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.