Dear Clipboard Guy

Dear Clipboard Guy:
First, let me say that the use of "dear" is merely a convention for a letter greeting, rather than an expression of affection. A colon may seem formal, but I'd like to remind you that you're not a friend or family member or even an acquaintance I think I might kind of like one day; the reason you don't get a friendly letter with a comma after the greeting is that you're a stranger.

Your status as a stranger might have been driven home to you when you walked up to my house. Did you hear my dog barking from the moment you stepped on the grass? Remember how her barking increased in both intensity and volume when you stood at the front door? How about when she jumped up on the armchair and barked at you through the window?

What I didn't have the time or inclination to tell you:
1. I've been regretting opening doors to clipboard-carrying strangers for thirty years, which experience assures me that there is nothing you can have to say that would interest me, partly because I have no interest in knowing someone who invades people's privacy for a living, but mostly because I know you wanted something from me that I didn't want to give you: money or a signature.

If I had opened the door, I know I would have been sorry. You might have been sorry, too; I would not have bought what you were selling; I would not have signed your petition. I never do. I don't want strangers appearing on my doorstep to sell me things or to proffer petitions, and therefore I never reward the unwanted behavior.

2. In order to open the door to you, I would have had to grab my dog's collar and drag her, toenails scraping on the wood floor, into another room, and lock her up. I did the cost/benefits analysis and decided not to bother. My dog is getting on in years. She has hip dysplasia and arthritis. Being yanked around the house would only aggravate the pain she is already in: you might or might not agree that's an excessive cost for the experience of declining whatever you're selling. It doesn't matter either way; I care a lot more about my dog's feelings than I do about yours.

3. When you knocked on the door, I was working. I don't show up at your work and bother you. I wish you would show me the same courtesy.

4. When a person asks you THREE TIMES--politely, in a neutral, civil tone and without brandishing a weapon--to vacate the premises, the sensible action is to shake the dust from your feet and hie thee hither, not to remain on the doorstep making facial expressions and gestures indicating your chagrin at being insulted. If we lived in Florida and if I owned a gun and if I had any whiff of a hint of a thought that I might be under threat, I guess I could have shot you. 

If you believe that we all of us who are not you have some obligation to do exactly what you would like us to do, e.g., open the door, buy your magazine subscription, do your laundry, put up with your nonsense, and so on, much disappointment awaits you. To be plain, just because you want me to do something doesn't in any way obligate me to do that thing. (Although I very much hope you will learn from this experience and stay away, so I can't imagine what else you might want from me.)

Best regards, (which you should interpret as a meaningless convention)
[signature here]

Rainbows, Butterflies, and Unicorns

Although yesterday started off fine, with a long walk during which My Good Dog was mostly perfectly behaved (except when she wasn't), she went on to have a bit of a rough day. Mondays, you know: trash day. All day long, we hear the slow rumbling of  garbage trucks. Then the yard waste trucks make their rounds. By the time the mail carrier arrives in the late afternoon, Sophie's limited store of patience has been exhausted. Still, I see progress. Even though she launched a full offensive at the mail carrier's approach, I intervened swiftly and she recovered her equanimity quickly.

This morning, we left for our walk a bit later than usual. A mail carrier truck was parked to the left of us as we neared the trailer park on Telegraph. I made sure I was breathing and walking normally. Sometimes I catch myself tightening up when I see a mail truck, or a FedEx or UPS truck: my shoulders tighten and rise, my breathing gets faster, my heart beat becomes noticeable. I react this way even if I'm out driving by myself.

So I've been learning to pay attention to that and correct my posture. This morning, I held the leash loosely in my left hand, which is in itself progress; I used to begin our walks by wrapping the end of the leash around my hand several times.

We kept walking, with Sophie trotting at a sedate heel. Then she glanced at the mail truck briefly, returned her gaze forward, and kept walking as if she had never once in her life ever even growled at a mail carrier, as if she bore no grudge against mail carriers in general, as if she'd never been the spectacle of 70 pounds of barking, whirling, ferociously lunging fury that interrupted a middle school P.E. class because all the students and the teacher ran to the chain-link fence to stare at her while she let a mail carrier know what was up.

Several blocks later, we'd turned down Ashwood toward the park, and Sophie caught sight of a large, long-haired cat of the striped variety. The cat looked at Sophie calmly, and then approached--not as a Halloween cat would do, but as if she thought she'd like to say hello. Sophie and the cat touched noses and sniffed each other thoroughly. The cat didn't run, Sophie didn't pounce at her, they just looked at each other for a moment, and then Sophie and I went on our way.

This is how it would be in my dream world every day.

Today's Report Card
# of mail trucks sighted (parked): 1
reactivity: 0

# of cats sighted (in motion): 2
reactivity: -5, 0

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

We're moving in the right direction.

Today's Report Card
# of meter readers sighted: 1
reactivity: 3
# of cats sighted (2):
reactivity: 1
# of mail carriers sighted (in motion, with truck): 1
reactivity: 0

I would throw a party if only there hadn't been such a hullaballoo about the meter reader.

What to Notice

A few nights ago, it was late, I was tired, and I could hear my daughters practicing their cellos (celli?) in their studio. (Studio may be a grandiose term; it's a shed, albeit with French doors and several windows, with an interior that we painted lilac, and it was designated their music room because inside our small house, two cellos/celli playing at one time is a lot.)

The background on this is that we've always had this rule, as loosely followed as it was enforced, of no practicing after 9:30, 10 at the latest, 10 being the hour specified in the city ordinance prohibiting noise. It was 11:30 and my daughters were playing their cellos/celli. Was I steamed.

I went out to the shed, offered a reprimand, and invited them to shut it down and go to bed. All the while I grumbled--about having had to rise from my warm cozy bed, about the possibility of their having disturbed the neighbors, and so on.

When I woke up in the morning, I saw that what I've often suspected is true: I am the most ridiculous person in the world. Here I have these teen-age daughters, these straight A students, these musicians who diligently practice: girls who are nice, fun to be with, and funny as all get-out, girls who never cause me a moment's worry that they might be sneaking out to gleefully roll around in all the trouble that teen-agers often do roll around in. If the worst thing they ever do is practice their cellos/celli at 11:30 at night on a school night--well! Then I will have been mightily blessed.

Late, while walking My Good Dog, I listened to the Make Dogs Your Life podcast, episode 4, the interview with Jessica Dolce, a professional walker of dogs. Ms. Dolce talked about this very topic as applied to dogs, and I realized how incredibly good My Good Dog is, let me count the ways:
1. Never chews on shoes or furniture or any other item except chew toys.
2. Is 100% house-broken.
3. Is absent any hint of food or toy aggression.
4. Is always sweet and calm to small dogs, no matter how aggressive the small dog is.
5. Is almost always sweet and calm with any dog (except, rarely, dogs that are aggressive to her--she usually doesn't react, but once in a while, she does--and, only twice, she was snappy with dogs who seemed passive and sweet).
6. Learns new tricks quickly.
7. Obeys basic commands: sit, stay, wait, down, sit up, shake.
8. Walks well on a leash.
9. Is always sweet and calm with family members.
10. Never lies on the furniture (when we're home).
11. Doesn't jump up on people who don't let her jump up on them.
12. Has learned not to lick my face.
13. Never steals food from the table or counter.
14. Never gets into the trash.
15. Is a pleasant companion.

All that having been said, if My Bad Dog's one personality flaw is her reactivity to mail carriers and all delivery personnel and strangers who come to our house unannounced, well, maybe that isn't the worst thing in the world.

Especially if that one personality flaw is seeming to (very gradually) diminish.

I decided to record the level of reactivity along with the stimulus to help me monitor improvement. Reactivity is measured on a 0 to 5 scale, 0 being obliviousness and 5 being nuclear explosion.

Today's Report Card
# of cats sighted: 2
reactivity: 1

# of FedEx trucks (in motion): 1
reactivity: 1

Wrong Is Me

We don't have cable at our house; we don't even have a TV. Our ancient cathode ray tube set gave up the ghost before we moved last fall, and when I asked my daughters if they wanted a TV, they said no. We do watch Netflix on occasion, and recently I've been watching Cesar Millan. That show is addictive. I could watch for hours.

Why? It's the old, old story: all about faith and hope and love and redemption.

I've been sorely in need of the faith and hope. In spite of that one moment, and subsequent minor victories (The mail carrier came to our door and My Bad Dog slept through it! We walked past a mail carrier who was only 15 feet away from us, and My Bad Dog didn't react at all! A FedEx truck passed us and she didn't lunge and bark!), I was feeling discouraged that the hard daily work of consistent discipline on walks and correcting her when she registered loud disapproval of landscape workers across the street, a real estate agent down the block, the Seventh Day Adventists who like to check in to see if we've changed our minds (we haven't) wasn't yielding consistent results.

She seemed better, then she seemed worse. She didn't bark, then she tried to eat the mail carrier/FedEx guy/school bus driver/elderly man with those enormous black sunglasses and the rather aggressive posture who doesn't like to share the sidewalk. 

In watching Dog Whisperer episodes this time, though, I found hope once again fluttering in my breast. I always say I'm a repeat learner, and the repeated lesson here is that it's me, not My Bad Dog. I had thought and thought and thought and thought about why she was the way she was, and kept blaming her sad, sad past of having been a street dog, having been abandoned not once but twice. The conclusion I always came to was that she was the way she was because of her past. Then sometimes I would sort of get it that all right, so I was inadvertently allowing some dominant behaviors and failing to be a confident pack leader, and so My Bad Dog then tried to take that role.

I got it, but I didn't get it. I probably just didn't want to believe it was me. On Cesar's show, it's always obvious to the viewer that it's the owner's problem that fuels the dog's problem.

Maybe the reason for the inconsistent results was that even though I had some of the behaviors in place (for myself, I'm not talking about My Bad Dog, I mean that I learned not to let her walk ahead of me and not to let her put her paw on me, for example), I hadn't done the necessary emotional excavation that you see with the owners who become successful in rehabilitating their dogs. Also, I was still making some behavioral mistakes (e.g., letting her sniff and track while we walked instead of requiring her to walk directly forward with me).

We none of us humans enjoy admitting we're wrong. It took me a while, but now I'm at this place of being thrilled to admit that I am wrong, wrong, wrong if that will solve the problem. 

My Mistake:
I had dreaded meetings with mail carriers/FedEd guys/teens in hoodies/elderly men with aggressive postures. Perhaps My Bad Dog sensed this dread and assumed that she needed to protect me from those dangers. My solution had been to avoid them, but that didn't work. It just made encounters worse when we had them.

What I'm Doing Instead:
I noticed that when Cesar worked with reactive dogs, he welcomed opportunities for the dogs to react in their typical manner because those were learning opportunities. Instead of avoiding such encounters, I needed to welcome them. This requires a certain amount of internal fortitude, but the great thing is that the more you do it, the easier it is.

Now we've have a few days of my embracing the outside world in its entirety, mail carriers and all. It gets dramatic and people do love to stare when they see me administering correction when My Bad Dog is leaping and lunging and barking.

The Result:
Today we were at what I used to think of as the Infernal Intersection because it had been the scene of many overreactions on the part of My Bad Dog. A big school bus rolled up from behind us, and My Bad Dog went crazy.

I gave her a firm "No!" (as opposed to a pleading or doubtful "No?") and each time she lunged, I gave a swift backward pull on the leash and the claw hand to the loose ruff around her neck--"claw hand" makes it sound meaner than it is, but there's no violence in it, nothing that causes her pain, and the reasons I know it doesn't cause her pain are that I'm not applying enough pressure to hurt her and that I know what she looks like when she is in pain, and that is not it. It does get her attention. She is used to my correcting her with ineffective words, and those are very easy for her to ignore. This she couldn't ignore. It was as if I had gone from saying "Blah blah blah blah, Sophie" to "Attention, soldier!" She calmed down and sat next to me at the intersection, EVEN THOUGH THE BUS WAS STILL THERE. Fantastic.

Then, because God likes a joke, I think, a little school bus pulled up in front of us on the cross street to turn right. My Bad Dog went crazy, and we went through the same routine, and she calmed down and sat down until our light changed, and then she walked sedately by my side while we crossed the street.

I'm so proud of My Good Dog.

And one of the best things about all of this is that it drives home for me what Cesar keeps saying about how dogs live in the moment, they don't live in the past. Sophie doesn't sigh for her lost puppyhood. She doesn't weep in remembrance of the wrongs done her. She reacts in the moment. Therein lie the hope, right? Every moment gives us a chance to react differently.

We met a school bus, My Good Dog reacted and got corrected, and then we went home, and the whole way, My Good Dog trotted happily and confidently at my side.

The Thing with Feathers

. . .in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson.

What never ceases to amaze me is the cheering power of setting a plan in motion. And then, perhaps even greater, the reassurance and comfort when another person has a calm response to what one inwardly believes is a tragedy of massive proportion.

That calm and solid "here's what you need to do" manner may go along with the territory for dog trainers. It is an excellent thing, is what I am saying.

You may have guessed that I have news. I called Stacey Ayub of Good Dog! Dog Training on a recommendation from a fellow who had also adopted a rescue dog.

I told Stacey everything about My Bad Dog: about her checkered past, that she had been labeled "incorrigible" by a trainer, that she had bitten her previous owners AND the trainer who maligned her (though I did ask Stacey to consider that the trainer used a fog horn, and who wouldn't bite under that provocation?). I told her about how My Bad Dog bit that one kindly stranger, seemingly for no reason, and I told her about how My Bad Dog responded to both the man in the blue truck and to the hoodie-sporting teen-ager. I told her about what happens when a mail carrier comes into view.

It was a relief to say it all out loud to someone who listened carefully. In the immortal words of Sir Gilbert Parker, "In all secrets there is a kind of guilt, however beautiful or joyful they may be, or for what good end they are set to serve. Secrecy means evasion, and evasion is a problem to the moral mind."

Rather than focus on what many might believe is the misfortune of Sophie's breeding, Stacey instead explained what was happening exactly what I've been doing wrong and what I should be doing:

1. Ixnay on the inchpay ollarcay. Why was My Bad Dog wheeling around and snapping at me? To stop me from hurting her. Stacey pointed out that Sophie snapped at me, but never bit me hard enough to hurt me. If a stranger had been using a pinch (prong, training, mean metal) collar on My Bad Dog, that stranger would have ended up in the emergency room.
2. Get a HOLT collar. (Done.)Introduce it gradually, with lots of steak or another special treat, over the course of several days before trying it on My Bad Dog. (We had several sessions today of bringing out the HOLT and then giving My Bad Dog a piece of hot dog every time she looked at it or smelled it. Then we put it all away again.)
3. All those cute behaviors, like the leaning on me? Stop those right now. Don't let My Bad Dog lean against me, put her head on my leg, paw at me, or stand in front of me. Nudge her out of the way.
4. Insist that My Bad Dog defer to me always in the matter of right-of-way (when entering or exiting) and that she walk next to me, never in front of me.
5. Never allow My Bad Dog on the furniture.
6. Wait until after April. Stacey is very busy at the moment training service dogs. Also, Stacey is going to Iowa in April to take a class on dealing with demon devil Cujo Satanic dogs like My Bad Dog from Robin MacFarlane of That's My Dog! and will come back ready to apply everything she has learned.

Poor My Bad Dog. Stacey explained that our intersection troubles came about because I've given Sophie to believe that she must protect me, and so she is doing that to the best of her ability. Aggravating the situation is the use of the prong collar, which corrections keep My Bad Dog in check until she can't contain herself any longer, and so the situation is escalated before it has even begun.

We had a family meeting, during which I told my daughters everything Stacey had told me, and we are all in agreement to reform ourselves.

How long will it take? About eight months.

How did My Bad Dog act on our walk this morning? With perfect composure. But it was a shorter than usual walk. And also? No mail carriers.

Speaking of which, how did My Bad Dog greet our mail carrier today? As she usually does. But she obeyed me when I required her to go and lie down on her bed until her madness passed.

Let's see how it goes.



“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all - 
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
                       Emily Dickinson