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.