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?