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."