Today there are several popular systems of puppy temperament testing, but at that time nothing formal had been developed, although I knew of some tests that were emerging as reasonable ways of determining what a puppy’s personality might be. I started by seeing how sociable the pups were. I knelt down, placed my mug of tea on the floor and off to the side, and called, “Puppy, puppy, puppy!” in a friendly tone. The gray dashed over to me immediately, and the brown followed somewhat more slowly.
I gave each a little pat on the head, then stood up and started to walk away again calling “Puppy, puppy, puppy!” and slapping my leg as I moved. Again the gray was most enthusiastic and the brown lagged behind. Pups that willingly come to people and follow them are usually sociable and friendly.
I asked Joannie to hold the brown and sat on the floor with the gray. I flipped him on his back and held him there for about 30 seconds. He gave a quick attempt to free himself, but then lay there quietly and licked my hand. When I did that with the brown, she struggled and then tried to bite me. Next I lifted each pup and held it up for a few seconds with its legs hanging down and got much the same results: the gray first struggled, then accepted the situation, while the brown continued to try to bite me. These tests both indicate whether a dog will accept human control.
Next I asked Joan to stamp her foot as loudly as possible on the wooden floor. She winced a bit at my request. Joan’s philosophy is that a person should never do anything to draw attention to herself, nor do anything that anyone might consider impolite, unusual, or eccentric. Stamping your foot to make a loud sound in the home of a complete stranger violated her idea of proper behavior.
“Joannie, please! I need a loud sound coming from a direction that the pups are not looking.”
Joan sighed and glanced at Margaret, who simply smiled pleasantly. So she stamped her foot hard enough to produce a loud clapping sound. The brown pup looked startled, jumped backward, and then growled, while the gray pup gave a quick snap of his head in Joan’s direction and than took a few steps toward her as if he wanted to investigate the source of the noise. This is a crude test of sound sensitivity and response to an unexpected stimulus.
Next I took a piece of paper and crumpled it into a ball. I waved it in front of the pups and then threw it. This test is based on the suggestion of Clarence Pfaffenberger, one of the most important figures in the development of training and selection programs for guide dogs for blind people. Although he used a variety of different tests to select dogs, he claimed that a young puppy’s willingness to retrieve playfully thrown objects was the best single indicator of whether it would grow up to be a good working dog.
In this case the brown dog simply looked at the paper ball and then moved a few paces away from me and sat down. The gray pup ran out after the paper ball and nosed at it. I repeated the test for the gray, and again he raced out after the crumpled paper ball and this time picked it up and looked at me. Then he dropped down on his belly and began to tear it apart.
As I watched him I thought, “Typical terrier.” As a follow-up I took out my key ring and jangled the keys. The gray looked up, dropped the paper ball that he was dissecting, and trotted over to inspect the shiny tinkling object in my hand. When he drew close, I tossed the key ring into the middle of the floor. He immediately dashed over to it, grabbed the keys by biting the plastic identification tab on the ring, and began to shake it back and forth as if he were killing a rat. This was a true terrier—brave, energetic, and with a hunter’s instinct. At that moment I knew that the gray was going to be my dog.
The little pup continued his battle with my keys, but his puppy teeth were not strong enough to hold on as he snapped his head back and forth trying to kill them. As a result, the ring full of keys slipped out of his jaws, flew across the room, banged into my mug of tea, and spilled its contents over the floor. The pup was not fazed by this outcome at all, and merely sauntered over to lick at the sweet liquid. Joan was very embarrassed by the outcome of my testing, however. She began apologizing to Margaret and offering to clean up the spill, glaring at me as I sat on the floor laughing at the pup’s antics. She could not understand why I was not upset by my role in making a mess.
So it began. A bouncy dog acting like a classic terrier, my laughter, and Joan’s distress—this would become the pattern of our life for years to come.
Of course, Margaret was not bothered by the pup’s behavior any more than I was. If you choose to live with terriers, you either have to be very accepting and tolerant or you have to have a good sense of humor.
I told Margaret that we would take the gray and call him Flint because of his color. She nodded but pointed out that the brown was the more handsome of the pair and would grow up to be good enough to do well in the show ring while the gray “doesn’t have classic Cairn proportions.”
“I know,” I told her, “but I don’t intend to put him in confirmation shows. If we ever enter a show ring, it will be in an obedience competition.”
Margaret looked a bit nonplussed at my comment and said, “Cairn terriers really aren’t designed for obedience work. They’re more catlike and independent. In my forty years or so of breeding, only two of my dogs have ever earned an obedience degree. Terriers don’t like taking orders.” She paused for a moment as if considering whether she had been too negative and then added with a smile, “They do learn their names very quickly.”
Joannie looked at me as if to ask whether this new information would make me reconsider taking this hyperactive little gray thing home. I repeated, “His name will be Flint and we’ll just have to see what he can learn.”
Long before I’d signed the paperwork and officially purchased him, Flint had cleaned up all of the liquid on the floor and was now nosing the mug around, pushing it noisily across the floor. Joan glanced back and forth between me and the pup, looking a bit apprehensive.
The trip home with Flint was relatively uneventful. Although I had brought a secondhand wicker-and-wire kennel crate, and padded the bottom with some bath towels, Joan had decided that it would be “cruel to cage him” and had piled the towels on the space between us and put Flint on top of them. He curled up there, and she stroked him gently, softly smiling in the way I had grown to love.
Once at the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, we had nearly an hour’s wait ahead of us. So I clipped a leash onto Flint’s new little collar. In my house, from the moment a dog enters my life until the day that it dies, it wears a collar. My father had been quite adamant when he had said, “A dog with a collar is an owned dog and he wears that collar with pride.”
I lifted up Flint and said to Joan that we had time to wander around and let him explore a bit of the world. Although it was a nippy December day, the sun was shining and she agreed that a walk would be nice.
I carried Flint over to the nearest patch of grass, and, as puppies usually do when they first wake up, he squatted to eliminate. Then we strolled down toward the edge of the water, Flint inquisitively shoving his nose into everything that he encountered. Occasionally he’d stop and twirl around in a full circle, apparently trying to get his bearings.
At the edge of the berth where the ferry would moor, Flint became quite fascinated with the water. Perhaps it was the smell of the saltwater and its contents, or maybe the sparkling caused by the sun glinting off the ripples on the surface. In any case, he climbed onto a wide, flat wharf support and began staring down, moving his head up and down like a bobble-head toy on the dashboard of a car.
At that moment a seagull landed a couple of feet away from Flint. I was amazed at the size of the bird, which seemed to tower over my tiny puppy and looked as if he clearly outweighed him as well. Flint turned to face this feathery visitor, showing no fear at all. He looked at the gull carefully, took one step in his direction, and then sat down as if to consider what to do next.
The bird eyed the pup carefully and then looked to the side and squawked “Grock! Grock!”
Flint jumped to his feet and answered in
his high-pitched puppy voice, “Ruff! Ruff!”
The pup matched the gull’s squawks.
The two animals stood watching each other, and the bird announced loudly “Grock!” to which Flint responded “Ruff!”
The bird nodded its head then gave its wing a cursory stroke with its beak. The gull then stared directly at Flint and screeched, “Grock! Grock! Grock! Grock!”
Flint stood and responded “Ruff! Ruff! Ruff! Ruff!”
The bird then shook itself and flew off with Flint staring after it. I turned to Joannie and asked, “Did did you notice that he was counting?”
“What do you mean by that?”
I was fairly excited. “When the bird squawked twice, Flint answered with two barks. When he squawked once, Flint answered with one bark, and finally when the bird gave four squawks Flint answered with four barks. He was counting and matching the number of sounds that the bird was making.”
She looked at me as if I had just said something remarkably stupid or impolite. “Dogs can’t count. Kids have to be taught to count, so dogs can’t be born with the ability to count, and he is not old enough to have learned to count on his own. I hope that this doesn’t mean that you are going to brag about your genius dog from now on.”
I quickly did the math in my head. Suppose that the dog and the bird have a vocabulary consisting of 1, 2, 3, or 4 barks or squawks. Then the chance that the two animals would make the same number of sounds in any one “conversational exchange” is 1 out of 4. That means that the chance that the gull and my pup would match the number of sounds they were making 3 times in a row turns out to be less than 4 chances in 1,000. Those are pretty long odds.
It would be 3 or 4 years later that I would have a better demonstration that dogs can count. I would be back on Vancouver Island with Flint at a dog obedience competition held a few miles from that same ferry terminal, in a town called Saanich. We had completed our time in the ring, which had been a disaster, since Flint had been in a playful mood and had decided to dash out of the ring to “visit” with some kids who had been watching and waving at him. Nonetheless, he had made people laugh, and I would rather have a friendly and not fully obedient dog than a standoffish but obedient animal. At the end of our performance I took him out of the building to enjoy the spring afternoon. One of the other competitors had finished for the day and was in a large field near the parking lot with his small black Labrador retriever named Poco. He was tossing orange plastic retrieving bumpers. The bumpers were about the size and shape of a small loaf of bread and each had a cord on the end so that you could whip them around quickly and throw them quite a distance. As we watched, he casually mentioned to me, “She can count to four quite reliably, and to five with only an occasional miss.”
“She must be a really smart dog to be able to count,” I replied.
“She is, but all retrievers have to be able to count to three if you want to compete in high-level hunting competitions. Look, I’ll show you how it works. First, you pick a number from one to five.”
I chose the number 3, and while the dog watched, her owner tossed 3 bumpers out into the field in different directions and at different distances. All disappeared from sight in the high grass. I got down on my hands and knees at the dog’s eye level to verify that she couldn’t see the bumpers from the starting position. Then, without pointing or giving any other signals, the man simply told the dog “Poco, fetch.”
Poco immediately dashed out to the most recently thrown bumper and brought it back. He took the bumper from the dog and repeated, “Poco, fetch.” The dog quickly moved out into the field and started to cast about and search for the next one. After the second bumper was returned, he again commanded, “Poco, fetch,” and she quickly retrieved the remaining lure. Removing this last bumper from the dog’s mouth, he continued as if he believed that there were yet another object out there to be retrieved and again gave the command, “Poco, fetch.” At this, the dog simply looked at him, barked once, and moved to his left side, to the usual heeling position, and sat down. He smiled and gave Poco a pat and murmured, “Clever girl!” He then explained to me, “She knows that she’s retrieved all three, and that is all that there were. She keeps a running count. When there are no more bumpers to find, she lets me know with that ‘They’re all here, stupid’ bark that you just heard, and then goes to heel to let me know that she’s ready for the next thing that I want her to do.”
Although Poco’s performance was impressive, I was still a bit skeptical. In the end we spent the better part of a half hour, varying the number of bumpers up to 5, with me and another dog handler tossing the bumpers and sending the dog to fetch. We reasoned that this would serve as a sort of a check to see if something in the way the items were placed or the way Poco’s master gave the commands affected the dog’s success. None of these changes seemed to matter, and even with 5 objects, the dog never missed the count once. If I had conducted a similar experiment with a young child, by tossing toys behind items of furniture, and they had performed as well as Poco, I certainly would have taken that as proof that they could count from 1 to 5. Some 20 years later researchers would confirm that dogs not only have the ability to count, but may even have a primitive ability to add and subtract.
However, all of that was in the future, and on that day I simply suspected that Flint could count. I had never seen any mathematical ability in my previous dogs, so maybe this puppy was really clever, or maybe I should start observing dogs’ abilities more closely. I had to smile at the puppy teaching the professor of psychology new tricks.
When we got home, Joan carried Flint into the house and I brought the kennel crate inside and placed it in the bedroom next to my side of the bed. I went back out into the living room, where Flint was sniffing around, took the very light nylon show leash that I had just purchased and attached it to Flint’s collar. Then I put a spring clip on the other end and attached the leash to my belt.
Joan gave me a puzzled look. “He’s in the house, so he really doesn’t need a leash now,” she said.
“I’ll leash him in the house for the first few weeks. He’ll have to stay close, but clipping the leash to my belt leaves my hands free for normal activities. Obviously, he can’t sneak off and get himself into trouble while I’m not paying attention to him. Young puppies are always chewing on inappropriate things and some of those, like electrical cords or even knitting yarn, can hurt them. But I’ll be close enough to see everything that goes into his mouth. It also gives me a chance to start house-training him since I’m likely to notice when he stands and indicates that he wants to go to the potty.”
This training method has psychological benefits as well. Dogs don’t instinctively understand that they’ve been adopted and are beginning a new life with a new family. Having the pup by your side continuously teaches him that he is now supposed to be with you rather than off on his own.
It was also a great way to teach Flint to pay attention to me so that he could learn his name. Every time I would get up to go someplace, I just said his name. Soon he’d learned that the sound of his name had a special significance and meant that something concerning him was about to happen. Before long, whenever I said, “Flint,” he would look at my face to see what was going on.
I explained to Joan that the leash is a kind of umbilical cord connecting the pup to me, the human who was going to be “his person.” Even though the natural umbilical is cut when the dog is born, the puppy in a new home needs to be reborn as my dog and also reborn into new behaviors. Flint would have to be at least a minimally well behaved and house-trained dog before I removed this umbilical house leash.
Joan asked, “You mean you’re going to drag him around with you every time that you move?”
“No. He’ll learn his name and walk happily beside me.”
To demonstrate I said, “Flint!” in a happy voice and looked at the pup who was dozing beside me. He didn’t move or respond, so I repeated his name “Flint!”
Joannie sno
rted, “Like I said, you’re going to drag him around every time you move,” and then left the room as I was gently nudging the pup to awaken him.
Applying psychological principles is not the same as applying the principles of physics or engineering, in which you create an apparatus, turn it on, and get instantaneous, predictable results. Chemists know that mixing the same set of chemicals will always produce exactly the same compound. Biologists know that each seed or fertilized egg is programmed to produce only one, completely predictable species. Behavioral psychology, however, is different. Even when psychological principles are sound, their application does not always produce exactly the predicted results, and even when it does, those results are often not immediate. While a physicist or chemist may have the ability to control reality and force it into the shape that he or she desires, psychologists are often in the position of negotiating with reality, since they are dealing with living beings who can behave unexpectedly. Each living thing has its own agenda, motives, and history, which are often unclear to those around them. So psychologists have learned to apply the principles that have the highest probability of working. Then they must be patient and adaptable, modify procedures to fit the current circumstances, and respond to changes as they occur. It would take a few days before Flint would learn the routine, but he quickly learned to pay attention because each time I said his name it meant that I was about to move. I used the umbilical for only around 2 weeks (with occasional returns to it during his housebreaking period), but the effects were lifelong. Every time I said Flint’s name, he would pause in what he was doing and look at my face.
Using the umbilical leash indoors was not completely free of momentary difficulties. One day when I was not paying really close attention to Flint while I was working on the computer, I needed something from my bookshelf and stood up to walk across the room to get it. As I said “Flint,” he looked up in time to watch me topple over onto my face. I had not noticed that he had looped the leash around my ankles. I managed to avoid falling on my puppy as I hit the floor and suffered no permanent damage.
Born to Bark Page 11
