Pack of Two

by Caroline Knapp

  BAD DOG

  THE DOG IS ROLLING in decomposed squirrel. We are at Fresh Pond, a local reservoir that’s ringed by a two-mile walking trail, and she has disappeared up a wooded hill and into the brush. I can just make out her silhouette through the trees, that unmistakable slow-motion dip: she lowers her shoulder over the carcass, eases her body down and to one side, and then casts herself upon the rot, throws her whole body into it, squirms against it until her neck is encrusted with squirrel innards, stiff and rank and (to her) utterly delightful.

  Ah, Lucille. As she does so well and so frequently, the dog is reminding me that she is very much a dog, and at the moment I am finding this deeply annoying.

  So I call her.

  “Lucille, come!”

  Nothing happens.

  I try again, a little louder.

  “Lucille! Come!”

  Nothing. No dog.

  My voice grows louder, more urgent.

  “Lucille! Come! Now!”

  This time I see her stand up, cast a fleeting glance my way, then drop down onto the squirrel a second time, hind legs flailing in glee. My irritation mutates into anger, a feeling that’s tinged with an odd sense of betrayal. Lucille is a year old by this point and she knows better. She knows what “come” means. She is totally dismissing me, and I can’t help but take it personally. I look around, hope no one is observing this obvious failure on my part (Who’s the moron who can’t control her dog?), and this time I scream it: “LUCILLE! GET OVER HERE, NOW!”

  Finally Lucille comes trotting out of the brush and gives me a look of utter innocence, the perfectly merry pup. I know I am not supposed to yell at her when she finally shows up. I understand that the act of coming to me—even belatedly or reluctantly—should never be associated with punishment, but at that moment I am so angry, I want to spit.

  My frustration is a blend of irritation and fear: it is, quite simply, a pain in the butt to have to stand there and scream into the bushes for your dog; it’s also very scary. The trail we’re on abuts a fairly major roadway, and when she disappears into the woods that separate the two, I often have no idea if she’s up there rolling in something putrid or if she’s strayed farther, chased a live squirrel out of the woods and into the street. But the sense of betrayal is more complex, so powerful at times it takes me by surprise. When the dog fails to come on command, when she ignores me like this, I feel some well of fear rise up about being inadequate, unworthy of attention, out of control. I hear a small voice inside: She doesn’t come when you call, because she knows you’re a wimp. She doesn’t come because she doesn’t love you. You’re a loser; you can’t even control your dog.

  * * *

  Human emotion, meet the dog. Fantasy and ego, meet instinct. Lucille is for the most part a wonderfully responsive animal—intelligent, capable, actually voted “most likely to succeed” in her puppy kindergarten class (and I have the diploma to prove it, dutifully taped to my refrigerator)—but she is also a dog, which means she is governed by drives and instincts that often have little to do with me. And so, on occasion, we clash. She acts in ways that run counter to my vision of an ideal dog; my feelings get hurt. Together, we enter the murky, emotionally loaded continent that every dog owner must visit, a land called Obedience and Control.

  On the surface the landscape here looks pretty straightforward, eminently navigable. You read a few training books, maybe enroll the dog in an obedience class, get the basic rap. You learn that dogs are creatures of hierarchy and order who need to know their place in the pack. You understand that in the wild the pack leader or “alpha dog” makes up the rules and enforces them, decides when the lower members in the pecking order eat, determines who can get away with what, settles conflicts. You recognize that as a dog owner, this is your job as well. Be the alpha. Control that dog.

  But this turns out to be a bit harder than it sounds, in part because dogs can be difficult to control (they can be stubborn and willful, fast and strong, assertive and pushy), in part because humans, at least some, have a tough time acting in ways that communicate authority (directly, with clarity and resolve), and in part because in the act of controlling a dog (or trying to), you stumble upon one of the central differences between us and them: dogs live in a physical world, we live in an emotional one. Their universe is about immediate drives, smells, sounds, pleasure, pain. Ours is about feelings, fantasies, symbols, abstract thought. They act, we interpret, and in the gap between those two modes of being, there is a whole lot of room for confusion and conflict.

  Consider the recall, which is probably the single most important command in an owner’s repertoire and the one that gives owners the most trouble. When Lucille was a young puppy, I liked the idea of taking her to Fresh Pond and letting her run off-leash. I liked the fantasy behind it: she’d run and cavort, I’d amble along, and periodically she’d race back and walk by my side, gazing up at me in love-struck devotion. This is such a common and powerful fantasy about the human-dog relationship it’s hard to see what it really represents: it’s an image of human power and canine subservience, ready-made and non-negotiable. It places you at the center of your dog’s universe, and it speaks to our most central ideals about canine love and respect: that those qualities are unwavering and automatic, requiring little to no effort to attain. Dogs stay with us (and come back to us when we call them) because they love us and want to be with us.

  This fantasy is complicated at least in part because it seems relatively easy to realize. At some of the dog groups I went to with Lucille early on, I’d see owners saunter in and out of the park with their dogs off-lead, the dogs trotting calmly by their sides, and I’d feel a little jolt of longing, an Oh-I-want-that sensation. The image got tied up (and quickly) with all those deeper longings about connection and family: I might not have parents, I might feel uncertain about the other humans in my life, but I’d have this dog, this adoring dog who’d be glued to my side, in my thrall, the very picture of attachment. So day after day when she was a puppy, I’d go to Fresh Pond with Lucille and I’d unclip her leash—and she’d promptly disappear into the brush, compelled not by any complementary fantasies about attachment and connection but by her nose.

  My own behavior, of course, flew in the face of everything I’d read, everything I’d been told: never call the puppy unless you can reinforce the command; never call the puppy unless she’s at the other end of a leash and you can reel her in if she doesn’t come immediately; if you can’t back up the directive, you’re allowing her to decide whether or not she feels like coming, and nine times out of ten, she will decide that there’s something far more interesting out there than you. Which is precisely what happened. Lucille would lag behind, and she’d stop every fifteen seconds to sniff something, and she’d meander off into the trees, and I’d find myself turning around every twenty-five feet and imploring her to keep up. Sometimes she would trot up to me immediately when I called; sometimes she wouldn’t; within the space of about a week I’d made the huge, not-quite-irrevocable and very common mistake of teaching her that “come” was an optional command, and the word lost its meaning entirely. I’d scream, I’d shout, sometimes I’d get so frustrated, I’d sit down in the middle of the path and cry. And Lucille? She’d amble my way if and when she wanted to.

  Like I said, human emotion, meet the dog.

  And yet control is such an individual matter, such a complex blending of owner and dog and the traits they both bring to the bond. Breeding and temperament are the big wild cards here, defining control issues in very specific ways: get a Samoyed, bred as a sled dog, and you will spend a lot of time lurching along at the end of the leash shouting, “No pull!” Get an Australian shepherd, and you will spend months (possibly years) trying to teach the dog not to herd joggers. Terriers dig, Labrador retrievers hurl themselves into bodies of water, scent hounds careen across fields, and these instinctual drives will be muted or highlighted by a dog’s nature. Some dogs are more dominant than others, some more placid or
high-strung, some more trainable, some (frankly speaking) more obnoxious, and all of these qualities can shape your relationship with control (and with your dog) dramatically.

  Our skirmishes at Fresh Pond aside, Lucille tends naturally to limit my battles on the control front, evoking pride more often than frustration and insecurity. As a puppy, she took to training quickly, learned the commands “sit” and “down” within a matter of minutes, and was housebroken within days. She still seems to enjoy obedience work today, knowing what’s expected of her and then carrying out the task: she can execute a mean high-five and a perfect high-ten, she will hug me upon request, and when we practice heeling off-leash, she trots beside me with her ears flattened in pride, tail swishing behind her as if to say, “I can do this. See how good I am?” Lucille is also an exceptionally mellow dog, perfectly content to curl up in whatever room I happen to be in and sleep. The second or third time she met Lucille, my house cleaner asked me how old she was. “Eighteen months,” I said, and her jaw dropped. “You’re kidding! I thought she was, like, eleven.” The dog’s temperament affects the texture of my life significantly, and I feel blessed by this, not just because I appreciate her manner (which I do) but because I know how stressful I would find living with a more assertive, noisy, or high-strung dog.

  But to each his own. Human needs for discipline and order are all over the map, and a dog’s behavior might bring out the control freak in one owner, the wimp in another, the casual pal in a third. Just the other day, at Fresh Pond, a runner came jogging toward me and called out, “Hey, have you seen a big golden retriever?” I said no, and he shrugged as he ran past me, smiling. “Oh, well,” he said, “he’ll find me.” The man was completely unfazed by his dog’s absence, possibly because he knows from experience that his dog will find him, possibly because, unlike me, he’s not the sort of person who gets bogged down by questions about an animal’s love and respect, let alone safety.

  Not ten minutes later, a woman approached, someone I periodically see walking a Pomeranian. The dog, a little rust-colored fuzzball, is always on-leash, and the woman tenses visibly when she sees other dogs coming toward her: she pulls the dog in closer to her side, then picks the animal up until the approaching dog is safely past her. Sometimes I hear her whisper little reassurances to the dog—“It’s okay, honey”—and a few times she’s smiled shyly at me and confessed in a hushed voice: “She’s afraid of other dogs.” In fact, there is no physical indication that the dog is afraid—her hackles aren’t raised, she doesn’t bark or snarl or seek protection from her owner when she sees a dog approach—but no matter: one owner’s nonchalance is another’s perpetual state of terror.

  And one owner’s definition of control is another’s recipe for chaos. Alison, an owner from San Francisco, tells me over the phone that she considers a quiet, controlled demeanor to be part of her dog’s “job description,” and she has taught the dog, a sheltie named Sky, to lie in a silent down-stay whenever she is working at her computer or talking on the phone. Sky is not allowed on the furniture, never begs and never barks indoors, having learned the command “quiet!” very early on.

  Alison’s summation of Sky: “She’s a great dog.”

  Janet, an ER nurse from Boston, would find this laughable, unthinkable. She lives with a fourteen-pound Pomeranian-terrier mix named Kim who appears to be constitutionally incapable of sitting still: the dog yips constantly, runs non-stop laps around the living room, leaps up and down as though attached to permanent springs, and begs for biscuits constantly. Janet, who admits she “thrives on chaos” herself, adores this about the dog.

  Her summation of Kim: “She’s a great dog.”

  Breed and temperament of dog, personality and style of human, tolerance for chaos, feelings about authority and definitions of love: control (or lack of it) is what happens when you throw all those variables into the great stew pot of contemporary human-dog bonds, add a pinch of ego or a dash of insecurity, and let them simmer.

  Want to see how many different dishes you can come up with? Just stand around a dog park and watch how owners react when their dogs start engaging in that less-than-endearing canine behavior, crotch-sniffing. I have experienced the full gamut of responses: some strange dog pokes his nose in my crotch, and his owner leaps up, aghast, and reprimands the animal: “Stop it! Bad dog!” Another dog does the same thing, and his owner stands idly by, pretends not to notice, perhaps even gets a secret kick out of the transgression. A third does it, and the owner reprimands me: “Oh, you must have treats in your pocket.” (Translation: It’s my fault.) What’s fascinating about control is not just that we have to decide whether and how wield it; it’s what those decisions have to say about us, about who we are and how we experience relationships.

  My first year with Lucille, at a park I no longer go to, I used to watch a woman named June with her puppy, a Scottie named MacGregor. MacGregor was about five months old, a fierce little male and very headstrong, as Scotties are wont to be. June adored him—she used to swoop into the park her first weeks with him and announce, “I am in love with this dog! In love!”—but as time wore on, she had an increasingly difficult time with him: MacGregor wouldn’t listen to a word she said, wouldn’t come when she called, wouldn’t sit when she commanded him to, tested her constantly. On the face of it, this seemed odd, because June was very fierce and headstrong herself: she wasn’t the sort of person who gets wimpy or fearful in front of a dominant dog, who just stands there and shrugs her shoulders. She’d give very clear commands—“MacGregor, down!”—and she didn’t let him get away with disobeying; if he didn’t lie down right away, she’d make him. “I don’t know what to do,” she’d complain, and as the weeks wore on her complaints intensified. MacGregor had begun snarling at her in the house, baring his teeth and growling when she tried to take away a toy; twice, as she tried to wrestle him into the bathtub, he bit her on the wrist.

  Books on obedience training would no doubt call this a classic case of dominance and aggression: the dog is vying for top position in the household, and the owner needs to assert her authority in more direct and deliberate ways. Firmer corrections. An end to any household routines that might communicate equal status to the dog, such as allowing him to sleep on the bed. But the longer I watched MacGregor and June, the clearer it seemed that she participated in this dance of dominance with him: the dog’s behavior appeared to touch her on a primal level, stirring up a range of ancient emotions that caused her to react to him in ways that fueled his dominant streak.

  June was a fairly self-disclosive woman, and she talked a fair amount over the weeks about her mother, who apparently had a strong aggressive streak herself: a “controlling bitch,” June called her, “Attila the Mom.” June herself left home at age eighteen, after a lengthy rebellion-filled adolescence, and did her best to keep contact with her mother to a minimum. What she did less effectively, it seemed, was keep her feelings about this battle-ax of a mom in check. One day I watched her put MacGregor in a sit, then set a biscuit in front of him and tell him to stay. MacGregor sat for a few seconds, then stood up and made a move toward the biscuit. I watched June. She lunged toward him. She screamed an ear-piercing “No!” and then she picked him up by the scruff of his neck, screamed “No” again, and literally hurled him back down onto the grass. Her hands were shaking she was so mad, her face contorted with rage. She looked as if she was about to go after the puppy again when an onlooker, apparently horrified, suggested to June that her reaction may have been a bit out of proportion. “Dogs have excellent hearing, you know,” she said. “You really don’t have to yell at them so loudly.” June looked a bit taken aback, then tried to laugh the incident off. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m turning into my mother.”

  Having watched and listened to this woman for a while, I suspect there’s truth in that. June felt helpless in front of the dog’s assertiveness. She felt enraged by it. It seemed to touch some of her deepest feelings about dominance and control, about both wiel
ding power and losing it. And while the dog may indeed have been a naturally dominant, willful little pain in the butt, it seemed equally plausible that her reaction—testing, confrontational, angry—contributed to the conflict. He was rebelling, just as clearly as she had as a teenager. They’d entered into a classic power struggle, a grown woman and a five-month-old puppy.

  And yet this is exactly what amazes me, the way a person’s core sense of self—anxieties, insecurities, grandiosity, fantasies of self and other—can come bubbling up when it comes to controlling a dog, even in the smallest and seemingly most inconsequential ways.

  At the same park where I used to watch June and MacGregor, a woman named Ellen used to stand on the sidelines and deliver a running commentary about other people’s dogs. Ellen, a grad student in her mid-thirties, was opinionated and rather brash, a tall heavyset woman who secretly annoyed me by consistently referring to Lucille as “Lucy.” She’d watch a dog beg someone for a biscuit, and she’d huff, “I would never let my dog beg.” She’d see an owner trying to call her dog, watch the dog dart away as soon as the owner got within reach, and she’d say, “My dog would never do that.” In fact, Ellen’s dog, a three-year-old chocolate Lab, appeared to be no more or less well behaved than anyone else’s dog, but Ellen was so invested in the idea of her own power that that didn’t seem to matter. She might as well have been wearing a T-shirt: “I Have Total Control.” Needless to say, Ellen was one of those owners who waltzed in and out of the park with her dog off-lead, and this grated on me, not because it implied that she did, in fact, have total control over the dog but because it sparked a competitive streak in me, tapping in to those gnawing insecurities about Lucille’s attachment.