Bad Dog (9 page)

The most troublesome item, the one that caused most of the Ochlockonee mixed-breeds to fail, was the final one, then called “Dog left alone.” The dog was tied to a post for five minutes while the owner waited out of sight. To pass, the dog was not allowed to whine, bark, growl, or otherwise display excessive signs of anxiety or agitation.

This is a difficult item to train and for many dogs to pass.

Susan Conant, who took the test in the early days with one of her malamutes, told me: “Dog left alone was horrible! My Kobuk flunked it. He was tied at the end of a long corridor. He entertained himself by giving a loud concert of northern breed vocalizations. The evaluator let the howling and yipping and woofing go on for the full five minutes.” (Kobuk later passed.)

Single-handedly responsible for a majority of the early failures, this item was shortened to three minutes, changed from a tie-out to leaving the dog with “a friendly stranger,” and renamed, less fearsomely, supervised separation.

Once the test items were finalized, there remained the significant challenge of socializing it. To this day, external perceptions of the exam—which isn’t an obedience title, exactly, and has few obvious, nonspiritual benefits—vary widely. According to an editorial in the
AKC Gazette
, it was originally believed by many that the CGC was a temperament test, similar to the American Temperament Test Society’s instrument, and therefore did not require training.

“This view completely misses the point of the program,” ranted the
Gazette
. “Dogs are not born trained nor are their owners born knowing how to train them.”

Amen.

The test includes a number of basic commands, including sit, down, stay, and come, that no dog knows intuitively. But since there are elements of temperament testing, including accepting
strangers and not shying from examination, it is the case that some dogs require less training than others to pass.

As Burch says, “Some dogs don’t really have a hard time with the test at all.”

And then there is Hola.

F
OR A CLASS
with such a laid-back name, Family Manners Skills gets complicated very fast.

“This week,” says our instructor, Wendy, much too soon, “we’re going to practice our lid work in preparation for ‘going to mat.’ You get the dog to touch the lid with her nose, and click and treat. Then you put the lid on the mat so she targets that, and then you fade the lid. That’s when you can start training the down-stay on the mat. It’s great for when you have guests, say, and you want your dog out of the way; you just say, ‘Go to your mat!’ and she goes. Right, Hola?”

This is a class for
beginners
? She might as well have me teach Hola the ancient art of paper folding. We are in Family Manners because it’s a prerequisite for the more advanced Canine Good Citizen preparation program, at the end of which the dogs are tested.

Our goal is to take the test in December and invite Gloria, who will then move back in with us for the best Christmas ever. It is now nearly October. We are doomed.

Wendy is a syrupy-voiced fiftysomething woman with limp hair and elastic-waisted jeans, quite slender, unusual in a dog person, with an actual smile—a smile that vanishes with her sentence as Hola, seeing a friendly puss, darts toward her and tries to play some tonsil hockey.

“Make her sit,” Wendy tells me.

“Hola, sit,” I say, in my ultramanly training voice, which sounds like a cross between Pee-wee Herman and the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
“Sit.”

To her credit, a vague look of recognition passes across Hola’s deep brown eyes before she kisses our instructor on the nose.

Being an expert, Wendy doesn’t flinch; she turns away. Dogs understand the cold shoulder better than people do, and Hola falls back on all fours. Turns out the best way to get a dog to leave you alone is to avoid eye contact, a technique well known to women in bars.

“Okay,” says Wendy, still facing away from us, “let’s see some walking on a loose lead. Use treats if you have to. I’d rather see you cheating with the treats than walking on a tight lead. The dog should be at your side and not pulling. Let’s have the Berner show us how it’s done.”

“Okay, Hola,” I say. “It’s showtime. Let’s go.”

She stays.

“Come on, Hola,” I say, squeaking up a register. All twenty-two eyes, canine and human, are upon us. “Come on, heel.”

Hola starts panting and whining, making a sound that is like a cross between a tiny whoopee cushion and a woman approaching orgasm. (Or so I’ve heard.) She seems strangely rooted in place, like she is stunned.

“Does she know how to walk?” Wendy asks. “Do you know what a food lure is?”

It would take a very special person not to be able to figure out what a food lure is, but I don’t blame her for asking. We are burning daylight here.

“Try luring her out into the ring, slowly, and—”

Suddenly, Hola bullets out, pulling me across the entire
training area and coming to a heroic stop at the accordion gate, where she stands gazing into the next ring, which holds a Canine Good Citizen preparation program. For two long months—an entire semester in the Port Chester Obedience Training Club’s Family Manners program—as Hola finds new and amazing ways to display her love of all objects, people, and dogs, I peek longingly at the well-mannered CGC students as they stroll past distractions and sit gently at their owners’ sides as they shake hands with one another.

I feel like I am watching
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
in a mobile home.

“I’m not seeing much of a loose lead from you guys,” says Wendy, who obviously reads a lot of Oscar Wilde. “Does she know the loose lead?”

“Um, we, I mean—”

“Does she know how to sit?”

Okay, now she is getting personal. That is like asking me if I know the Electric Slide. A dog that doesn’t know the sit command is basically a dog that hasn’t been trained at all.

“Hola, sit,” I say.

She sits. Then rolls onto her back and praises the god of her understanding with her four wiggling paws.

Oh, Dad
, she seems to say.
I love this class! Thanks!

It doesn’t help that the other pupils are a regular mutt Mensa. In particular, there is a handsome young boxer named Atticus who is obviously most likely to, and I develop what people in the program call “a resentment” (
n
., homicidal loathing) against him. It isn’t just that he is whip-smart, picking up new commands so easily I suspect he looks ahead in the curriculum.

No, it is his loving upward gaze at his owner, a good-looking
woman in her twenties who wears a baggy sweatsuit and doesn’t seem all that much more gifted than I am as a dog trainer. Well, okay, everyone is more gifted than me, but she is no Siegfried & Roy.

Our only real enemy in life is ourselves.

It amazes me how personally I am taking this dog training thing. Each week, I am nervous for two days before class and ashamed for two days after. Hola’s failure feels like an open expression of my defects of character.

And it doesn’t help that Clark tells me to give Gloria time. This requires an act of God since, of course, I know her phone number. I rattle around. Work very hard. Talk to Hola. Go to meetings. Look at things Gloria has left around the apartment, her books on Emily Dickinson, hanging files with clippings of reviews of her shows in the
New York Post
and the
Daily News
, pink cashmere scarves and expensive little polka-dot umbrellas, her upright piano in the back room with thick scores of Bach and Aerosmith. Did she ever play Aerosmith?

One day about two weeks after she left, she calls when she knows I’m in my weekly staffing meeting at work and tells me what I’d already guessed: she’s living about two hours away in the Catskill Mountains, in our one-bedroom vacation house, called the Rock House because it sits on a rock.

“Don’t call me,” she says. “Just wanted you to know I’m okay.”

I listen to the message a lot but still can’t hear the hidden code.

I
START GIVING
Hola little pep talks in the Zipcar during our half-hour drive up I-87.

“I’m going to need you to bring your A game here, Schmoe,” I say to the little Hola in the rearview mirror, using the adorably shortened version of the adorable nickname I give her—Schmola—when I’m nervous. “I’d like you to leave it all out there in the ring, okay?”

Her narrowed eyes seem to say:
What are you talking about, Dad?

“It’s a competitive group of dogs,” I say. “A young group. They’re going to be training to win, and we need to suit up and show up.”

Are we going to the dog park? Are we going to Florida again? Where are you hiding the Pop-Tarts?

“Listen to me. I need you be on point out there. Stay hungry.”

I was born hungry
.

And inside the facility, it is an utterly woof-centered universe. I don’t see any human restrooms, and despite a wind chill in the low double digits some days, there isn’t any heat.

Although Wendy doesn’t kick us out of the class, she does ask a lot of hard questions:

“Have you done any training with her before?”

“How old is she again?
Five?!
You mean months?”

“Does she have any kind of a stay behavior?”

“Have you ever used a clicker?”

“Does she have a down behavior?”

Everything is a
behavior
with this woman. A down-stay behavior, a long-down-stay behavior, a down-from-standing-and-then-long-stay behavior, a heel behavior, or in Hola’s case, misbehavior. Port Chester is an avowedly “positive method” facility: dogs are trained with food rewards and bad behavior
is ignored. Wendy’s been a click-and-treat operant conditioner so long she breaks life into discrete, reinforceable units, always aiming at what she calls—over and over again—“maximum likelihood.”

“Dogs do what gets the cookie and don’t do what doesn’t,” she says. “And the cookie can be anything they want. If you’re in the dog park and you call them and take them home, pretty soon they figure out that coming to you in the park gets them nothing they want. You need to cue and reward things like a hundred times in a lot of different places, and eventually you have maximum likelihood they’ll do it again. But there’s no guarantee with dogs. It’s always a choice.”

“In fact,” she goes on, “what’s one way to guarantee your dog will never learn come?”

“I know,” says Atticus’s owner.

“Anyone else?” Stay. “Just make sure every time you call them you put on their leash and take them home. That will guarantee you never get a recall. Why?”

“Because bad things happen when they come,” I say.

“It’s like dating. You need four or five good dates before you’ll let a bad one slide.”

What surprises me is not this wisdom—which, like most dog training, is simply common sense from one foot off the floor—no, it is that Wendy is dating.

Go down, boy, go down! That’s a good boy
.

Outside class, my relationship with Hola is changing. I’m not sure what I did before on our walks, but it obviously didn’t involve the dog.

Now, I watch her hold the city in her paws, breasting the air in front of her proudly like a naval destroyer, capturing everything
as her big browns skitter and her mighty proboscis works its chicken bone recon.

Every once in a while she looks back at me—just a glance, to make sure I am still there. It breaks my heart, that glance; how often has she done it before, and I didn’t even notice?

H
OLA AND
I
POWER ON
. Her sits and downs are marginally more reliable; she develops somewhat of a recall behavior, sometimes even when I call. Her stay shows some palpable potential. I am thinking we might just hammer this CGC thing in a couple of months—

Then the squirrel shows up.

Wendy promises the final class will be a lot of fun, which fills me with a lot of fear. Fun means distractions, and Hola is bad with distractions. She has the attention span of a—well, of a me. I am trying to meditate in the mornings now because Clark says it helps him deal with the stress of Wall Street, but my brain keeps putzing off on tangents. What was I talking about? Oh, right, it is like that.

“How are we doing today, Atticus?” Wendy asks the entire class.

“He’s doing great,” says the owner of the animal who is, appropriately enough, the teacher’s pet.

“What have we been doing this week?”

“Well,” starts the owner, “we worked on our go to mat during a big Thanksgiving party. And then I had Atticus mix the cocktails and serve the desserts and post the pictures on my Facebook page …” Or whatever. Those two do nothing for my mood, so I tune them out.

“Great,” says Wendy. “How’s his retrieve coming along?”

Fill in the blank. Hola’s retrieve, on the other hand, consists of her snatching the tennis ball out of my cold, tight fingers and shredding it. Lucky for us, retrieve is not one of the CGC tests.

After Atticus has shown us how to be a prima donna, Wendy pulls out a little stuffed squirrel and squeezes it.

Squeak
.

My blood stops. Hola lunges to the end of her leash, and only my superior weight keeps her from turning that squirrel into a terrine.

“Control your dog, please,” Wendy says.

“She … loves … squirrels.…”
Hola’s a muscular dog, bred to pull carts up steep Swiss mountains. Maybe if my hands weren’t so slippery from all the buttered roast chicken I’d brought for her treats that day, things would be different.

She breaks away from me, running directly to our instructor, and I stare in horror as she throws on the brakes and sits perfectly in front of Wendy, who is holding the squirrel close to her chest.

Collective exhale.

“Hello there,” says Wendy to my pet. “What’s your name?”

Hola does a down. She stays. Her eyes never leave the squirrel.

“Somebody’s trying every trick she has. I’ll bet she’d even go to mat right now if she had a clue what that was.” Ouch. Hola tries another gorgeous sit. Wendy says, “Dogs aren’t that good at discriminating cues. They recognize they’ve been given
some
cue, usually, and they try whatever worked in the past. That’s why it’s hard to get them to go down from a stand. They usually cycle through sit first. Hola, stand.”