say.

“It was a train-the-trainer thing. I lied so I could get in, said I was a dog groomer. They were amazing. I’ll never forget it.”

That night I take Hola for a walk on the absurdly steep, dew-slicked hill leading up to our cabin.

The large and small dogs have been separated into different compounds, probably because the small-dog owners are embarrassed. Both compounds sit at the foot of a thickly wooded pair of mountains necklaced with hunting paths and rapid shallow streams, dirt paths paved with grassy clumps of horseshit and dead leaves.

We run into a woman walking two gorgeous Swissies, which are related to Bernese mountain dogs and look just like Hola with a close crew cut.

“She’s quite a handful, huh?” asks the woman, a tired-looking fortysomething wearing a new Rutger’s hoodie and a big diamond wedding band.

“Yeah, she’s a pistol.”

“How old? Two?”

“Everybody says that,” I say. “She’s five.”

“Amazing.”

“We want to get our CGC.”

She looks at me cautiously as I struggle to pull Hola away from her dogs. “You taking the test here? They give it at the end.”

“I don’t think we’re ready,” I say.

At this point Hola hurls herself through the air, landing on the back of one of the Swissies, who shrugs her off, steps back, and sneers: definitely not on the guest list.

“Yeah,” says the woman, “I see what you mean.”

N
EXT MORNING
, we walk on the vertical hills under skies so clean they could treat an open wound, our four sleep-dried eyes blinking out at ropes of small farms that probably haven’t changed much since the Civil War.

“Hola,” I say. “I’m sorry I made you come here. I’ll try to make it fun.”

Hey
, she says,
don’t worry about it. I’m always up for a road trip
.

“You seemed upset in the car.”

I miss Mommy
.

No comment.

Are you by any chance hungry?

“Maybe we’ll learning something,” I say, not really listening to my dog. “Let’s keep our ears open.”

Oh, was that the breakfast bell?

And then I’m sitting at the round table in the cellar next to the big-boned OTCH handler, Stella, and the nun, Sister Irene, who runs a thriving kennel in upstate New York, and we’re listening to Jack and Wendy Volhard introduce us to our coming great adventure.

Wendy is saying, “Wear waterproof shoes. Most of your
classes will be held outdoors no matter what, and the grass gets very soggy. Keep your dogs dry in the room when they’re not working.”

She is a lean British woman, serious, calm, and physically stolid, and we listen to her with keen attention, leaning forward. Her cheekbones are sharp, her voice carefully modulated, and immediately I recognize what she is: pure alpha female.

“Watch out for doorways,” she says. “Dogs confront each other at thresholds, doorways, exits, jumping in and out of cars.”

“There’s no TV here,” she continues. “No phone, although if you walk around in the parking lot you can sometimes get a signal. News is stress. Live like your dogs for a week.”

“That was stirring, my sweet,” says Jack, who unfolds his long frame and beams at us. He’s a palpably youthful old southern gentleman with a close-cropped silver beard and a buoyant sense of humor, like a yang to Wendy’s yin. Wendy sits and gazes up, way up at him. We are obviously eavesdropping on one of the great romances.

“How many of you,” Jack asks us, “work your dogs three hours a day?”

Of maybe sixty people in the cellar, only one guy raises his hand—a hard-ass-looking dude wearing fatigues who, I hear later, owns a flower shop.

“At the Volhard Instructor Training Camp,” Jack says, “we work the dogs very hard. On day two some of you will show signs of fatigue. You will take it out on the staff. This is normal. We will ask you to refrain from physical combat.”

“Day three,” he says after the laughter dies, “the dogs will start doing the same. They have a longer fuse than we do.”

He explains the classes offered, which with the exception
of the basic level Hola and I are taking—ironically called Fast Track—conform to the three standard AKC obedience classes: Novice, Open, and Utility.

“The difference between Novice and Open,” Jack says, “is the addition of jumps to the basic heeling patterns and commands. The difference between Open and Utility is you must have a retrieve. [Beat.] On command. [Laughter.] We require the
re
part of the exercise.”

For a dog trainer, this guy is a first-rate comedian.

Jack and Wendy Volhard are the Bill and Hillary Clinton of canine obedience, a long-married couple whose books, videos, and seminars have saved more than twenty thousand of us dog owners from ourselves. Pioneers in puppy temperament testing, canine nutrition, and alternative healing, they are also coauthors of the book that tops my personal canon, after the mysteries of Susan Conant, namely,
The Canine Good Citizen: Every Dog Can Be One
.

I talk to Kelly, the dogless personal assistant, during the break, establishing that even she knows more about dogs than I do, and then Stella storms back and sits with a deepening despair.

“That nun,” she says, “is a real piece of work. She grabbed the only land line we can use in this place. She’s standing there yelling into it like some … some guy at an auction— ‘
Sell! Buy! Sell! Nail them to the fucking wall!
I don’t give a shit what they’re offering, it’s too fucking low.’ ”

“Wow,” I say. “I’m not sure those words are in the liturgy.”

“Jesus never mentioned dogs,” says Kelly, and I think: a born-again.

“I’ll tell you what,” says Stella, “if that nun hogs the phone all week I’m going to nail
her
to the fucking wall.”

“Ha,” I say, as Sister Irene returns to her seat with a beatific glow.

Then Wendy stands in front of an empty whiteboard and introduces us to the real sacred mysteries:

“Dogs think, reason, and have a language,” she says. “It’s called body language. People also have this. Within a few seconds you’ve sized someone up as a type based on their body language.”

Yes, I think, seeing how I’ve already categorized a lot of the people in the room as poor spellers without even talking to them. In fact, talking makes it harder: it’s a mess of contradictions.

She says, “We’re going to spend the whole week making you untwitch. Most of us are moving all the time without knowing it, and our dogs pick up on everything. We confuse them. Leaning in a quarter inch can make a difference to a dog. Every motion we make must have a clear purpose and meaning if we want to communicate.”

She was originally inspired, she tells us, by a course she took in the 1980s with a German policeman named Jorg Silkenath, who practiced a method of training called Schutzhund.

“He didn’t talk at all,” she says. “It was purely communicating with the dog through motion. He said it was a secret method that was passed down from generation to generation. That you needed to apprentice to a trainer, like the old guild system.”

“None of what we teach here is new,” she admits. “It’s just nobody wrote it all down before.”

Another inspiration was the Austrian behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, whose classic
On Aggression
divided animal behaviors into discrete groups he called drives, which are present, to a greater or lesser extent, in each animal.

“All dogs are individuals,” says Wendy. “No two are the same. Once you know their personality, defined by their drives,
you know what kind of training to do. It will cut training time in half, without stressing the dog. A stressed dog doesn’t learn.”

Hola is stressed. She’s always stressed. Florence had told me the last day of Family Manners that this had something to do with my own personal anxiety, but I wasn’t sure what to do with this insight except worry about it.

“There are only three main drives,” Wendy explains. “There’s the prey drive, which is the instinct that makes them go after balls and shake T-shirts like a dead animal. Then there’s pack drive, which is about reproduction, nurturing, their status in the group. And there’s defense, which is either fight or flight. It’s about self-preservation.

“All these drives are basic to the animal’s survival, but every individual is higher or lower on each, and you need to understand where your dog is to train them effectively.”

“It’s sad,” she says, “but over time a lot of the defense fight/flight tends to get bred out. We’re left with animals who are not animals. The ASPCA kills off dogs with some oomph. What’s left are dogs who are brain dead. You need some oomph to be good at tasks.”

I remember something Susan Conant wrote: “You can teach a dog to quit the theatrics, but if he doesn’t have any zip to begin with, he never will.”

Zip is something my Hola most definitely has.

“We can use our dog’s drives to train them,” Wendy explains, “by knowing which drive to elicit in the given circumstances.

“When your dog’s with you, he must be in pack drive. Your body must be quiet, not moving, absolutely still and straight. So many beginners make the mistake of yelling
Come!
and leaning forward. To the dog, these are opposite signals.

The AKC Novice exercises, which lead to the title Companion Dog, or CD, are mostly pack behaviors, she tells us. “Heeling
patterns, figure eight, stand, recall, stay—these are all pack behaviors.

“When you add the retrieve in Open and Utility,” she continues, “it’s a prey exercise. Now, the lower your dog is on defense, the more body language you need …”

It gets a lot more complicated, and at some point I stop taking notes.

A stressed dog doesn’t learn.

I feel like I can pass as a legitimate participant in this crowd until we take our dogs out: the moment I’m on the field trying to switch Hola from prey into pack by heeling her in a tight circle to the left—which is what, apparently, works—she is going to betray me.

Totes.

A
ND SHE DOES
.

Turns out the only people more punctual than AA members are dog trainers. At one minute before nine, the entire Fast Track class is assembled in an attentive circle in the enclosed picnic shed at the foot of the hill, beside the babbling brook. There’s about twenty of us, mostly women, most with larger breeds, including five German shepherd dogs, two Belgian Malinois, some field Labs, a collie, and an enormous white polar-bear-looking thing I’ve never seen before and hope never to see again.

The dogs are groomed to within an inch of their lives, but the owners look like they just rolled off a bunk after two weeks at sea. They drive dog-stickered vans with room for extra crates and wear loose-fitting sweatshirts that say cute things like You Had Me at Woof, and their notebooks have laminated pages. They have notebooks.

Meanwhile, I forgot my pen, don’t have the right shoes, have a car that’s too small for Hola’s crate, which I didn’t bring anyway because she refuses to get into it.

“Welcome to Fast Track,” says our instructor, Mary Jo. She’s a springy, bell-shaped, loud woman with an infectious dog joy and a national reputation for teaching stupid pet tricks to small dogs. Rumor is, she trained the first President Bush’s famous springer spaniel, Millie.

“We’re going to start with the sit,” Mary Jo says. “Let’s begin by kneeling down next to our dogs, like this. Put your hands gently on their rear legs and guide them into the sit.”

I think:
What?!