Bad Dog (15 page)

Trouble is, the review is delivered in a forceful—well, belligerent—style by my new division head, Huxley. The menschy, squeezable Don, who hired me and kept me through my bottom and early sobriety, who once alluded to knowing I was in the program and seemed to approve, moved to LA. His replacement was like an ironic commentary on Don: short, swarthy, high-voiced, volatile, extraordinarily hyper, a torrent of opinions and abuse.

Which brings me to my performance review. Huxley’s office is as warm as he is: nothing on the walls except a whiteboard and calendar with key deliverable dates; a desktop oddly uncluttered except by a phone, pen and paper, my review, a cactus, and a framed picture of an unattractive, undersized dachshund. My review, I notice, is lying next to the cactus.

“So,” he starts, “I got some feedback.” After what sounds to me like an obligatory sprint through the positives, he gets to it: “There’s one area you can work on.”

“Yes?”

He looks at me directly, parts all ten of his fingers and jabs them at me: “We need you to man up, Marty.”

“What?”

“You back down too much. We need to hear your opinion—push back more. Argue with the people on the team. You’re always so nice and reasonable.”

“Is that bad?”

“It makes me uncomfortable.”

“… ?”

“I don’t care if we all get along,” he says. “I care if we all get it right. The ideal meeting to me is like two carbs fighting in a bowl. You know what I’m saying?”

I say, “Carbs?”

“What?”

“You said ‘carbs fighting in a bowl.’ How does that work?”

“I mean crabs—you know what I mean. Speak up! You hearing me?”

Dogs rely more on sound than on sight. I am hearing his sound loud enough. I’m wondering,
Should I push back on it? Is this a test?

“What if I don’t disagree?” I ask.

“That’s not the point,” he says. “Disagree anyway. It’s a process.”

“How does that help get to the right answer?”

“It does if you’re right.”

“Right?”

“Right.”

“I’m lost.”

“Give you an example,” he says. “Look at”—here, he mentions one of the most egregious bitches I have the misfortune to work alongside. “She tells people what she thinks. She’ll push back a lot.”

“Ah.”

“Why are you smiling? This is serious.”

“I know it is,” I say, sincerely. “It’s just, I’m looking at that picture of your dog. Cute little guy.”

Huxley lowers his hands, settles back in his chair, and lets out a contented breath, beaming.

“That’s my Andy,” he says. “Two years old. Awesome dog.”

“How are his manners?”

“Perfect. I put him in a down during dinner; he sits right under the table and doesn’t move.”

“For how long?”

“Like, I don’t know, an hour. He’s amazing.”

“Did he come that way?”

He shakes his head, then cradles it in his hands and leans even farther back, looking like Hola when she’s getting a tummy rub.

“He was horrible at first,” he says. “Barked all the time. Guarded things. Couldn’t handle separation. Between you and me, I couldn’t control him. I had like ten pounds of dog pushing me around. It was humiliating.”

“Wolves and dogs try to avoid conflicts,” says Norwegian trainer Turid Rugaas. “They are conflict-solving animals. It is usually we, the human species, who tend to create conflicts between our dogs and ourselves.”

“What did you do?” I ask Huxley.

“Got an amazing trainer. Did the homework.”

Bingo. “Can I get a name from you?”

That night I tell Clark about the feedback at work, its pushy regularity. He tells me he can’t talk long because he and his wife are expecting some of their incredibly wealthy, gorgeous friends over for dinner, and he has to hand tie his bow tie.

“Here’s what you say,” he says to me. “Next time, you say, ‘You want my
opinion?
You guys are full of shit! How’s that for an
opinion!
Hah!’ ”

I’m laughing now. Perspective inches back.

“Oh, my God,” I choke out. “Totes.”

“What did you say?”

“Totes.”

“I heard some guy say that on a call today.
Totes
. What the fuck does it mean?”

Hola cranes her neck around and looks at me from a caustic angle, then shakes her head rapidly from side to side, ears fluttering like an asynchronous bird of prey before her chin alights gently on my kneecap. Ruby then hurls herself off the chair cushion and flounces off in the direction of the kitchen with her tail erect, yowling:

“Ik ik ik YOOOOUUUWW.”

O
RGANIZED OBEDIENCE
competitions appeared in America in the 1930s, driven largely by a standard poodle breeder named Helene Whitehouse Walker, who toured dog clubs to evangelize dog training as a sport. Walker ran the first obedience event, with eight dogs, in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1933. Train Your Dog became a Depression-era slogan, and by 1936 the AKC had published its first competition regulations.

Soon Walker was joined in her demo wagon by Blanche Saunders, who became the godmother of obedience for decades and, in the 1950s, published the first modern guidebook for trainers. Her methods were typical of the time: no food, but you could praise; look for the dog to do something wrong and jerk on a choke chain around his neck; use physical guidance to teach things like sits.

Although basically humane, Saunders was part of an ancestral chain that ran from the ancient Romans through the nineteenth century, when it was believed that dogs, like children and horses, needed to be “broken,” and that, in the words of a popular manual published in 1894, “All knowledge not beaten into a dog is worthless for all practical purposes.”

Animal behaviorists call this method—correcting errors with aversive consequences—negative reinforcement. The most notorious of the negative gurus was William Koehler, head of
training for Walt Disney Studios and the man behind the dog actors in
Swiss Family Robinson
and
The Incredible Journey
, among many others. His book,
The Koehler Method of Dog Training
, was the best-selling obedience title in the United States for decades.

Today, it can make for terrifying reading:

“Hold [the dog] suspended until he has neither the strength nor inclination to renew the fight,” he writes. “Once lowered he will probably stagger loop-legged for a few steps, vomit once or twice, and roll over on his side. But do not let it alarm you.”

Koehler believed in nipping problems in the bud with a massive display of pain. Training was a battle of wills, and it was you or the dog. Yet he had a good heart: he honestly believed it was actually hurtful to be too kind and that the greatest of all physical and psychological cruelties was—ready now?—“under-correction.”

A popular medical textbook from 1907 describes how alcoholics were routinely treated:
*

“When an alcoholic called for [the doctor], he immediately placed the patient upon the operating table, introduced the stomach tube, pumped out the stomach, then washed it out, and after he had freed the stomach of all mucous and contents, he gave the patient a bowl of hot essence of capsicum, and allowed him to rest for a few hours.”

Conclusion: “Perhaps the rapid, cruel treatment … may be the most humane after all.”

Well into the 1970s, drunks were routinely locked up in asylums, strapped to tables, force-fed belladonna, castor oil, and stewed tomatoes, and subjected to therapy sessions that were little more than moralistic bullying.

Clinical psychologists are still conducting experiments into modalities such as “emetic and electric shock alcohol aversion therapy”
*
—a
Clockwork Orange
-esque attempt to make them nauseous at the sight of alcohol.

Starting in the late 1970s—when, some might point out, former hippies started getting dogs for their kids—things shifted. “Like human therapies, for the most part dog training has undergone an evolution and moved toward a more positive approach,” write animal behaviorists Mary Burch and Jon Bailey in
How Dogs Learn
.

Positive methods include clicker training, promoted by the dolphin expert Karen Pryor, a more precise way to tell the animal which behavior you are actually rewarding. From what they’ve done wrong to what they’ve done right, it’s an approach that works well for most dogs, who are basically easygoing and eager to please, because that’s the kind of dog we humans have been selectively breeding for centuries.

But growling and snapping; lunging at other dogs; yanking us down the street; refusing to surrender things they’ve got in their mouth; tackling old ladies who smile in the elevator and breaking a hip, leading to lawsuits, evictions, homelessness, and jail … Even if it doesn’t go that far, there are limits to the power of a hot dog when some real dogs crave excitement in their lives.

The so-called click-and-treat method dominated dog training for a generation. And then came Cesar Millan. His TV show,
The Dog Whisperer
, has been seen by 50 million people on the National Geographic Channel—and there are only about 65 million dogs in the United States. This former illegal immigrant
from Sinaloa, Mexico, is a $100 million industry, with leadership seminars, books, DVDs, and pet food.

He doesn’t use a clicker and rarely pulls out a treat. His credo is that dogs need a leader, the leader is you, and they must be given this information by any means necessary.

Anti–Cesar Millanism is epidemic in the pet dog training world, at least in the Northeast, and it comes out in ways that are sometimes pretty funny. My club, the Port Chester Obedience Training Club, gives all its students a recommended reading list. Along with books by Ian Dunbar and Karen Pryor are newer feel-good classics such as Andrea Arden’s
Dog-Friendly Dog Training
and Joel Walton’s
Positive Puppy Training Works
. And under a title by Paul Owens called
The Dog Whisperer
, they emphasize: “(NOT to be confused with the book with the same title written by Cesar Milan).”

Whom they hate too much even to spell his name right.

An op-ed columnist in the
New York Times
recently called Millan “a charming, one-man wrecking ball directed at 40 years of progress in understanding and shaping dog behavior.”

Millan talks about observing the dogs on his grandfather’s farm as a boy, how they would fight among themselves until a clear leader emerged, at which point peace reigned in the pack. He likens them to wild wolf packs, which were long thought to be held together by a dominant “alpha male.”

But as animal behaviorists have been quick to point out, our pet dogs are not wolves—far from it. Cats are behaviorally much closer to wild cats than domestic dogs are to wolves. Fifteen millennia of coevolution have changed dogs to such an extent that they cannot survive without us. We have turned them into our own better halves.

To take just one example, the reason dogs bark so much is
because we talk. Wild animals rarely vocalize; their communication is visual and olfactory. But humans are verbal, and so we’ve proactively anthropomorphized this trait into our dogs. And dogs are the only animal that can naturally follow where a human is pointing or looking; even chimpanzees cannot do this.

Interestingly, aversive training methods do not work well on wild animals. A wild animal will literally fight a human to death rather than
not
do what we punish him for. Dogs are different: we have taught them to submit to pain.

And so on.

Dominance is a complicated topic, but more recent work on wolves in the wild, including a multiyear study by L. David Mech on northwestern Canada’s Ellesmere Island, seems to show that packs function more like families than conscripted armies: they accept roles rather than take them by force.

As animal behaviorist Temple Grandin says, “What dogs probably need isn’t a substitute
pack leader
but a substitute
parent
.” Either way, though, the human should be setting the tone.

Among serious dog trainers, as opposed to pet owners, the anti-Millan feeling is much less pronounced. “I’ve got to give Cesar credit,” Wendy Volhard told us at dog camp. “He takes on behavior problems that the rest of us wouldn’t touch.”

As Millan himself takes pains to point out, “I
don’t ‘train’ dogs
.” What he means is that he corrects behavior problems; if your dog isn’t having serious issues, Millan is not your man.

Having been primed for the worst, I was surprised as I made my way through Millan’s book, written with Melissa Jo Peltier, called
Be the Pack Leader
. It made a lot of sense: “We’ve gone from the old-fashioned authoritarian extreme—where animals existed only to do our bidding—to another unhealthy
extreme—where animals are considered our equal partners in every area of our lives.”

I thought of dog writer Jon Katz’s observation that “as a Boomer parent in a child-centric town, I’d spent years watching people struggle to say no to their kids and their dogs.”

Millan talks less about forcing dogs to do our bidding than reshaping
ourselves
to be worthy of our dogs’ respect, by becoming confident people who exude what he calls “a calm-assertive energy.”

In an article about Millan a few years ago, writer Malcolm Gladwell quoted the well-known canine ethologist Patricia McConnell: “I believe [dogs] pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go.”

Or, as Millan himself says: “Dogs know how comfortable you are with yourself, how happy you are, how fearful you are, and what is missing inside of you.”

Putting down his book, I can only think:
Oops
.