Safety First

My dog just started wagging his tail (OK, his stump) when visitors come to the door. This is kind of a major turnabout: anyone the least bit unfamiliar at the door has historically inspired the full Gates of Hell treatment embodied by a pointy-eared, hackled demon standing and barking explosively at the front window. In fact, our couch has been moved away from the window ever since our second round of trainers pointed out, rightly, that the dog was too charged up around the front of the house and he should be blocked from hanging out there. I may have lost some friends in the meantime; however, after almost two years of "working on it"---i.e., having him go to his place when someone's at the door, strengthening his Stay there, and turning an endless parade of visitors into hot dog dispensers---suddenly I noticed there's been a change: Laszlo hears someone at the door and wags his stump, his whole body radiating the expectation of something good.

This made me proud as punch when my girlfriend came by and my dog spontaneously modeled his new Good Dog behavior by standing on his platform the whole time; I could barely keep myself from bursting his bubble by showering praise on him. And then a couple days ago a sketchy homeless guy came to the door asking for money by way of a long and complicated con story, as is the local custom; during which time I stood at the front gate with the house door open, half of my mind ready to remove the dog from the situation since certain people, like the UPS guy, seem to be exempt from his recent attitude adjustment. It would have been a good excuse to have to go back inside, anyway. Laszlo, however, after a single, not-very-loud "wuf" and a quick stump wag, actually took the opportunity to wander back into the bedroom and curl up for a nap. What the...!?

"Why did you get a Doberman Pinscher?" those same trainers had asked me. They sensed there was more to it all than met the eye, and they were right. I don't think I gave them a good answer, but if I had been able to be honest with myself I would have said, "Because I need to feel safe. I am freaked out in my house. I feel powerless. I want to put a demon between myself and my fears."

And Laszlo did exactly that. And after two years of walking my dog around the hood at all hours, two years of fearlessly opening the door to strangers because my dog was right there, apparently Hell's gates no longer need a guardian. I feel "safe." Nothing is really different: intellectually I know while Laszlo may be helpful, a dog isn't going to deter all the world's perils. I am aware how much of an illusion safety is: in my neighborhood where gunshots remind you how life balances on a needle's point, or snugly in the 'burbs, it's a feeling, nothing more. It was at that moment I realized the true achievement: I did not feel any fear talking to the sketchy homeless guy. Which is why Laszlo did not feel any fear. His job is done. My job now is to stop needing the demon; to hold that awareness that I can feel safe on my own. My job is to keep him retired.

As my friend Sang sagely pointed out, "Now you're going to have to teach him to bark at strangers." That should be fun for both of us.

The Leaky Teapot

A couple months after I came back from Vermont, I was hungry to learn more about the nuts and bolts of protection training and to see if Laszlo was ready to work with a "real" decoy. He wasn't. But I learned a lot. Some background: about a year prior I'd met a prominent Ringsport trainer who happens to live in my neighborhood and often dropped in to the bakery where I worked. Because he specialized in aggression cases I'd sought his help early on (right after my first trainer told me to put my dog down). He'd remained unfazed by Laszlo's display of aggression, assuring me there was nothing particularly wrong with my dog. He turned my head around by being the first guy I talked to who didn't subscribe to the locally pervasive dogs-as-victims mentality, didn't neuter his dogs, and just plain didn't fear bad dogs. It was a surprisingly profound relief to finally hear a dissenting view. I went and checked out all the videos he'd posted of training and competing with his Malinois; my heart soared at the unbridled joy of those dogs as they tore across the field after the decoy. It felt like a window to a different, way-more-fun universe of dog training had cracked open, just enough to peek through.

We didn't have a lot of luck working Laszlo in protection, and in hindsight: duh. Of course he was nowhere near ready (though apparently my karma is to learn everything by way of making every mistake in the book). Laszlo wasn't focussed, didn't show the drive I knew he had, acted shut-down and targeted on squirrels in the trees. The trainer advised to correct him for the avoidance and attention lapses, saying "Laszlo is a leaky teapot. You want it all to come out the spout, but there's cracks and the water runs all over the place: over here, over there, to the squirrels. You have to stop up all those leaks and then the water will go where you want it to." We'd hit a bit of a philosophical roadblock since I didn't agree about correcting for the squirrels; so that phase of training fizzled. The metaphor, however, was well-taken. I was already conceptualizing the dog's energy as a flow of water. I think of our pushing and obedience exercises as digging a trench: when the trench is shallow, more water will overflow and go out in all directions, but the deeper the trench is dug through practice, the more water it can contain, and the stronger the flow in a single direction. To be honest, I felt very attracted to the idea that I could have shored up the leaks through corrections, but something also felt wrong. I crawled back to my sensei for guidance, who very graciously clarified:

"The forceful movements of the helper at this point in time inhibits the dog, because these movements are associated in the dog's mind with the "correction" he experienced in obedience training to for example not chase squirrels. So all the dog learned was to not show prey-making desire to humanoid/handler/helper. Therefore, since dog's prey instinct is channeled into squirrels, which is the "leaky pipe" problem, rather than into helper, which when helper confronts him is asking the dog to reverse everything he's ever learned, first the dog must learn to (A) bite around the squirrels. Now the "problem" energy (leaky squirrel energy) is going toward the bite toy. And once this is strongly established, then the next step (B) is to associate the forceful actions of the handler with biting the bite toy. So when the dog is biting you back slap the dog and become forceful and now you are "correcting" the dog for doing it correctly, i.e. associating forceful movements with showing handler prey-making energy. The dog is converting old memory of helper/handler pressure that represses prey-making urge into new memory of expressing energy toward bite toy. When the dog will do this well for you and becomes hardened, the next step (C) is for helper to come into squirrel zone and just encourage dog to show energy, push/bark/jump up and make contact. Then (D) bite object is on ground and helper starts to make leaning moves and pressure that is focused on the toy. Dog will at some point show energy toward toy and then finally (E) the stronger the smacks and fake hits on the dog, the more we are correcting the leaky pipe problem. This progression is a sequence that the dog can solve, rather than the 180 degree reversal as in have no energy for squirrels around humanoid/handler and full energy to humanoid/helper."

So now I get it. Why spend energy trying to block every rivulet on the flood plane when I really just needed to go back and dig the trench deeper. "Ground" work.

Why was I so attracted to the idea of jumping ahead? No one who knows me would call me lazy. And part of it was my attraction to the sport itself, the idea of getting to learn from an experienced and exciting trainer. But also, I am the leaky teapot. Totally distractible, a sparkle chaser. Jill of all trades, spread thin over a million different projects, giving none a full measure of attention. Multiple jobs, many balls in the air. Passionate about a pursuit just long enough to get pretty good at it, but stopping just short of the highest level, where that last push of resistance would have to be overcome. And always keeping one foot out of everything, holding on to that thread of perceived freedom.

This may read as an overly harsh self-assessment, but it is one truth, the truth of my temperament. The other truth is that I do work hard, have seen many projects through from beginning to end, and didn't give up on my dog. At some point in my thirty-somethings I figured out that commitment is paradoxically the path of least resistance. So maybe it is laziness after all.

While I was processing all of this, my yoga teacher, by chance, read the class a particularly fitting story. It went something like this:

A man travels every day from his hut to the river carrying two pots, each hung on one end of a pole across his neck. He fills the pots with water from the river and carries the water back to his house. One of the pots arrives full, but the other has a crack and is only half full with water when he arrives. One day on the way back from the river the pot cried out, "Master, I am ashamed! Why do you not replace me? Because of my flaw, I am leaking water all the way back to your house, and arrive with only half the water of the other pot." The man replied to the pot, "Look along the path and you will see there are flowers growing all along one side, but not the other. This is because you have watered them every day as we walk back from the river. Their beauty gives me pleasure as I walk. Without your flaw, there would have been only bare dirt."

Puppy Class

I have a friend with a huge black and brindle Rottie-Mastiff cross. She's 130 pounds and one of the most fearsome-looking yet gentle beasts I've ever met: good with other dogs, cats, and children; even tolerant of Laszlo. My friend drove all the way to Eugene in a snowstorm to get the dog as a tiny puppy in a litter that had been rejected by the mother; a little velvety slug with her eyes barely opened. I think they had to hand feed her. But this dog was born under a happy star. All throughout her puppyhood she'd bound along with us on long hikes through redwoods, always coming when called, never getting too far ahead or behind, never chasing other animals. At some point my friend took her to puppy class, which was kind of ineffective in correcting any perceived faults (or causing any new ones). Recently I was over at my friend's house and as she wordlessly guided the dog back indoors after greeting me, she mumbled something sheepishly about how the dog didn't know any commands, though it seemed to work out. The implication was she was somehow slacking off by not "training" her dog. But what I saw was a relationship where no commands were necessary because dog and owner were already moving in full accord with one another. My friend must have done something very right, because she is the center of her dog's universe, and there is no conflict.

I catch glimpses of that accord between me and my dog, though there's still resistance. But sometimes, lately, stuff will just work out. I'll be thinking about going to bed and find Laszlo already in his kennel…little stuff like that. The other day Laszlo picked up on my cues that a friend was on her way over, and went to stand on his platform in the living room even before the she arrived. I never issued any command, but he stayed on the platform through most of her visit, though I never told him to. I really wanted to praise him, but I also didn't want to burst the bubble.

So is a trained dog one who responds to commands, or one who just WANTS to do what you want?

The weird thing is I realized I've made a shift in thinking, myself. There had been a part of me that was clinging to the same feeling my friend had: that if you hadn't issued a command, it somehow didn't count. I can guide my dog into a down-stay with my body language, but since I didn't stand there stiffly and bellow "down!" it's not really the same. There's some kind of power/ego thing wrapped up in that, too. I am a good dog trainer. My dog obeys me. If he wanted to do that thing anyway, he's not obeying me, is he? It doesn't count because he is just doing what he wants. Even though it also happens to be what I want. His wild nature cannot be trusted.

So what if we let go of all that control stuff in our training approach? How scary and awesome is that? Someday I'd love to teach a puppy class where no one says anything.

House of Cards

Did I mention my dog is good looking? Yeah, I'm biased, but really, he's like a supermodel. People actually slam on their brakes when they see him. Everyone asks about his puppies (not having quite put together the no balls=no puppies thing). Every dogman or woman who's ever met him has taken a moment to run their eyes over him and whistle softly. "Damn, that dog has great lines. You found him in the pound?" It's a little weird: this quality of desirability that has nothing to do with the dog's character (or mine, for that matter), something on which people compliment you that you didn't actually work on, like your hair ("thanks, I grew it myself.") OK, yes, I did consciously adopt a beautiful dog. On some level I must have been just as attracted to it as the brake-slammers. SHINY! I WANT IT! 

All of which is the categorical opposite of the other way people see my dog: BAD DOG! MONSTER! Aggressive, unsocial! The disconnect is a problem for people. How can pretty shiny dog be aggressive? Must be bad owner! I feel their accusing eyes settle on me, taking in whatever cue or piece of gear that fits into their current conception of Wrong and Inhumane, trying to match it up against idea forming in their mind of what kind of treatment I'm inflicting on the poor animal to make it act this way. In better moments, I'm kind of amused by the role I'm playing, which is to embody evil for that person in that moment. I am the danger. Someone has to do it. When it's one of those dogmatic Berkeley types, it's easy for me. I'm happy to be what they need, because no part of my heart wants their approval.

But then, how easily my bubble can pop when, for whatever reason, I do care. We have a neighbor with a couple little terriers. He and his wife seem like good folk; they recently opened a yoga studio in the neighborhood and we've stopped to have brief chats about dogs and starting businesses. The neighbor has admired Laszlo during our training sessions out on the block, and more than once I've had to gently dissuade him from introducing his dogs and himself to Laszlo. Today he saw me, I waved, and he strode across the street straight toward Laszlo with his hand out, not waiting for an invitation. "He's such a beautiful dog, can I meet him this time?" It may have been just fine for him to meet Laszlo right then, but I'd just been working him around stuff that triggered him, and I didn't even wait to read Laszlo's body; in that moment it seemed like the possibility of him biting the neighbor had to be avoided at all costs, so I pulled the dog back and said kind of harshly, "I wouldn't...no, seriously, I wouldn't. He does bite." The neighbor looked really disappointed and said, "I thought you said he was doing a lot better!"

I don't know when or if I'd said that to him, but that sentence went right to my core where all the buttons get pushed. Suddenly the perception of a decent morning session with my dog turned sour, and I got that feeling in my chest, a house of cards collapsing inward, a stone lodged in my throat. All the STUFF. You're not good enough. You're failing. Your dog will never be trustworthy. You are just kidding yourself with all this training stuff. I thought you said he was better. You're full of shit, aren't you. What kind of people are you, owning that dog. What are you trying to prove.

I've visited this place a lot over the years, like wrestling with a tiger at the bottom of a pit: I lived there for a while when I was much younger, and then at some point I realized I could leave the pit, that the world was beautiful and there was joy at the core, but every once in a while the bottom falls out and I find myself there again, looking upward from a great depth. Getting Laszlo plunged me into the pit for many months, and it was a dark time.

Yet over and over I have proven to myself that we can make progress. Over and over I have seen my dog transform, assimilate an exercise I secretly doubted was possible for him, make a previously insurmountable hurdle into old news. But of course it's not really about the dog.

So the real progress is that now I go there, but I don't live there. The pit is still dark, the tiger still at the bottom. Now I can stand outside it and look at it and say, OK, that's what I'm feeling now. I want the neighbor to like me. I want people to like me. OK. I am afraid of not being likable. OK. And then I can just feel THAT. It's not about the dog. It's not about goals, or success, or failure. It's about a child's primal fear. Here it sits, here in my chest. I don't need to argue with it, because it is not an argument. I don't need to feel anything but that, the truth. That's the best thing I've ever learned from dog training. It's enough for now.

Bombs Bursting in Air

A shorter one, this time.

I don't know about your city, but Oakland on and around July 4th lights up with pyrotechnic artillery about a week prior and several days after. Pretty much around sundown each day, our neighborhood echoes from block to block with the snap, crackle pop of contraband fireworks of all caliber. Sometimes we climb up on our roof to watch the major explosives our neighbors somehow get hold of, and usually give it up eventually after a bottle rocket whizzes too close past our heads.

Dog-wise, I kind of wanted to try and nip this one in the bud. Mine doesn't do the catatonic hiding-in-the-closet shivering thing that I know some dogs do, so I can't claim any kind of miracle working, but he does hackle and puff every time stuff goes off. And, well, I don't want a dog afraid of  noises. Today when the kids started up, I took him out back, hitched him to a post, and brought out a bunch of tasty meat scraps. Every time firecrackers started: push for food. I got the timing down to where I'd hear the start of the whistle, have him strain on the lead for the food, and then let him get it just as the "pop" went off. Fireworks mean success. We ran out of food and I switched to having him bite a tug and having him "speak." Fireworks mean, bite the tug. After a while I unhitched him, played a little, let him carry the tug around, and called it a session. I think I spent all of ten minutes, and now he is much calmer. I wish I had started this three days ago, because I'm pretty confident that by tomorrow we'd have it solved. But he's not hackling at the fireworks anymore.

It's satisfying, because the reason these tools were so readily available to me is that I've spent the better part of a year opening those channels. Laszlo now is able to feel that particular context: "oh, this is that thing where I solve the problem by pushing for food/biting/etc." It feels good to him because it is familiar, surmountable. And I've come to realize that ALL good dog training consists of showing the dog again and again and again, "this is where your energy goes. This is where your energy goes. This is where your energy goes." A million times. Like playing scales, until eventually your fingers get stronger.

So, kids, push with your dog and play tug, and when you BBQ tomorrow save some hot dogs for training the pooch. You don't really want to eat those things anyway.

Love and disobedience

Why do I love my dog? Let's just say over the past year and a half the question has come up a couple times. There's no good reason. He's a pain in the ass. At best he's high strung, destructive, and expensive; at worst he's a lawsuit waiting to happen. He is responsible for more tears, stress and anguish than I care to say. And I am not one of the hand-wringing, rescue-every-hard-luck-case-that-comes-along, Crazy Dog Lady types. OK, not much. But I loved my dog from day one, a real, warm, mammal attachment. I've never liked the smell of dogs, but I like the smell of mine. Even my husband, not a dog person at the outset and definitely not on board with the chaotic new addition, now loves our dog. We want to kill him on a regular basis, but if he ever actually did something awful and we were ordered to kill him for real, we'd fight tooth and nail to save him. So my point is, no one can convince me this isn't hard wired into our physical selves. We humans are social animals, attached to the group, attached to family; I'd argue that no matter what modern, politically-informed choices we make with our intellect, we are predators by nature. Group hunters. And we easily form strong interspecies bonds. Like dogs.

Seems dogs can't help but love us, too. But don't take it personally: after all, they love us no matter whether we're cruel or kind, right or wrong. They're programmed to. I guess that's what folks mean when they talk about the "unconditional love" of animals, and also when they use phrases such as "following her around like a puppy" or "slavish like a dog." For some reason we have both praise and contempt for the love of dogs, as if it was any different from the love we bear them. I say it's involuntary, like breathing. Which is not to say it means nothing, unless you think breathing means nothing. Our hearts are the same. Our minds are not.

Animals can't do anything BUT follow their hearts. They can't talk themselves into or out of anything, can't rationalize. Can't lie. This is why your dog is never wrong. If you tell him to do something and he doesn't do it, there is a very good emotional reason why. His heart told him not to. So one of the questions I ask myself now when evaluating my own training is, "Am I asking the dog to think, rationalize, or lie?" Because while we can and do these things so easily on a daily basis, they simply can't. And all our frustration, anger, and stress when they disobey us, all our reading into some kind of complex or manipulative thought process that caused the disobedience, is all a big projection of ourselves into them. This is how I think about all my training challenges now: how to make the training feel like what the animal already wants, how to create a new emotional imprint. And not just a negative one, because that's where our clever little monkey brains always seem to go, mine included. Yes, if I do something and the result is totally painful, that's an imprint of some kind. But does that mean I won't do it again? If it's touching a hot sheet pan out of the oven---OK, probably, although as a professional baker I can attest that conditioning seems to magically disappear ever year or so. But what if it was something I was strongly driven to do? Something deeply wired into my makeup? Like, sex? What happens when you punish the sexual drive in humans? OK, what happens is pretty much most of Judeo-Christian civilization, really, but hold that thought. What happens when you punish it traumatically? You get a pretty twisted human that still wants to have sex. Sometimes you get a rapist or a serial killer. Back to Western Civilization, though: what happens when you channel it instead? Maybe you get the great Renaissance painters. Symphonies. Rock bands. Etcetera.

Anyway, here at the House of Laszlo things are going pretty well. Anything with fluffy cotton stuffing still suffers terribly, but our fearsome Dobe is showing his softer side more and more, and showing more and more ability to tune in and turn on in situations in which he'd previously been out of control. He is still pushy and demanding, still barks his head off at night, randomly, and we still can't trust him within a mile of our shoes. But there are small and significant changes. An overall calmness. The ability to wait. A new open channel of playfulness: when I go out into the yard with him, instead of dashing around like a maniac looking for squirrels, he throws himself at me, looking for something to bite or fetch. This may not sound like an improvement to some, but to me it's huge because it means he's seeking to resolve his energy through me. It's trust. He has a couple dog buddies now, and when he sees another dog he gets out to the end of the leash, goes into Doberaptor mode, and then turns around to push for food. Not every time, but a lot of the time. He plays dead, balances things on his head, and plays the bass drum while barking (I'm thinking about further exploring drumming as behavioral therapy for dogs). My husband works with him a lot now and it's a beautiful thing to see the two of them with their boy-energy, battling over the tug toy. Watching Matt with the dog has taught me a lot, too: he hasn't particularly steeped himself in overthinking like I have, and when he goes out with Laszlo he just follows his heart and has fun. The way it should be.

Yo, where's my treat?

Dogs don't generalize. That's one of the first things I was told about dogs, and what I've come to realize is that it doesn't mean dogs can't generalize, because they actually can and will; but rather that dogs are literalists, and when they learn it is through very specific imprints. For instance, I taught my dog to "go to his place," a mat in the corner of the kitchen. The theory was that he'd learn that success (treats) came only through sitting in his place, rather than getting his nose into my business. Basic operant conditioning, and pretty effective. In a way. Two things happened. It started to rain nonstop, and to battle the muddy pawprints all over the house we threw a couple towels down on the floor around the kitchen. Laszlo generalized: suddenly, going to his place meant sitting down on the first available towel instead of the mat. The other thing that happened is that by creating the expectation of a treat, I also created inevitable frustration. True to the neurotic overachiever Doberman heritage that is Laszlo's, when the lightbulb went on over his head, he really got on the mat. Within a couple days I pretty much couldn't enter the kitchen without the dog rushing past me to get on the mat and directing an unwavering, laser-beam stare at me. Where's my treat? The next development: the sound of barking echoing from the kitchen while I'm working in another part of the house. I go to see what's up: Laszlo on the mat, lying down as he'd been taught. Barking. Where's my TREAT!? Laszlo, like his owner, doesn't deal with frustration gracefully: he barks and digs maniacally at the floor and tries to destroy the mat. Great.

So I mull this over and decide to stay the course, but try to make it look more like what I learned on the ranch. Here's one thing I keep forgetting: the food isn't just a reward, which is really the key to timing, in particular. The food is the means by which you engage the dog's drive, not just to elicit a behavior but to get the dog to feel a certain way while performing that behavior. In this case, the goal is that the dog feels that feeling patient--i.e., doing nothing--is what makes the food materialize. It's a really subtle difference, but in this case important. I tried a little harder to make that emotional connection. Instead of tossing treats at Laszlo from across the room, I channeled my teachers and became more fluid. One thing I've observed about the really good dog trainers in my life: there's an important physical presence; they move like magicians, mesmerizing the dog, who often gets a sleepy, dopey look and becomes totally magnetized: "learning with the puppy mind," I think Kevin called it. I stopped giving the commands; I concentrated on paying more attention to the minute details, "zinging" the food right into the dog's face the moment he shifted his weight back into "waiting" mode. Success didn't come from the action of sitting on the mat and expecting; it came from the feeling of settling. Success as a trainer came not from dispensing treats robotically, but from learning to play the theremin of the dog's field of desire (OK, a really arcane metaphor, but go look up theremin playing on YouTube and you'll see what I mean).

I took to practicing this while my husband and I ate breakfast at the table right next to the mat, a scenario which historically has often resulted in Laszlo being banished so we could finish our meal in peace. And, despite the voices of dog trainers screaming in my head, "you're going to create the worst monster that ever lived!" it actually seems to be working. I hung in there through a lot of obnoxious behavior, a lot of big dog snout in my lap, and kept guiding him back to the mat. And now it kind of seems like Laszlo hangs out on the mat, generally without barking or digging. Often looking positively peaceful. At one point my husband and I looked at each other and said, "You do realize we're training him not to beg at the table by feeding him at the table." For some reason, we both really loved that idea. But I think that's actually what's happening.

Besides the fact that I am overly analytical and need to be more present in the physical world, if there is a conclusion to be drawn from this anecdote, any tidbit of advice for other folks trying to get inside the doggie mind, it's this: nothing you do is necessarily, in and of itself, right or wrong. That should be a relief. OK, I know, we all can talk about all those ways you can mess up your dog. We will all make mistakes. My point is that once you are (1) open to really feeling what is going on with your dog and (2) non-judgemental about your dog's desires, that is all you need to guide you. In other words, it's not about this technique over that technique, or this piece of gear over the other one. (This, of course is assuming you act with good intention. Obviously if you set out to be cruel to your dog, that is wrong. Duh.) Apropos to that, there is no trainer out there who can "fix" your dog with some set of esoteric secret techniques. There's nothing wrong with having some tricks up your sleeve, but what really matters is understanding how they work. In fact, I'm tempted to dedicate an entire post to the enumeration of every little trick I've ever learned from every trainer I've ever encountered, not because I want to scoop all the dog trainers (some of my best friends are dog trainers) but in order to de-glamorize the tricks so we can all get to the heart of the matter. The magic is in your grasp of the dog's emotional state, and it's really about loving the desire in your dog that is currently powering the inappropriate behavior you hate--because that's the same steam that's also going to power the good behavior you love. The same drive. So, love the drive. Don't squash it, don't mess it up. Think of it as sacred, really, because it's the spark that unites our two species, that makes it possible for us to have our unparalleled connection.

Progress Report--State of Heart

I've now had Laszlo for a little over a year, and find myself trying to evaluate where the progress is and isn't. It's hard to see change when you're immersed on a daily basis, though once in a while I'll have a flash of clear memory, something specific. The other day I remembered that twelve months ago I realized Laszlo wouldn't lie down. I don't mean lie down on command---I mean, he wouldn't lie down. Such was his anxiety and vigilance. He slept curled in a ball, but I never once saw him stretch out on his side and loll on the floor like a proper house dog. So now Laszlo lies down: hooray. Friends tell me his demeanor is calmer, and at least I'd like to think so.

There are discouraging things: barking, for one. He barks a lot lately. Usually at night: howly, grumbly, piercing barks that go on and on. He also barks at us when he wants something, when other dogs bark within a half-mile radius, when neighbors, squirrels or cats pass by, and so on. While completely annoying, this is not surprising: I have been training him to bark ever since we went to Vermont. Being able to "speak" on command is an important element of Natural Dog Training; fellow student Sang relates how his own dog overcame her fear of the vacuum cleaner when he taught her to bark at it. Ironically, I never thought I'd get Laszlo to bark on command. It was one of the hardest things, and it wasn't until the last day of my nine-day intensive that he even coughed out the smallest of "woofs." Now he's Speaking like a champ, particularly at 3:00am or when the ball goes under the couch. Apparently he had a lot to say.

I was warned there would be weird things, maybe even bad things: "every improvement he makes will come through the fault line." Barking is a fault line, beneath which is the magma of rage. So my goal now is to dig a channel for that rage, a path for it to flow.

I've gone back through my Vermont journal and remembered that this is not the first time something escaped through the cracks. Here's an entry:

"Day six and suddenly my dog is phobic. Noises, thunder, the vacuum, a cord on the floor he won't cross over on his own, even though I lead him back and forth over it with a hot dog. This is a dog who regularly hears gunshots, car stereos, fireworks, drums, and band practice, all without flicking an ear. What's going on? Have we pushed him too hard? Have we simply traded 'strikes like a raptor without warning' for 'scaredy dog?' Or was he scaredy dog all along, masked by the pre-emptive aggression?"

I remember this really freaked me out, though I obviously had the answer right. Was I ruining my dog? In the end, there was no lasting phobia. We've even had a thunderstorm since (very rare in this area), and Laszlo paid it no mind. What I keep coming back to, again and again, is that the fear of ruining my dog stems from a lack of trust. Not of my own abilities, clumsy though they are, but of the dog itself. Because though I would never have thunk it, tiger-lover that I am, it turns out it's scary to see what really is, accept it and love it and trust it. To one perspective, it seems totally crazy to take a wired, aggressive dog and teach it to bark and to bite. It's a choice that forces me to put away the anxious commentator in my head and reference my own heart. Because when I first saw Laszlo bite a sleeve, my heart swelled with pure joy. It was like seeing a horse run: Laszlo was doing what he was born to do. And the other thing my heart says is this: the aggression is there. You did not create it. Energy must move; water must flow down the mountain. Either it comes out in a way you can predict and control, or it does not.

I'm aware this breaks with every orthodoxy: I'm reinforcing behaviors I don't want. But let's talk about that for a minute. In the Cesar Millan school of dog training, we are told to correct or reward the state of mind, not the behavior. I think this is one reason that method of training works when it works. On the flip side, perhaps Operant Conditioning owes a couple successes to the chance that while intending to reinforce a specific behavior, the trainer is often actually reinforcing a state of mind. Of course, it's also possible to reinforce the wrong state of mind in both cases---a conundrum that's made my head threaten to explode many times. If I were to make a comparison to NDT, I would say that NDT shifts the emphasis away from the behavior and the mind, and aims to reinforce the state of heart. "The heart is a muscle," and fear is dealt with by building that muscle.

People who train working dogs know this, though they seem to hover with this knowledge in their own sphere, strangely isolated from mainstream pet dog training. The concepts, however, are familiar to anyone who competes in Schutzhund, trains police or S&R dogs, etc.; it's common in this context to talk about building a dog's confidence, words like "courage" and "heart" would not be out of place. I still don't quite understand the arbitrary categorization of "working" dogs and "pet" dogs, except that working dogs get to be dogs more, and pet dogs are expected not to bite anything or show aggression, ever.

The other day Laszlo caught a huge, full-grown possum in the back yard and killed it before I could even begin to lure him off of it. I did not correct him. Well, when he tried to bring it in the house I did head him off sort of emphatically. Part of me wrestles with the question of whether this was the right thing to do. But how could I blame him for it? It's exactly the truth of the matter. Possum blood and fur all over the yard: it's what he enacts on a daily basis with me and with any random piece of cardboard or chew toy he gets hold of: bite, shake, shred. The possum didn't have a chance because I've been working on this dog's bite for three months now. And yes, that could have been anything that attracts his prey drive: a cat, a poodle; let's not even go there. I have a long road ahead: this is only the first step.

Here's another entry from my journal:

"Why is this hard? It's hard because I'm scared. I'm faced with the truth that there is no quick fix. I am faced with the double whammy that I have f---ed up up to this point, and I will keep on f---ing up, I will not be perfect this time around. That just wouldn't be possible. That this animal is doomed to experience the pain of my imperfection, and I his."

Here's a happier thought to end with. I've been reviewing the videos I took of Kevin Behan working with Laszlo. Some of it was very hard to experience at the time, particularly the fence-fighting exercise (as described by Neil Sattin), in which some real viciousness rears its head. At the time I was immersed in watching Laszlo, wrapped up in his reactions and the job of handling him. I'm glad I took the video though, because watching it again I have finally begun to ignore the dog and watch the trainer. What I see now is a complete, unequivocal love and acceptance of the dog. No wonder the dogs trust and follow him like the Pied Piper no matter what scary, uncomfortable exercises he puts them through: he trusts them completely. No part of him is at odds with what they are. I don't think many of us realize how much courage it takes to have this relationship with an animal. Hell, how many of us truly have that with another human? "Show me your darkest self; I will not judge you for it." This is the trainer, and the human, I want to be.

Bad Gravity

It's fascinating how different schools of thought in animal psychology mirror different ends of the human political spectrum. Political conservatives view human nature as being inherently bad, prone to violence, dissipation and vice; therefore a moral structure is built upon discipline, self-control, and external compulsion, echoing the idea of Original Sin: we are born bad, and we must strive to become good. "Good" is defined by a higher authority. The brilliant linguist George Lakoff described this polarity as the "strict father" model, as opposed to the liberal "nurturant parent" model, in which human nature is viewed as essentially good, and good is defined as that which benefits the group or community--core values of are cooperativism rather than competition, egalitarianism instead of authoritarianism. When people are bad, it is thought to be caused by poor socialization, trauma, or abuse: antisocial behavior is seen as illness rather than lack of self-discipline. The goal of the nurturant parent is to provide an environment of support and safety in which the child will develop into a responsible citizen. Lakoff proposes these two models of family structure are the underlying cognitive basis for the difference between liberals and conservatives, though we all have some of both models bouncing around in our psyches.


These are things we also tend to believe about dogs, in equal opposition to each other. Whatever techniques we endorse, most of the folklore about canine nature falls into one of two camps. One sees the animal as having both "good" and "bad" impulses. The seed of badness--rank-seeking--is part of fundamental dog nature. The dog is either expressing a state of submissiveness to the handler, or one of dominance, and our goal as trainers is to reward the former and correct the latter. Rank-seeking, like sin, is seen as primary motivator, yet is fundamentally bad and must be discouraged. Camp two, however, claims that rank-seeking as a motivator is greatly overstated, even irrelevant; and the source of bad behavior is generally lack of proper nurturant conditions (socialization, stimulation). Dogs are inherently good, and bad behavior is assumed to have an external cause.

Part of my point is that I do think that many of these stories we tell about animals are really stories about ourselves. Dogs are arguably the animal we keep closest, in our everyday lives and definitely in our hearts, and the one onto which we paint the most folklore. They may act as our spiritual mirrors, finely tuned emotional mechanisms reflecting our deepest energies back at us; but I think they're our metaphorical mirrors as well, explaining and justifying our own archetypes.

And how does this relate to my personal experience of dog training? At some point during the first six months of working with Laszlo, uncomfortable with the concept that dog behavior could be reduced to simple input/output, but also increasingly dubious that everything would fall into place once he saw me as "pack leader," I started to seek another way to describe to myself what was going on. I was starting to get disheartened with the dominance description. For one thing, it was kind of a drag. Viewing behavior through this lens required constant vigilance: anxiously assessing whether or not each and every action, body posture or demeanor qualified as dominant and needed to be corrected. Half the time it seemed to work, and half the time all the corrections seemed to make the dog anxious. It was also confusing: what if he showed both submissive and dominant behaviors? Could they happen simultaneously?  Also, what if a behavior I like falls into the dominance category, do I need to correct it? Would a wolf? The tangle of absurd inner conflict and contradiction was stacking up to amount to a categorical mistrust of my gut feelings about this animal, none of which were lining up neatly with any theory (which I chalked up to my lack of experience). This was about the time I started thinking to myself sulkily that if this was the only possible relationship I could have with my dog, then I wasn't sure I wanted one at all.

One breakthrough moment of total confusion happened one evening when I resorted to using a squirt bottle as a tactic for getting the dog out of our faces while we were eating. Laszlo responded to being squirted with water by peeing copiously on the floor right in front of us. I was flummoxed. This was a dog who, in the presence of a squirrel, could take my hardest pop on a prong collar without much loss of interest. What could this mean? Was it defiance? Was it fear? Was he "marking?" Was it submssion? Did I break my dog? I Googled "submissive urination" and found Neil Sattin's blog.

I'd been searching for words that carried less charge and worked more consistently than "dominant" and "submissive." Thumbing through Cesar's Way in the bookstore, I opened to a page that contained the following quote: "The word submissive carries with it negative connotations, just as the word assertive does...it simply means relaxed and receptive." Well, that sure was a start. Neil put it in slightly different terms: he substituted the words "predator" and "prey" for "dominant" and "submissive," and he also used the term "overload response," describing dead-on what I felt was really going on with my dog:

Most problem behaviors in dogs have two root causes:

1. A dog has too much stored stress and no way of venting (resolving) that stress productively.
2. A dog has trouble relaxing when they’re energized, and their physical tension causes them to have an ‘overload’ response to being energized (aggression, submissive urination, etc.) instead of being in the flow of the situation (which would allow them to handle the energy of the moment without overloading).

I'd been harboring a theory (that's me, always harboring a theory) that all these "dominant" and "submissive" behaviors were just different sides of the same coin, and the coin was the dog not knowing what to do with its energy. This is also the place where Cesar Millan and Natural Dog Training intersect: the big revelation that it's all about energy. It's also where they part ways, because NDT goes on to say that as a trainer one must learn to minimize one's predator energy rather than enhance it, and maximize one's "preyfulness," which is totally counter-intuitive to pack theory. That said, during my stay with Kevin Behan we did a lot of "predator work," though the point, was not to establish dominance and not to elicit submission: it was to present Laszlo with an embodiment of the biggest, baddest animal in the forest and draw out the resultant emotional energy (and that animal is not the Alpha Wolf, but the Moose).

Here's where all this relates to human politics and stories we tell ourselves about animals: by letting go of the dominance lens, the words that evoke so much charged narrative of human power, we finally take all this out of our own realm and can gaze into the true realm of animal nature, which is what Cesar Millan strives to practice. In nature, however, there is no good energy and bad energy. As Kevin wryly points out, if someone falls off a cliff we never say there was too much gravity...the guy might have died, but we don't talk about "bad gravity." Therefore with dogs we don't talk about "bad energy"--we talk about the dog's capacity to experience energy, and how to teach the dog what to do with that energy. For me, letting go of the judgement and anxiety was the most "calm-assertive" thing I could have done, because suddenly I could see the truth of my dog.

What is the Law?

A couple years ago I became slightly obsessed with the Christmas day tiger attack incident at the San Francisco Zoo, in which two brothers, probably drunk, reportedly taunted and threw things at a 300 lb Siberian tiger named Tatiana who then escaped her enclosure, killed their friend, mauled one of the brothers, and followed the other through the Zoo before she was finally shot in the head by the SFPD. I know it may be farfetched, but I like to fantasize that the brother who, covered in blood, made that frantic 911 call while running from a realio, trulio tiger, glimpsed in his thuggish mind for a moment the true nature of the ancient nemesis that stalked him. I like to picture the animal in its original homeland, the mountains and river valleys of Eurasia. Their numbers are now reduced to a couple thousand, but I imagine how the tigers once held their rightful place in the dreams of the hardy, fur-clothed peoples in high mountain huts: the spirit moving silently through the conifers, giving its form to our deepest fears. What forms do we now project onto animals?

In my fantasy, Tatiana woke up that day and realized who she was, like Bagheera in The Jungle Book: "They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera, the Panther, and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw, and came away." Maybe it was not just that this kid had tormented her and she'd had enough. Maybe, on this day, it was that she looked at that kid and saw prey. On that day, she knew herself.

Besides much heated finger pointing, the tragedy inspired folks to share all their pictures and home video footage of Tatiana the tiger. One in particular was arresting to me: a video taken during feeding time, in which people and their children watched from behind thick glass while Tatiana, snarling, mangled and devoured an entire side of goat that was thrown to her. The people were giggling and cooing and saying things like, "ooh, isn't she beautiful!" Maybe it's me and my dark heart, but I felt an immediate disconnect. These people certainly appreciated the tiger, but, like the brothers that taunted her, somehow did not see the reality of the animal in front of them. Or rather, they saw some aspect and rejected others; they saw the shape of a tiger cut out and overlaid with a veneer of human meaning.

I mentioned that there are contradictory schools of dog training. That may have been an understatement. What I've come to understand is that if you take any two books from the dog training shelf, you will be convinced by each of them that the methods in the other one will totally ruin your dog. One claims you must establish dominance and pack-leadership, or you will screw up your dog. The other: all that's really going on is a hierarchy of reinforcers, and all that dominance stuff just functions as negative reinforcement (or, to use the vocabulary: "positive punishment"), thus screwing up your dog. And in the case of an already screwed-up dog, there is various conjecture about how he got that way. He was abused. He wasn't properly socialized. He needs more mental stimulation. He is reactive. He wants to climb in social rank. He doesn't see you as the pack leader, and therefore is trying to assume the role himself (which he doesn't want, so it's screwing him up). He's fear-aggressive. He's dominance-aggressive. He's predatory-aggressive. One website identified eighteen distinct types of aggression. All of which had the result of rendering me, fledgeling owner of a pre-messed up dog, totally paralyzed. At some point in all this my husband quipped that the difference between us and the "experts" was that none of us knew what we were talking about, but they got paid for it. It was stunning how little agreement there was about what was really going on inside dogs' hearts and heads.This was a creature with which we humans had shared quarters for fourteen thousand years, maybe more; how could they be such a black box today? How could there be such wildly different explanations for their motivations and character?

I think it's safe to say our laissez-faire household failed at pack leadership at the outset; and in the eyes of the behaviorists, I did even worse. I felt intimidated by the positive-only methodology, and skeptical that it would ever even work with a dog like mine--a dog whose utter distraction and disconnection to me prevented me from being able to get his attention once outside the house except through aversive means. I was reading Jean Donaldson, Patricia McConnell and Ian Dunbar: according to these trainers, the correct course of action was a process of gradual desensitization and re-conditioning through positive reinforcement in the presence of the "trigger;" i.e., that which elicits the aggressive response. Which made a lot of sense to my scientific mind, but broke down in the field. Laszlo's aggression did not at any point feel like it could be lessened by the introduction of treats. The drive was so powerful. He would ignore a raw steak in front of his nose if he was in his "raptor mode," missile-locked and ready to strike. And if I did wave that steak in front of his nose, wasn't it possible I'd be making it worse by actually reinforcing the "dominant state of mind?" I could not have been more in conflict.

The Bay Area is arguably the beating heart of the positive-only movement, but I never found a +R trainer to work with (each one I wrote to seemed to want to refer me to somebody else, or not return my emails at all). I was introduced through a local Doberman rescue to a pair of talented trainers in the "pack order is paramount" camp. In hard contrast to what had started to feel like self-righteous orthodoxy from the SF SPCA devotees, with their freely-flung accusations of abuse if ever training crossed into the realm of physicality, these folks were kind, generous and nonjudgmental; they offered a lot of moral support, and talked me through some hard spells. Experienced handlers who were able to communicate their confidence to their clients, they were also the first to speak about energy, human and dog body language, etc. I stuck to their program for several months.

I'll save any dissertation about the Cesar Millan model of dog psychology for some other day (honestly it's already been done to death) but what I'd like to get to is why I finally abandoned it as a way to work with Laszlo. Because it was, for a while, the only thing that produced visible results. There is still a little voice in the back of my mind that nags, "Correct it! Correct it! If you would just be more consistent it would eventually work." Actually I suspect this might be true of most systems: if you really, unwaveringly commit, the system will eventually work. Which may be more about the power of human will than the strength of the system, or it may be just that dogs are so deeply and finely attuned to us that they will eventually synch themselves to our program despite all our blunders. Otherwise how could we possibly have taught them to perform complex work like sheep herding and mountain rescue, hundreds of years before clickers and e-collars? I am open to the criticism that it did not fully work because I could not truly commit. In any case, what caused my heart to waver was an overwhelming sense that my dog's behavior problems were an expression, however unacceptable, of drives inextricable from his deepest nature. Not in a hippie-parent "he's just got to be able to express himself, man" kind of way. It was more a sense that some kind of ancient pact between man and beast was being violated by the unqualified rejection of the dog's desires. It seemed unfair. Did we not breed this animal to be this way? And did we not, tens of thousands of years ago, allow the glowing eyes of that proto-dog-wolf to approach the circle of our fire, entering into a unique partnership based on the animal's innate ability to warn us about that tiger in the forest, follow herds of great ungulates across the steppes; and later, herd our flocks, kill vermin, retrieve game? The dog I adopted was first bred to protect its owner in late-18th-century German slums, and later accompanied the US Marine Corps in WWII combat. And now that we demand that they live quietly in our houses and play nice with strange dogs, any of the wolf that escapes through the cracks is seen as pathological, unbalanced. Unnatural.

Suddenly all these endlessly escalating corrections, all this expenditure of energy whose object was to keep the lid on the boiling pot--with the explanation that energy invested this way would eventually stop the boiling--seemed so very Island of Doctor Moreau: some kind of morality tale of human arrogance thinking to change beast into man through scientific ingenuity. "Each time I dip a living creature into the vat of burning pain, I say, 'This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own....[but] as soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again.'" Suddenly dominance training felt less like tapping into the dog's nature and more like trying to nullify it.

I have plenty of good things to say about Cesar; I do not actually think he is the Doctor Moreau of dog training. It is the story he tells himself about why his system works when it does, and why things don't work when they don't, that stopped resonating for me as truth, and started sounding a lot like a description of human nature that had little to do with dogs. I felt (and still feel) compelled to keep searching for the key to that black box. I want to understand how to really work with a dog's energy. I'd like to believe dogs are not beasts of burden, forced into servitude. Might there not be some forgotten knowledge whereby humans learned to channel the dog's energies, some Kung Fu of dog training by which the danger of a dog's energy was channeled into a common purpose? And here and now, in modern city life, is it possible to create such a purpose?

The Beastie Within

I got my dog Laszlo in October '08. His only backstory was that he'd been picked up by Animal Control on the street, and upon adoption he instantly manifested all the most disturbing rescue-dog behavior problems you could conceive: unhinged aggression towards dogs, unpredictable edginess with people, jumping up, pulling like a sled dog on the leash, shoe-eating, leash-eating, wanting to eat the cat, wanting to bite our visitors, wanting to destroy the house...you name it. Since then I've had a crash course in every possible contradictory school of dog training, tried to give the dog away twice, engaged the services of five different local trainers, pored over dozens of books, hit pretty much every doggie website out there, wrote many long desperate emails to strangers, and recently undertook a 3,000-mile trek across the country to try and fill in the blanks.

This blog is going to be about the Pandora's box of knowledge my choice of a Very Bad Dog has pried open. I started writing about my experiences from the little guest-cabin in rural Vermont on property of Kevin Behan--dog trainer, author and guru of a model of understanding the canine mind called Natural Dog Training. Now, back in California, I hope to extract from my adventures some musings on dogs, training, and the subject of the animal-human relationship which I've found so endlessly, obsessively compelling this past year.

Why this dog? I guess I've always had a thing for the bad boys. When looking back over my past choices, its something of a miracle, or at least a testament to the presence of some small kernel of good sense in my soul, that I ended up with my husband --the kind of guy who doesn't put his fist through walls, doesn't get arrested, doesn't cheat, doesn't look in other people's medicine cabinets, etc. I congratulate myself daily for having recognized this rare heart of gold and not screwing it up. But in light of this, it's not terribly surprising that, in an area with many state-of-the-art shelters full of eager, charming, imminently adoptable animals, I gravitated towards the foul-smelling, old-school, high-kill doggie prison that is the Pinole Animal Shelter, and found myself staring through the bars into the wary eyes of a large red Doberman Pinscher. He was somewhere in his second year, with cropped ears, docked tail...a dog who looked like he should be guarding the gates of Hell. I told myself it was between him and the exuberant little blue-eyed Husky mix barking and leaping hopefully against the wire in the adjacent cell, but really the Husky never had a chance. Maybe, looking down the barrel of 40, I could chalk it up to midlife crisis: like going to the car dealership for a Honda and walking out with a Ferrari. In any event, I took the Bad Boy home.

My reasons for wanting to adopt a dog were many: urban paranoia fueled by the neighborhood's frequent break-ins and my resulting insomnia whenever I had to spend the night alone in the house; desire to branch out from the parade of ragtag, freeloading cats I'd owned all my life; desire to make a connection with another species with whom I'd had no previous relationships. My dog experience was pretty much limited to a few friends' pups who tagged happily along on our hikes in the Oakland hills. Local shelters are overrun with pit bulls, but ironically I'd ruled them out, fearing the dog-aggression issues. My mom had owned a yellow Lab and a Lab-Husky mix, both good dogs, and neither of whom I entrusted to even so much as bark at a potential home-invader. I started thinking about Dobermans. I knew nothing about the breed, just that they were cool when I was growing up but now are rarely seen. I had a memory of watching "The Doberman Gang" as a kid--a 70's B-movie about bank robbers who train a team of Dobes to pull of a heist. That really impressed me. And Dobermans looked scary, but all sources claimed they're really Boy Scouts (most Doberman-related websites involved at least one picture of a sleek and heroic-looking dog posing in front of an American flag). At that point, I pretty much regarded breed differences as mainly aesthetic with maybe some some legacy traits related to the breed's original purpose, like digging or chasing balls. I had no clue about dogs.

We noticed right away that Laszlo was more than a little bit "reactive." Many times I've wondered how much more I'd have learned had the shelter allowed me to take the dog for a spin around the block. As it was, I spent about five minutes in a room with him before he was shipped off to the clinic for mandatory neutering and returned in a sore and drugged haze. In any case, I loaded him up the very next day to join me on the first of what I thought was going to be many fine walks in the woods: a girl and her dog. On the way I stopped by a girlfriend's house to see if she maybe wanted to join us with her own dog, a Mastiff-Rottweiler mix. Her dog, knowing the sound of my car, ran joyfully out to meet me. Simultaneously, Laszlo transformed into a raging demon. He couldn't be anywhere within sight of the Mastiff without lunging and carrying on like a maniac. The first of many walks cut short. Around the house, he didn't look quite domestic, a different order of creature--as if I had plucked the living incarnation of Anubis from an ancient tomb and ensconced it in our living room. When dogs barked on the television, the pricked ears would go straight up in the picture of laser-beam vigilance and he would spring to his feet in full alert, tail-stump erect, hackles raised; he would bristle and run back and forth across the house growling formidably and puffing his cheeks. More dog than I had bargained for.

Our first trainer (selected semi-randomly through the internet), after several perfunctory leash-jerking sessions in which Laszlo showed increasing signs of anxiety and disconnect, told us that we were in danger and should either put him on doggie Prozac (otherwise known as real Prozac--how convenient for those edgy dog/owner pairs) or better yet, drive him directly back to the shelter. I said something like, "But they'll just kill him, right?" He replied, "Let them do their job." I bear him no hard feelings: I think he must have seen immediately how far over our heads we were, and, being part of the shelter culture, i.e., habituated to mass killing, thought to do us a kindness by giving us an out. His assessment that the dog had been broken through abuse or neglect seemed like a plausible story. It still may be true. But he also never got to see the good side of my Bad Dog, the side that sets his muzzle on my arm and gazes up at me with soft eyes, wanting to trust. Maybe all broken dogs do that. Anyway, I'd promised Laszlo on the way home from the pound that he'd never have to go back to that place. Don't get me wrong, I'm no kind of saint. I immediately started looking for a nice new home for my aggressive, untrained Doberman.

That was ten months ago. Shockingly, that perfect owner didn't materialize. Friends finally stopped asking gingerly if I still have the dog, probably having come to quietly accept that I'd lost my mind completely on this front. My dog (while greatly improved) is not "cured." In the meantime however I've had some other kinds of revelations. For example, I started to understand why I chose the dog, and why I still own him. When trainer number three asked why I'd wanted a Doberman, I mumbled something about how I hadn't really done my homework. In hindsight, that wasn't the whole story. I didn't consciously set out to find a vicious dog, but I think there was something happening on a deeper level. What I'd felt in the dog was a part of myself I thought I'd long ago kicked out of the house. The dog mirrored all my own darkest qualities. Defensive? Check. Reactive? Check. Spaced out, unfocused? Anxious? Socially awkward? Check. Was it hidden in my subconscious that his role was to embody some atavistic desire to install a demon between myself and the world? Or did the dog choose me--the one who walked into the shelter with a soul stubborn enough to want to unlock his true Good Dog nature?

You know that mirror in Harry Potter that shows you what you really want? It says I show not your face but your heart's desire. So, it turns out, do dogs. But here's the good news: the heart's desire is to express its true nature. Perhaps when I can do that, my dog will finally be healed. But until then, we'll be working on the dog's true nature.