Born to Bark (8 page)

I was following the path of a major in physics, in order to prepare myself for one of the professions my parents had decided upon for me, although it brought me little joy. One evening when my parents were out and my brothers asleep, I made myself some tea and sat down to talk with Penny. Lying halfway on her favorite fringed floor pillow, she had the courtesy to keep her eyes open and to look at me.

Penny was lying halfway on her favorite fringed floor pillow but had the courtesy to keep her eyes open and to look at me
.

“I really don’t like this physics and math stuff all that much,” I admitted to my dog.

“Well, you are doing okay in those courses,”
Goofy’s voice replied.

“I really want to do something that holds my interest, especially if I am going to be doing it for the rest of my life.”

“So, what catches your interest?”

“Understanding what you and other dogs say and think is part of it. But I’ve also been reading some things about how people and animals see and hear, and that is fascinating stuff that I would like to do some research on.”

“Is there something in the university that will let you study both?”

“Psychology, I guess, but Mom and Dad don’t have a very high opinion of psychologists. They would explode if I told them I was leaving physics to major in psychology.”

“It’s not their life, you know.”

“Yeah, but they can make it very uncomfortable if I go against their wishes.”

There was a long pause, during which Penny walked over to me and nuzzled my hand. Then the Goofy voice announced,
“Well, you still have your job working in a physics laboratory. You could tell your parents that you want to explore psychology because it has caught your interest, but you can emphasize the fact that you are keeping your job in the physics lab so that you can always go back to that as a major.”

I looked into the dog’s dark eyes and said, “But that’s not the way it really works in the university, you know.”

Penny lay herself down at my feet and the Goofy voice said,
“Well, then, you may never get to really understand what I am thinking, and you may end up in a well-paying job that you don’t really like. But if you volunteer to live in a dungeon that your parents have designed for you, don’t complain to me later that you don’t like wearing chains. Besides, you can just take the courses and not tell them that you are thinking about becoming a psychologist.”

That was the longest oration I had ever put into Penny’s voice up to that time, but it reflected exactly the degree of emotion and turmoil that was going through my head.

The next evening I told my parents that I was going to take a few psychology courses, but they shouldn’t worry because I was keeping my job in the physics lab. They were concerned, and my mother complained that with all that Freud business, and that total concern with sex, it was not a very reputable profession.

Keeping my job in the physics lab calmed things a bit as my conversation with Penny had suggested it might. As a survival strategy I also eliminated the words
psychology
and
psychologist
from my vocabulary when I was at home. Instead, I would tell my parents that I was studying “animal behavior” and “human and animal sensory processes.” The fact that my academic major
had changed to psychology would not be mentioned until late in my senior year when I had already been accepted for graduate studies at Stanford University.

Regardless of their feelings about psychologists, my parents did like the friends that I made while working in psychology. It was during a visit from a couple of these friends that Penny showed another of her behavioral quirks. Most of my dogs have demonstrated a liking for beer—at least flat beer, since most dogs don’t like to inhale the bubbles into their noses. Penny was unique in developing an appetite for bourbon. Rye or sometimes scotch would occasionally suffice, but bourbon was her passion, and she was exactly the right height to be able to shove her face into a glass of whisky when
it was placed on a coffee table or an end table next to the sofa. Often the unfortunate owner of the drink did not discover that my dog had emptied his glass until he heard her crunching on the ice cubes (which she used as sort of chaser). With a body weight of only around 50 pounds, Penny was quickly affected by even a little alcohol, and so, after drinking some whisky on the sly, she would become slightly inebriated, stagger to the middle of the room, lie down, and start to snore. This prompted my father to observe, “Your dog is a noisy drunk.”

Penny was extremely important to me as a companion and confidante, and she also taught me something very important about courage by personal example. Some individuals are fearless, but it is not the fearless hero who demonstrates courage; real courage is shown only by people who have strong fears. Courage is defined as the willingness to act even when you are wracked by fear for your own life or safety.

One Sunday afternoon I was standing outside our house and chatting with Barry, a neighbor who also attended the University of Pennsylvania. He had joined the hockey team and was telling me about some of the team’s exploits (and embarrassing gaffes). I had let Penny out on the small front lawn to sniff about a bit. She would not wander very far and certainly would not go out into the street because of her paralyzing fear of stepping off a curb even when she was on leash.

My mother appeared briefly and asked me to keep an eye on Arthur while she was in the basement doing the laundry. A moment later my 3-year-old brother emerged from the front door pushing a big yellow ball. It bounced down the steps and stopped at the line of rocks that edged our little front lawn. As Arthur carefully made his way down the steps, Penny came over and sat down a few feet from him. I knew that she would not let “her little boy” out of her sight when he was out of the house. Arthur had now reached the bottom of the steps, where he picked up the ball and tossed it over the low ro
w of stones and continued to play.

I became engrossed in Barry’s entertaining tale and let my attention drift from my baby-minding duties. Suddenly I heard what sounded for all the world like a woman’s shriek of pain or fear. I looked up and saw that the sound had actually come from Penny who was darting across the pavement and, much to my astonishment, off the curb and between two parked cars, just as a bright red automobile raced past the very place where my dog had vanished. I ran faster than I ever remember running before or after—crossing the few yards between the front steps and the street in seconds. When I arri
ved at the gap between the vehicles, I found Arthur struggling to get across the street, where I could see his yellow ball resting on the other side. Another car flashed rapidly past, missing my brother by inches. The only thing keeping Arthur from being hit by the passing traffic was Penny, who had gripped the crossed rear straps that held up his
corduroy pants and braced herself to keep him from making any further movements forward. All the while she was whimpering plaintively.

I grabbed my brother and lifted him back to the safety of the pavement, with a loud, “Stay there! I’ll get your ball.” My heart was beating strongly enough that I could actually hear my pulse in my ears. My heroic dog, who had saved my brother’s life, still stood there, in the street that she feared so intensely. She was between two parked cars in virtually the same situation that she had been just before her own painful, life-threatening accident. There was a small puddle of urine in the place where she stood, visible evidence of the extreme fear she had felt.

I called her to me, and she moved in a slow, dazed manner as she stepped back onto the pavement. I bent down to pet her and felt her trembling and panting in rapid, shallow, fearful breaths. My dog had fought her greatest fear and protected “her child.” She took another step or two toward Arthur, then licked his face before sinking slowly to the ground, where she lay trembling and panting for several more minutes before she finally regained enough strength to move back toward the house.

In the movies, when a person faces his ultimate fear and survives, that individual is always cured and never has to suffer that fear again. My dog Penny had showed incredible courage in facing her utmost fear in order to save my brother’s life. However, she was not cured. I never saw her spontaneously step into the street again, and she seemed, if anything, to be even more fearful of traffic. She also became even more strongly protective of Arthur and would interpose her body between him and the street when he appeared to be approaching too close to the curb.

That night I sat down in front of my courageous dog, poured two glasses of bourbon, held them up in front of me, and announced, “I’d like to honor my brave dog with a toast. Remember that courage is just being equal to the tasks that life puts in front of us. By that standard, you
are indeed a courageous
dog. I would be honored if the most heroic boxer that I ever met would join me in a drink. Here’s to you, Glock!”

As I set one of the glasses on the floor in front of her, the Goofy voice announced,
“The street still scares me. You know, if you had given me this drink before Arthur tried to run out onto the road, I probably would have been a lot more courageous!”

All else was lost in the sounds of lapping and ice cubes and liquid splashing around in a wide glass tumbler.

From the moment that I decided to switch my major to psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt that I was really home. I loved studying both human and animal behaviors and how we form our conscious picture of the world in our minds.

So much was happening in psychology at that time. B. F. Skinner was formalizing his discoveries about the process of learning, David Hubel and Torston Wiesel, who would later win the Nobel Prize, were uncovering the neurological basis for how the brain puts together visual images, while another Nobel Prize winner, George von Békésy, was uncovering the mechanisms by which we interpret the sounds that we hear. The structure of DNA had recently been discovered, and new tools for looking at how behaviors could be determined genetically were being developed. There were also new dis
coveries and data about the behavior of dogs and other canines. Another Nobel Prize winner, Konrad Lorenz, had written two exciting books,
Man Meets Dog
, about the domestication of dogs and the human-animal bond, and
King Solomon’s Ring
, which gave an overview of his research on dog behavior, social structure, and the way dogs
communicate. L. David Mech had started his wolf studies, which would expand our knowledge of canine behavior even further. J. Paul Scott and John Fuller were applying the newly developed methods for studying behavior genetics to dogs at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, while Michael W. Fox was exploring the effects of early developmental experiences on the later adult behavior of dogs.