Born to Bark (11 page)

I was channeling all of my ardor and enthusiasm into my research and writing, building a name for myself, and developing a good reputation among my colleagues. Yet I was still young and beg
inning
to miss the passion to be found in a close relationship. The results were probably inevitable as I became quite fond of one of my graduate students who was incredibly bright, creative, and sociable. After she got her degree, she continued to do research and write articles with me and we made some significant scientific breakthroughs together. Clearly, I had chosen a personal relationship that would not interfere with my obsession with science.

Mossy announced to me one evening that she was pregnant again, this time with my son Benjamin, who is one of the true bright spots in my life. When
he arrived Rebecca was delighted to have a new brother. One day she took two stools and put them next to where Benn was sleeping. She then sat on one of them and had Feldspar sit on the other. Then she carefully explained what the baby was to the shaggy gray dog. As she spoke, she would first point to the baby and then look back to Feldspar to make sure that he was listening.

Rebecca carefully explained what the baby was to the shaggy gray dog
.

Feldspar observed Rebecca carefully, playing his part in the conversation exactly the way that dogs are supposed to. I wondered how this conversation might have gone if Rebecca had been older. What would she talk to her dog about? Would she have given the dog a voice to answer her the way that I had always provided a voice and silly answers for each of my dogs? Would she have the kind of therapeutic and self-revealing conversations with her dog that I had found so valuable?

With two children I felt committed to stay in the marriage for their sakes and also decided that New York City was not the place that I wanted them to grow up. In the early 1970s violent crime was rampant there and the newspapers had published a series of stories exposing the sad state of the public school system. I soon came to believe that if I could move my family to a quieter, more civil locale it would better for my children. A new place and a new home might also help my relationship with Mossy.

In November 1972 I gave a well-received talk at a conference held by the Psychonomic Society, an organization dedicated to experimental psychological research. While there I let it be known that I was thinking about leaving New York. Even though I was young, my reputation was very good and within three months a dozen institutions had made queries, and six had brought me out to visit them and talk about my research. All six eventually offered me a job in their psychology departments, but one institution really caught my interest: the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada.

One reason I was attracted to UBC was certainly the department chairman, Peter Suedfeld, an intelligent, cultured, and highly productive researcher. His attitude toward science was similar to mine, and I felt comfortable around him. At one point
in our first discussion I told him that my research interests tended to change continually. At the time, I was working on problems involving perception and cognitive processes but would soon be starting some research in neuropsychology and behavior genetics. I asked if that would be a concern. His reply was exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Stanley, it doesn’t really matter what areas you do research in. As long as you do good work, publish in good journals, and bring honor and respect to this department, you can do anything that you like,” he said.

UBC also seemed like a good choice because of the core of extremely bright and productive faculty members already there or newly hired. Finally, I was attracted to the city itself. Vancouver is beautiful, with its incredible vista of water and mountains, well-kept parks and recreational areas. Most residential areas outside the downtown city center have quiet, tree-lined streets. A zoo, an aquarium, a symphony orchestra, and a fine arts museum contributed to its cultural life, and major popular entertainers made Vancouver a regular stop on their tours. At that time there had not ye
t been a big influx of people and the population of Metropolitan Vancouver was around 1.5 million, so housing was still affordable. As the third largest city in Canada, it had all of the services and facilities that one would expect of a large Western metropolis. That year in New York City there had been more than 52,000 violent crimes of which around 600 had been murders, while Vancouver was concerned that their murder rate had just risen to an all-time high of 12 for the year. This seemed like the perfect place to raise my children.

At the end of the spring semester in June, we packed up and moved to Vancouver, buying a little house with birch trees on the front lawn and a fenced backyard. It was located only about 10 minutes from the university. Once we moved in, we started what was supposed to be a new life.

As a psychologist I should have known better. Psychological training recognizes that long-established behavior patterns and well-established habits of social interaction do not change simply by changing the place or setting where a person lives. So before long Mossy and I had reestablished all of the same patterns of interacting, or not interacting, that we had hoped to leave behind in New York, and I again sought meaning and feeling in my life by throwing myself into my research and writing.

To fill the emotional void in my life, just as had happened before in New York, I again became involved with a graduate student, Clare, who, after completing her doctoral work took a faculty position at the University of Victoria, about four hours travel from Vancouver. We did a significant amount of important research and published together for around 16 years.

Mossy and I continued to drift apart, and our personal exchanges became shorter and more distant. Despite the fact that we now lived in a safe city and a quiet neighborhood, and even though we had a large backyard that was fenced and safe for a dog to be in, Mossy continued to put out papers for Feldspar. Nonetheless, Feldspar had turned out to be the companion for my kids that I had hoped that he would be. I had helped Rebecca and Benn train him to do the basic “sit,” “down,” “come,” and “stay” commands and then also trained him to do some other activities that were simple and
practical. I also taught him some ways to entertain and play with the kids.

One of the things that I like to teach my dogs is to find family members. This is especially useful if you have small children who tend to disappear from sight when something is happening that they are not interested in, like baths, nail clipping, or cleaning up a room. The basic command that I teach is “Where’s” followed by the person’s name. Thus “Where’s Rebecca?” would
cause Feldspar to immediately run to where he had last seen her and bark furiously when he got there. Teaching this is a lot of fun because the person to be found gets to play a part in teaching the command while the dog gets to do some running around and receives lots of treats and praise.

When we taught Felfy to do the “Where’s” command, I would first say, “Where’s Rebecca?” Rebecca was standing across the room and would enthusiastically call out “Felfy come!” When he arrived, she would wave a treat at him until he barked and then give it to him. Then we might repeat it with “Where’s Benn?” and Benn would call the dog and again wave a treat until he barked. After a while the kids could hide just out of sight or in the next room. I would say “Where’s Rebecca?” in a voice loud enough that she could hear it, so that she knew it was time to call him. Repeated over a perio
d of days, we finally got to the point where the kids no longer had to call Feldspar and he would hunt them down and begin to bark to earn his treat on command.

The “Where’s” command came in particularly handy whenever we used to play hide-and-seek, with the role of “it” usually falling to me. When it came time to find my son, I would ask, “Where’s Benn?” The little terrier would run to his hiding place and bark, usually eliciting screams of “Felfy, go away!” followed by howls of “Daddy, you’re cheating!”

Terriers are not as scent-oriented as many other breeds, but they appear to be very attuned to the location of things. Once they have found something interesting in a location they will immediately check out that place the next time they enter the area. Watching Feldspar convinced me that he was basing his responses on some kind of spatial memory or mental map, rather than simply searching around randomly until he found the child. He only resorted to searching when something that he wanted had actually become lost. This became clear when Rebecca learned how to outsmart both her fat
her and her dog.
She would let Feldspar see her hiding place and wait until I called him back to me. Then, when he was out of sight, she would change hiding places. Thus Feldspar might return to the closet where she had first hidden and bark to indicate this, but in the meantime Rebecca might have switched to the bathroom across the way. She was still easy to find, though, because she could not keep from giggling at how well her deception had worked. By using Feldspar to do my advance scouting I was clearly not above cheating, but the idea was to enjoy the playing of the game, so in those cases whe
n Rebecca had been so creative, I would pretend not to know where she was, just to reward her for her cleverness.

One day I also tried to teach Feldspar how to square dance, which didn’t turn out so well. This human-canine square dancing actually involves a simple set of moves, but it results in what looks like a complicated musical routine done to traditional country dance music. I usually chose from two or three Irish jigs or reels played with a fiddle, banjo, guitar, and double bass. All of these had a similar sound, and I believe that the nature of the music serves as an extra reminder to the dog as to what he is expected to do.

First, I taught Felfy to heel, which is just to stay by my left side when I walk. That allowed us to perform some dance maneuvers like “promenade,” where couples walk side by side around in a circle. Then there is the “forward and back,” where I call the dog to face my front and then he and I move a few steps back and then a few steps forward to face each other again. There is also the “dosado,” where the dog starts in front of me again and we pass right shoulders as we circle around and return to the starting place. Finally, there is the “sashay,” where, starting from the heeling position
, the dog and I circle each other and return to our places. When you string together these four simple actions in various combinations, you provide the illusion that the dog is square dancing. The fact that all of these maneuvers
are in response to subtle hand signals makes it look as if the dog is spontaneously performing his part of the complex dance routine on his own.

Felfy was well on his way to learning his steps, so I decided to teach him one little additional trick that heightens the illusion that the dog has a sense of rhythm and is truly dancing. This involves having the dog stand still and alternately lift his right and left front legs as if he were keeping time to the music. My hand signal was simply waving my index fingers up and down, which looks much like I am keeping time as well. The first stage of teaching this was to use that same motion of my index fingers to lightly touch Feldspar’s front paws so that he would reflexively
lift the paw, for which he would be rewarded. Of course, with a small dog this involves a lot of bending down as if trying to touch my toes.