Bad Dog (16 page)

T
HE SMALL WOMAN
in the camo T-shirt and parachute pants makes a quick scan of my battered chew-toy sofa and Hola’s worn-out chaise lounge from Domain.

“Obviously,” she says, “the dog has furniture privileges.”

“Don’t all dogs?” I ask her.

“No,” she sniffs. “They do not.”

Although I have her on leash, Hola is trying to catapult herself off her new friend’s breasts when the woman makes a sound I’ve never heard from a human being before:
“Grrrrrggghhgg.”

Deep, guttural, sharp, disarming: the sound of a dog backing up against a flaming wall.

Like magic, Hola plants four on the floor, lowers her head and her tail, and steps back.

“Sit,” says the woman, calm-assertively.

Hola sits.

This, I’m thinking, has potential.

I’d found this woman, who changed my life, by asking the most dominant person I knew—namely, my boss—who had helped him train his dog. That his dog was a tiny dachshund just made his good manners more rare: these rodents are usually wretched because nobody fears them enough to even bother.

“Her name is Lorena,” he’d said. “She will change your life.”

“Does she use a clicker?”

“A what?”

Lorena has the kind of full-blooded New York accent—
dawgs uv got they-uh own lang-wage
—you don’t hear so much anymore, blunt-cut straight red hair and copious freckles on an open oval face like an overgrown kid’s. She’s not too clean-looking, like a woman who spends her time with canines and bad men. Of course, she’s chewing gum—or thumbtacks.

I’m sitting on my bomb-zone sofa with Hola at my side listening to her say:

“The problem is, people don’t know how to communicate with their dogs. We need to learn their language. See the world from their point of view. They have one job and that job is to train us. We’re a lot more important to them than they are to us, if you think about it. They don’t have a lot of other options.”

Regaining her charm after a temporary setback, Hola starts testing Lorena: poking, nuzzling at her, probing her knees.

“She does a lot of attention-seeking behavior,” Lorena points out. “Demands to get petted and so on. Does a whole lotta that.”

“ ’Cause she’s pretty,” she says, “she gets a lot of attention. It works for her. I bet it’s worse with men—big men, right?”

“How did you know?”

“That’s your fault; you trained her. She bats her eyes, rubs against you—you pet her and talk to her. She doesn’t really care if you yell at her or praise her. The point is she’s training you. Meaning she gives the cue, you do the thing.”

Hola rolls over onto her back.

Lorena smiles for the first time since she got here.

“This is her pulling out everything she’s got,” she says, BBing her eyes into mine. “You pet her right now, I’m gonna have to kill you.”

“Dogs need a boss,” she says after a second. “Somebody’s the leader. Most of them want it to be you. It’s like the military—if there’s no leader, people are going to die. That’s the way they think. It’s not like people—we talk; everybody contributes, you know. More like children—that’s their mentality. Think about two-year-olds—how they think. You can’t keep feeding them candy all the time, right? Don’t answer that.

“Dogs get dominance through height. Not necessarily taller breeds—within the breeds. That’s why she gets up on furniture. Why she jumps up on people. When she jumps up, she’s higher. Telling people she’s dominant from the beginning. Thought she was being friendly, right? Dogs may have a tendency but will go to both dominant and submissive from time to time. Your girl probably does both.”

Momentarily flummoxed, Hola heaves herself to standing and starts to oscillate slowly back and forth between us, like a furry washing machine.

“Hola, sit,” she says, and Hola does, skyrocketing right back up like the floor is on fire.

“I think she’s naturally submissive, believe it or not,” Lorena says, amazing me. “This is not a particularly dominant dog. I can tell. This dog should not be all that hard to train.”

Off my wilted-lettuce look: “Sorry, Marty. You thought you had a Bernese Marley, right—and what you really got here is a Taco Bell.”

My phone vibrates, and I check who it is. Not Gloria. I had caved in to Clark’s advice and set a date for our Canine Good Citizen test: December 19. Less than one month away. I had e-mailed
the date, time, and place to Gloria, and she hadn’t responded. Now I feel like I’m sitting through a sad animal movie—which is basically every animal movie—and I don’t know why.

“We’re not going to use treats anymore for training,” Lorena says. “It doesn’t work for telling them what you
don’t
want them to do. Jumping on people is so much better than any treat. You have to keep raising the treat ante. So what are you, going to have a piece of filet mignon out there? Caviar?”

“So what do we do?” I ask her.

“It’s simple,” she says and proceeds to lay out our new method:

From now on, Hola doesn’t get anything she wants unless she does something in return.

First.

Not just food, but anything she wants: petting, a walk, dinner, furniture time. She sits before every door, every flight of stairs, every exit or entrance. She doesn’t move until I say, “Okay.”

“And how do I get her to do this?” I ask, getting testy.

“Just like this,” she says.

“Sit,” she says to Hola, and as Hola hesitates, she growls
“Grrrrgggh!”
and snaps gently on the leash.

Hola sits.

“Good dog!” she sings, happily. “Very good girl.”

“The thing most people forget,” says Lorena, “is to praise dogs when they do it right. No treat, just praise. You want voice control of your animal. It’s more important than the correction. Ideally, you want to get to a place where you’re praising all the time and don’t need the growl.”

“But for now …” I say.

“The growl.”

This new Lorena Method is certainly a lot easier than the
Port Chester Obedience Training Club protocol, logistically. I don’t have to fumble with clickers and treats and so on, which I never quite mastered. As Lorena had said, a food-motivated dog will do anything for a treat. It’s a monologue, not a dialogue.

If I have a treat in my possession, Hola will go through a sit, down, stay, backflip, and tarot card reading—all before I have time to give her a command. It becomes: I’ll do everything till something works. A kind of Las Vegas school of human behavior modification.

“Our goal,” says Lorena, “should be to get them to do something because we asked them to. Good things happen when they do what we say. Annoying things happen to them when they don’t. It’s as simple as that.”

We go around Trinity Church Cemetery, the only active cemetery in Manhattan. It’s a Gothic slab of old New York, a steep and rocky lot of ornate gravesites climbing from the West Side Highway to upper Broadway, remnant of a time when Washington Heights looked more like Bern, Switzerland, than a burn ward.

Hola trots along between Lorena and me as we talk, and I’m holding the leash. She’s pretty well-behaved, by my standards, but Lorena works from a stricter rule book.

“She’s forging ahead,” she says. “Use the correction.”

“Grrr,” I say, self-consciously.

“Hola forges ahead—
Grrr
like a taser, okay?”

I pull Hola back and around until she’s at my side.

“There’s no sniffing, chewing, whatever, unless you say so,” says Lorena. “Her job on the walk is to walk next to you until you tell her to stop. That’s her job. Heel position. That’s it.”

We angle back down Broadway, within sight of the massive Episcopalian cathedral; as usual, as I’m walking Hola between
the cemetery and the cathedral spires, I feel as though we are padding softly over a tapestry woven from the spirits of the dead.

Lorena says, “She picks stuff up fast. She obviously wants to please you.”

“What?”

“Yeah, that’s why she’s so fast. She has a lovely temperament. You’re lucky. She’s smart too.”

“We’re talking about Hola, right? This dog right down here?”

“What you need is to challenge her more.”

We navigate 156th Street past Boricua College and descend the slope to Riverside Drive, and I’m thinking that Hola seems to have mastered the heel: her nose at my kneecap, trotting with her tail a-wag and her head sweeping the antique-brick sidewalk for signs of chicken-related detritus.

Watching her, Lorena says, “This dog is not very dominant, Marty. Why did you say that when you called me?”

“I don’t know. I just assumed that was the problem—that she was dominant and she didn’t respect me enough.”

“She doesn’t respect you enough. But it’s not because she’s alpha.”

The Volhards convinced me that Hola was fearful. Now Lorena is saying she’s a natural follower. Fearful and submissive is surely not the dog I thought I knew.

Back in the apartment, I practice having her sit-stay while Lorena knocks on the door and comes in like a fake visitor.

This is very hard for Hola.

We break it down into pieces: the knock, turning the doorknob, opening a crack, opening more, Lorena coming in, Lorena saying hello, Lorena shaking my hand.

Each time, Hola’s corrected for breaking the stay without waiting for my signal.

“Don’t do too much at once,” Lorena says. “It’s important to make things easy for her. If all your sessions are about failure, it makes you seem weak. Success for her makes you strong. Leadership is about how the world is arranged. Well arranged means good leadership. Hola wants to be with the stronger leader. It’s natural. It’s just a lot less stress for her.”

“Do you like Cesar?” I ask her as she’s getting ready to leave.

Her moon-round eyes narrow slightly, as though she’s wary of the question, but she’s nodding her head.

“Problem with Cesar,” she says, “is people see the show, but they’re not him. They don’t see all the subtle things he’s doing—the body language, how he positions himself. Eye contact. It’s like a dance, you know. He looks like a magician, and they’re not seeing what he’s doing. They try it at home and get bit or whatever. But you know, man, it’s not the dog’s freaking fault.”

L
ORENA LEAVES ME
with a handout titled “The Rules of Passive Dominance,” which begins: “Ignoring attention-seeking behaviors is the highest form of dominance.”

The
highest
form?

Attention seeking: Grabbing shoes and making you chase her. Soft sweet cries and I say, “What’s wrong, Hola, you hungry, doll?” Poke and pet, roll over and rub reflexively, even yelling “Drop!” when she’s got our neighbor’s kid’s sandal in her mouth, shaking it like a squirrel that’s dead enough already.

Negative or positive—it’s all attention seeking.

What she lives for.

“Her job is to train you,” Lorena had said. “She’s better at her job than you are because she is more focused. It’s all she thinks about.”

Hola’s toolbox consists of annoying me until I do what she wants.

Which I always do.

Why?

Because it’s annoying, that’s why.

And if I don’t?

Drama queen.

She’ll collapse on the floor like a character in
Gossip Girl
tossing her Fendi bag onto the davenport.

Now I’m seeing her behaviors through a new frame. Her whining isn’t an existential scripture on the brevity of life. The way she pokes her head and makes me pet her isn’t a rhapsody on the mutability of love.

No, the new hermeneutics is that she’s a spoiled kid throwing tantrums just to get her way. The more I look at her I see she is in a state of perpetual tantrum. She makes spoiled kids look evolved.

How can I have been so wrong for so long?

Ignorance is an expensive occupation.

But I don’t want to be too hard on myself. I am reading Sharon Chesnutt Smith’s classic book on the Bernese mountain dog, and I run across the following passage in her section called “Temperament and Characteristics”:

“Bernese like to keep in touch. So just to make sure you are with them, they have a habit of backing up and sitting on their owners’ feet.… Then there is the ‘Berner Bump.’ This involves a Bernese sticking its head under your hand or arm and forcefully nudging it until you provide the petting.”

What Lorena would call naked displays of dominance and signs of pathological attention seeking are, to Smith, simply the endearing characteristics of a friendly breed.

W
HAT
I
DISCOVER
, as I have in the program, is that following instructions can be liberating.

Rules seem like tyranny to the immature, but the greatest tyranny of all is indecision—it is paralysis—and everybody in marketing knows indecision is a consequence more often of too much choice rather than too little.

Every doorway, I make Hola sit and stay. I go through it. Say okay and she follows.

Every doorway. Up and down the stairs. If she doesn’t sit, I do what Lorena’s leave-behinds called a “check” with the leash, and I make my
Grr
sound.

The noise I make is like a buzzer on a game show when you get the answer wrong. Hola understands right away what it means. It means: “Try again.”

Lorena said it’s like a growl, instinctively understood, like what mother dogs do to their puppies when they get out of line. The tone is what is important—not the words—for conveying information. Making it clearer to Hola that nothing good is going to happen for her unless she lives by the rules.

What rules?

The rules that I make.

You can’t think your way into right living. You have to live your way into right thinking.

All dog trainers say you have to be more patient than your dog. Eventually, it becomes logical to them to get it over with and do what this silly person seems to want. Obedience doesn’t hurt—not physically. It’s just a kind of inconvenience with a life-saving outcome. Like going to work or making your meetings.

On our walks, I never let her get in front of me. When she breaks heel position, I do my buzzer and the check. She picks it all up right away. In fact, it sort of seems like it’s all the same to her: walk up front, walk near me; at least somebody has a point of view.