Bones Would Rain from the Sky

by Suzanne Clothier

  Though behaviorists and cognitive scientists might insist otherwise, what we see in our dog’s eyes is more than just animal instinct or the trained behaviors of dumb beasts. Looking back at us, we see intelligence, humor, joy, disappointment, fear, anger, lust, anticipation, relief, curiosity, delight, boredom, resignation, amazement, sorrow, sympathy, and—undeniably—love. If we honor the dog as a dog, we do not see another human being trapped in a fur coat, doomed to wander through life on all fours at the end of a leash. We see another sentient being who, though science may anxiously remind us there’s no “proof,” has feelings and experiences that often parallel our own but are uniquely canine. Our dogs look at us, and we cannot shake the feeling that they are telling us something, in fact that they are telling us a lot more than we can understand. And we want to know.

  WHAT IS IT, GIRL?

  From the time the First Dog crept up to the fireside, man and dog have been trying to understand each other. We have not always been successful, but on both sides we keep plugging along at it. Roughly fourteen thousand years later, communication between man and dog reached its ultimate expression, of course, in Lassie. Not even Rin Tin Tin was as eloquent or as capable of saying so much with just a few barks. Lassie needed only to appear on the scene with an inquiring or urgent look on her face to prompt the classic question, “What is it, girl?” In response, Lassie might say, “Woof. Arf, arf, ARF-rowf !” and Grandpa or Timmy would instantly know that a busload of hungry Boy Scouts was trapped in an abandoned mine just two miles southeast of the farm and that subtle (but detectable by canine senses) seismic activity foretold a collapse of the main mine shaft in the next twenty-four minutes. Whatever the situation and no matter how complicated it might be, Lassie could always find a way to make things crystal clear and rouse the humans to appropriate action.

  Few scenarios were as guaranteed to arouse tension and interest in the audience as those dreadful moments when, despite Lassie’s attempts to communicate, the humans would not listen or got the message all wrong. “Are these people idiots?” we mutter under our breath, waiting for the lightbulbs to turn on. The director of the show made very sure that the viewers were led by the nose to an understanding of the situation, so that Lassie’s barks would be magically translated into meaningful communication. But as someone who was given a collection of Lassie reruns on video as a wedding present, I can assure you that if you miss the first half of the show and tune in just as Lassie makes her dramatic vocalizations, you cannot make heads or tails of what she’s saying. Is this, you wonder in vain, the episode where the tiger gets loose from his trainer? Or the one where the greedy rich man from town is tearing up the forest with illegal logging activities? Without the information received in the first half of the show, nothing makes sense.

  We would all like to look at the dogs at our feet and ask, “What is it, girl?” and be sure of getting an answer. But our dogs are not Lassie, and it might fairly be said that in our communications with our dogs, we sometimes feel like we’ve arrived in the middle of the episode. Faced with a series of meaningless barks, you long for clarity like that of the cartoon that shows a Collie at the front steps greeting the lady of the house with a human arm dangling from the dog’s mouth. The woman inquires, “What is it, girl? Is something wrong with Timmy?”

  Communication is a critical ingredient in any relationship, yet as our human interactions show, even between two members of the same species speaking the same language this is not necessarily an easy matter. On a visit to Washington, D.C., my husband and I were walking near the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. As we walked, I was paying attention to the various trees and plants along the path. John said, “Mint?” in a casual tone, and immediately I began scanning the rather closely manicured area for anything that resembled mint. It is a plant I’m familiar with, but no matter how closely I looked, I couldn’t find anything that looked even vaguely like any form of mint: spearmint, peppermint, apple mint or even catmint. Still scanning, I heard him say again, “Mint?” Frustrated, I turned to him, annoyed at his superior observation skills; a former park ranger and an avid gardener, he’s famous for spotting wild asparagus from a vehicle moving at sixty miles an hour. “What mint?” I asked in irritation. Puzzled by my sudden mood shift, he smiled cautiously and held out the peppermint candy he’d been offering me.

  When we add the complications created by not only another language but also another culture, it gets more difficult. And when the other speaks a different language and is from another culture and is also another species, we have reached what is perhaps the most difficult challenge of communication with the possible exception of communicating with the average teenager. How, we wonder, can we communicate with a creature that drinks out of the toilet bowl and speaks in a mysterious blend of growls and woofs and wags of his tail? Though it’s tempting (and easy) to focus on the differences between us and our dogs as the cause of problems that arise, the truth is that a great deal of the difficulty lies not in understanding canine communications, but within ourselves.

  Many of the problems that complicate our human communications also exist in our relationships with dogs. Dog or daughter, puppy or parent, Fido or friend, we still have to find ways to understand and be understood; such is the nature of communication in any form. We still have to find ways to shape our conversations with respect, curiosity about the other’s point of view, a willingness to listen (even when we don’t like what we hear), and a compassionate sense of how our communications are received and how the listener may be affected. We still need to find ways to hear with more than our ears; to listen is to tune every sense to another’s communication, to the nuance of eyes and gesture and breath and body. To hear our dogs, we must also listen with our hearts.

  Within a loving relationship, we must be willing to do the work of choosing the event of quality, aware that in each interaction, we are moving in only one of two directions: toward greater trust, understanding and intensity of connection, or toward greater distance between ourselves and another. How we choose to communicate with our dogs will either enhance or limit our relationships. Norwegian trainer Turid Rugaas is a pioneer in understanding canine communications, particularly what she calls “calming signals”—gestures used by dogs to acknowledge, reassure, calm and defuse tense situations. These gestures are offered by dogs to other dogs, to humans, and even to other species. Observing that in our conversations with dogs we can choose to be friendly, neutral or threatening, Rugaas asks the very good question, “Why would we want to threaten our dogs?” In every communication, we have the power to choose how we communicate with our dogs. If we love them, if we respect them, if we are trying to create an event of quality, then we also have an obligation to listen to what they have to say.

  What is inescapable in every communication is this: The common ingredient in all our relationships, whether with man or beast, is us. As they say, “wherever you go, there you are.” To an astonishing degree, our beliefs, expectations and assumptions color all of our communications. A well-known experiment years ago involved teachers and how their expectations might impact their teaching. One group of teachers was told that they had been assigned the brightest, most gifted students. Another group was told that their classes would consist of slow learners and poor students. In reality, all teachers were assigned their students on a purely random basis. The results were unsettling. The teachers with the “gifted” students had the test scores and progress to reflect just how smart those kids were; the teachers with the “slow learners” had test results that showed that indeed, these were slow learners. The researchers found an important difference in how the teachers taught as a result of their expectations. Teachers of “gifted” children had viewed any lack of understanding by the student as a teaching problem; since the child was known to be gifted, the only possible explanation for a failure to learn lay in the teaching style. These teachers worked in every way possible to ensure that they were able to
successfully communicate with what they knew to be gifted children. The teachers of the “slow learners,” on the other hand, viewed a child’s lack of comprehension as the unfortunate but inevitable outcome of the child’s limited ability: If the students did not understand something as it was taught, the teachers did not change their communication style.

  A similar phenomenon is at work among dog lovers around the world. People frequently assume that certain breeds or types of dog are stupid, smart, stubborn, lazy, aggressive, friendly. And their beliefs shape their actions, sometimes most unfortunately for the dogs involved. Very often, what we label as stupid or stubborn has little to do with the dog’s level of intelligence. What we really mean when we say that a dog is stupid or stubborn or lazy is that he’s not in agreement with us, that he’s not doing what we want him to do. When we try to force a dog to accept our particular methodology and ignore what he tells us about its unsuitability for him, we are really saying that our toolbox does not contain a teaching approach that will work for him and that we don’t really care. The failure, we feel, rests on the stubborn, stupid, dominant, fearful (pick an adjective) dog, not in our approach to him. A good deal of dog training is rather Procrustean. Procrustes was a mythological fellow who had a special bed that he guaranteed would fit all who tried it. And amazingly, it did—because he would stretch anyone too short for the bed and cut off any parts that were too long and hung over the bed. Perfect fit, every time! And we do this to dogs, stretching them unnaturally to suit our training demands and lopping off the parts we don’t like or the parts that don’t neatly fit within our paradigm.

  EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY

  In some of my seminars, I have the participants play a little game I call Fruits and Veggies. An adaptation of trainer Karen Pryor’s training game, Fruits and Veggies offers a reminder of how much we take for granted in our communications, an empathetic experience of how the dog may feel and a sometimes surprising look at how our expectations can create problems. The rules are quite simple. Participants are split up into pairs, and each person is handed a slip of paper meant for their eyes only. On those slips of paper are three simple behaviors well within the ability of the average person, such as “hop,” “blink,” “take off one shoe.” (The slips are color-coded so that each person in a pair has something different from what’s on their partner’s slip.) The goal is for each person (“the trainer”) to teach their partner (“the dog”) to perform those three behaviors. There is one catch: They may only address their partners using the names of fruits and veggies. All normal English is abandoned. The commands, praise and even negatives must all be the names of fruits and veggies. The trainers may use any technique they care to (except painful ones), but they must not take advantage of the human tendency to mimic or mirror what is shown. A trainer may not stand on one foot and then look meaningfully at their “dog”—a human will inevitably guess that an imitation of the trainer’s behavior is expected. (While dogs are an allomimetic species, meaning that they will imitate the behavior of others, dogs tend to reserve this for actions that are natural and enjoyable to them—digging, for example, as many gardening enthusiasts have learned to their dismay when Fido decides to “help” with the planting.) Trainers must somehow shape and encourage that behavior without offering an example. The “dogs” are free to act precisely like an off-leash dog—if bored, they may wander away; if threatened, they are free to yelp or growl (no biting allowed).

  Quickly, participants discover one basic truth about communication: It is most successful when the words you use are ones that both understand. Faced with “Grape!” or “Carrot” or “Rutabaga” (one that inexplicably shows up frequently), the “dogs” are often very, very confused. Diligently, they search the trainer’s face and gestures for clues as to whether “Apple” is a command or is meant to dissuade or is offered as praise. The word itself has no meaning; it is the full context of body language that gives the word meaning, just as our real four-legged dogs come to understand “Good dog” as praise and “Stay” to mean don’t move.

  At the same time, trainers frustrated by the “dog’s” lack of appropriate response resort to the technique used by tourists the world over—in the face of a listener’s confusion, they often just repeat the word at increasing volume. Volume, while impressive, never equals clarity. Trainers find themselves having trouble remembering just what they are trying to communicate, mixing up their words so that they’re praising when they meant to give a command or vice versa. As many have complained, “This is much easier when I know what I mean!” From the trainers’ point of view, the behavior is one they can easily envision, but they discover that communicating that via a nonsensical language is not easy. Of course, when we know what we mean in using a word, we often slip into the assumption that the listener—our dog—also does. “Heel” and “Down” are just as nonsensical to a dog as “Peach!”

  Successful communication requires that we understand the listener’s state of mind, their level of understanding and, past that, the information in their minds. The information left out of our communications is what Tor Norretranders in his book The User Illusion calls exformation, and it is as critical a part of communication as what we actually do say. As Nørretranders notes, “Information is not very interesting. The interesting thing about a message is what happens before it is formulated and after it has been received.”

  When I ask my dog Grizzly, “Where is your bumper?” there is a tremendous amount of unspoken information that I know he already possesses. “Bumper” is simply the key that evokes the response I want, but it works only because he has learned a great deal about a bright orange plastic tube with little knobs and a ratty rope. In his mind’s eye (and undoubtedly his mind’s nose) there springs up not only his internal representation of the thing itself but quite possibly the memory and anticipation of all the pleasurable experiences that go with it. To a dog who does not have all that information, asking “Where is your bumper?” is as meaningless a message as “Where is Timbuktu?” There is no difference in Grizzly’s response to the word bumper than in my friend Wendy’s response if I say, “Let’s go get some ice cream!” I do not need to spell out for her that this will require that we put on our shoes, locate some money, walk out to the truck, drive five miles or so to our favorite ice cream stand, stand in line, decide on our flavor or style of cone, pay the cashier and then begin eating. I also do not need to tell her that ice cream is the sweet, very cold, creamy shapeless stuff that comes in many colors and flavors. The mere words ice cream evoke all that in her mind, and her mouth begins to water, and she’s out the door before I am. If she were an alien who just arrived on a spaceship, we’d have to have quite a lengthy conversation in order to convey the exformation, all left out of but still contained in the phrase “Let’s go get some ice cream!”

  This is one of the big problems we have when working with dogs or other animals. When we utter a word as command or direction, we bring to that word a great deal of exformation. Because we are usually quite clear in our minds about what we intend to communicate, we forget that what is in the listener’s mind will affect to a great deal what the ultimate response to our communication may be. On a frequent basis, we experience a bit of the dog’s puzzlement when another person says to us, “Hand me that thingamajig.” The purely nonsensical word offers us no meaningful information, because no clear image or sensation is evoked. For our dogs, English or any other human language is a nonsensical one, and only experience helps them understand what we mean when we utter any word.

  Training is a way of developing our ability to communicate with our dogs (though like many of our conversations with other humans, sometimes it’s much more to the dog than with him). When we train, we are inventing our own mutual language so that when we say “ball” or “stay” or “come,” we can excite within the dog’s mind the images, sensations or even scents that we intend to. For his part, the dog learns ways to excite within us what he intends—thus, a meaningful
bump of his nose against a doorknob creates in our minds an indication that he needs to go out, and if he is a puppy, we may have vivid images of what our carpeting will look like if we ignore this message.

  It’s safe to say that one of the most common failures of communication is that we take much for granted and forget how much exformation there is in even a simple request. In our mind, there may be a very complete home movie about what we mean when we say “Sit” or “Stay” or “No.” But if we haven’t made sure that the dog has also seen and understands that home movie, we’re going to have problems. We’ll be frustrated, and the dog will be too. We are, quite often, asking our dogs for that thingamajig, and they make the best guesses they can based on what we have taught them.