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.