Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  We didn’t see a single car on the road, but the puppy saw and ran after two more squirrels. I responded to each event the same way as before. I said a firm but not harsh “No!” And then I let the puppy run to the end of the leash, calling and beckoning her over after she knocked herself off her feet, and praising and petting her for coming to me. The puppy’s third chase had a little hesitation to it, and as we continued our walk after that she strained at the leash a bit less and released the tension on it herself a bit more quickly.

  These were signs that she was already learning an important lesson that would make walks easier and help to keep her safe. Although our neighborhood is relatively sleepy, Briarwood Road can be very busy at times. Sally and I knew several neighbors whose beloved pets were hit and killed by cars when they chased squirrels or other animals into the street. In a couple of cases, large dogs had even yanked their leashes out of their owners’ grips and then run fatally into the street. Nothing like that had ever happened to one of our dogs, and we sure didn’t want it to happen with our new puppy.

  As the puppy and I turned in to our front yard, I glanced across the street. A big gray feral cat with a bushy tail was looking intently at us, especially at the puppy. The tip of the cat’s raised tail was twitching back and forth, as if in readiness for a pouncing leap. Judging by its size it was probably a young male from a line of Maine coon cats, among the biggest domestic cats. It was about twelve inches tall and almost two feet long, not counting its tail, and it weighed a good fifteen pounds if it weighed an ounce. Our puppy was only eight weeks old. She was scarcely ten inches high at the shoulder and weighed only a few pounds. She’d be helpless if that big cat caught her alone.

  The cat had been roaming the neighborhood for a few weeks, making regular visits at the house of a kindhearted neighbor who put out food and water for it. But the cat was also a busy hunter, as we’d seen him racing across the lawn, critter in mouth. Robin said she’d seen the cat near one end of a drainpipe that ran under the street to the woods behind our house. That made me more uncomfortable.

  I moved in front of the puppy and stared the cat down, doing my best to appear threatening. Unimpressed, it gave me a nonchalant look and then padded off in between two houses on its side of the street. Before bringing the puppy home yesterday, I hadn’t really given the cat much thought. Now I wanted it gone.

  Dismissing the cat from my mind for now, I took the puppy into our fenced-in backyard. I still wanted to be able to stop her from chasing a squirrel if she saw one, so I left the leash on her collar but let her trail it along behind her. She sniffed around the steps to the back porch, then trotted off to the sixty-foot-long chainlink fence that separated our yard from that of the neighbors directly behind us. Here she resumed sniffing with great intensity.

  “Yes, girl,” I said. “Two dogs live on the other side of the fence. You’ll meet them before long, I’m sure. They’re a couple of friendly creatures.”

  As if on cue, the neighbors’ back door opened and their dogs came out. On spotting us they both ran over to the fence. A large mixed-breed dog was in the lead—the type of dog Sally calls a Heinz 57, a combination of so many varieties that it’s hard to pin any kind of tag on it. A little bulldog came panting behind.

  The puppy stood stock-still, and I knelt down behind her so that she was sheltered a bit between my knees, with the fence a foot in front of us. She wasn’t cowering and didn’t seem distressed, but she showed no inclination to engage with the dogs as they came to a stop at the fence, barking in excitement. “It’s okay, girl,” I told the puppy, stroking her side. “These are nice dogs.” They were the first dogs she was exposed to besides her own kennel mates, and it was vital to socialize her so that she was comfortable around other dogs.

  The little bulldog and the big mixed breed sniffed through the fence toward the puppy. She remained motionless. The neighbor dogs bounded back and forth in front of the fence, bowing their legs in play postures. The puppy stayed very still, and looked back at me as if to say she’d had enough of this encounter. But then the neighbor dogs started racing back and forth along the fence, and that excited the puppy to race back and forth with them.

  I stood up and let them race. The puppy could barely cover a quarter of the length of the fence in the time the big dog took to run to the end and turn back to run the other way, and even the little bulldog was too fast for her. But the puppy plainly loved to run. Her exhilaration made me smile.

  As the big dog barreled back along the fence, Puppy tried to turn around in midstride to run beside him and tumbled to the ground. I quickly stepped over to her, but she was back on her feet, grinning, before I got there. The neighbor dogs stopped running and came to the fence again to sniff, and this time Puppy trotted over to the fence and sniffed back, nose to nose. That made me chuckle and tell them all, “Good dogs! Good dogs!”

  I heard my neighbor calling the bulldog and its big companion to their breakfast, and they were off like a shot. “Let’s go inside too, Puppy,” I said. She turned from the fence at the sound of my voice and walked along beside me up our sloping backyard to the house. The back porch steps were too high for her, so I picked her up and carried her inside.

  In the kitchen I held the puppy in my arms and saw her eyes slowly closing and then blinking open. She had tremendous energy, but racing the older dogs had worn her out for the moment.

  I put her down by the water bowl to see if she wanted a drink. She did, and I quietly repeated, “Drink, drink,” while she lapped up some water. Thirst slaked, she was more than ready for a nap. I led her over to the new dog bed in the living room and encouraged her to lie down. I praised her as she did, and then contentedly watched her eyes close and her breathing deepen as she fell asleep.

  She was a beautiful puppy inside and out. Her coat, more white than black, might not be the most favored for a Border collie. A mostly black coat stands out from the sheep better when the farmer is at a distance. But she was a pretty puppy—there was no doubt about that. The white parts of her coat had hints of mottled gray, which would likely become more pronounced as she matured. She had hazel to brown eyes, depending on how the light hit them. Her eyes shone, and I saw there her enthusiasm for life and interacting with Sally and me—and, I thought, keen intelligence.

  Sitting beside her as she napped, I thought about the behaviors and characteristics she’d displayed so far. Her responsiveness to subtle changes in the tone of my voice, especially when I encouraged and praised her, her fast-increasing ability to maintain attention on me, her slight hesitation in chasing the third squirrel and her pulling slightly less on the leash during the rest of the walk—all these things suggested both that she had a quick mind for learning and that we were building a strong bond between us. What excited me even more was how quickly she seemed to be attaching meanings to “here,” “out,” and “do your business,” associating the sound of each word or phrase with an appropriate action on her part.

  The puppy was a long way from any referential understanding of these words. But after all my experiences with animals in and out of the lab, these signs indicated that she had enormous potential for learning. That gave me goose bumps.

  Sally came out of the bedroom and I looked up to see her smiling at the puppy and me.

  “You’re up early,” I said.

  “I’m excited about our puppy,” she said. “What have I missed while you’ve been up and about? You must have been doing something to tire this little dynamo out.”

  Sally knelt down and stroked the puppy. She stirred and stretched herself awake at Sally’s touch, and then clambered into her lap and arms just as she’d done at Wayne West’s farm the day before. After our years without a dog, it filled my heart with joy to see a puppy basking in Sally’s nurturing glow again.

  I told Sally about the morning so far. She approved of everything except my concern over the feral cat’s apparent interest in the puppy. “Don’t worry yourself about that,” she said. “That cat’
s not going to get a chance to hurt our puppy.”

  But I wasn’t convinced. “That cat’s twice her size,” I said, “and you yourself said a few days ago that it was wreaking havoc among the songbirds and squirrels.”

  “Hush, John. The birds and squirrels are tiny compared to the puppy.” She held the puppy close to her face and said, “And you’re gonna get big fast, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Sally kissed the puppy and put her down on the floor, then turned to me and said, “What about a nice breakfast on this special day?”

  When I first met Sally she was a student nurse at Philadelphia General Hospital and I was a seminary student doing a counseling tutorial with one of the hospital chaplains. I was immediately captivated by her petite beauty, her oval face framed by short brown hair under the double-frill cap that Philadelphia General nurses wore, but also by the way she was joshing with a patient. This was in the psychiatric ward, and it moved me to see how Sally was giving an obviously very troubled man a few moments of relaxed fun. Her hair has turned white, but as throughout our marriage she can still josh me out of a troubled state of mind with her radiant brown eyes, her loving smile, and her unfailing common sense.

  While Sally made scrambled eggs and I saw to toast, coffee, and orange juice, the puppy wandered around the first floor. The door to the basement stairs was closed as usual, and the stairs up to the loft area where guests stayed and I had my desk and files were a little too high for her. When she brought a toy over to one of us, she got a warm welcome and praise. Intermittently I verbalized actions she was making—“Take toy,” etc.—to continue reinforcing the associations she was quickly forming with the sounds of those words.

  When we sat down to breakfast, we gave the puppy her morning kibble. We wanted to build the habit of having her eat her meals when we did: breakfast, lunch, and dinner while she was a puppy, and then two meals a day, morning and evening, when she was fully grown. Sally and I grinned at seeing the puppy wolf down her food with gusto.

  After we cleared the table I figured it was time for a little formal obedience training. If we couldn’t reliably get the puppy to come to us when we called, it would never be safe to let her off the leash near a road and it would be hard to extend her learning in any dimension. So that would be her first lesson.

  Teaching the puppy to come to the sound of “Here!” also had the virtue of being an easy lesson. I cut up some little pieces of cheese to use as lures and rewards. Even after a good breakfast, the smell of savory cheese got her attention. Then I knelt down in front of the puppy and held a piece of cheese a mere two inches from her nose while I softly said, “Here! Here!” She moved forward to take the cheese in her mouth and gobble it up, and I praised and petted her as she did.

  Any complex behavior is a chain of simpler behaviors. In teaching the complex behavior it often works best to teach the chain of smaller actions in reverse and train from the end to the beginning. That way the learner, who could just as easily be a human student as a canine one, can progress through the chain of actions with increasing confidence, always secure in what the final desired result is. The idea of training from the end lay behind Wayne West’s suggestion that a farmer with a young Border collie should let the dog out of the truck to follow its instinct and run around behind livestock after they’d been attracted by some hay. I used the same principle many times in experiments with rats, pigeons, and dogs in my lab at Wofford.

  Step by step I began the process of getting the puppy to come to me and the cheese from farther away. From two inches we moved to four inches, eight inches, a foot, and then a few feet apart.

  Five minutes of that was enough. I didn’t want either of us to lose focus, and too much food at once would satiate her and lose its value for training.

  Off and on through the rest of the day, we alternated training the puppy to come on hearing Sally or me say “Here!” with play with toys, exploratory sessions in the yard, and a couple of good naps. By the middle of the afternoon, the puppy came eagerly to “Here!” even when I was out of sight around a corner. Although she was delighted to get food treats, both yummy little biscuits and cheese, it excited me to see that praise and pets seemed to lift her spirits and please her even more than the food. That had something to do with both her individual temperament and her working Border collie lineage, I felt sure. In any case, it was another very promising sign for her long-term training. The food was an external motivation, and external motivations are never as strong and reliable as internal, instinctual ones.

  Around four o’clock there was a knock at the door. It was our friend Nora, a smile lighting up her face under her short, spiky blond hair. The puppy was enormously excited to meet another person. Ears up and tail wagging furiously, she lay down in front of Nora and looked at her expectantly. The puppy was so worked up that she wet herself and a small spot appeared and spread on the floor as Nora bent down to pet her and coo at her. A flower child with a country twang who was born and raised on a farm and had a dog and a cat of her own, Nora didn’t bat an eye. We didn’t make any fuss ourselves, lest we reinforce the urinating behavior. We knew this was a behavior that was likely to disappear as the puppy grew more accustomed to her surroundings and to meeting new people. Instead we just got a wet cloth to wipe the moisture off the puppy’s fur and clean up the little puddle of pee on the floor.

  Nora said, “I could have called, but I couldn’t wait to meet your beautiful puppy. Do you think she’s ready for a late-afternoon walk with the Ya-Yas?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Sally said. “The usual time?”

  “Yes, but don’t you come by for us. We’ll come around to you, so all the dogs can meet at once and we can get any hullabaloo over with.”

  Sally and a few of her women friends in the neighborhood loved the book and movie The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. They dubbed themselves the Ya-Ya Winos and made that the tagline for their evening get-togethers, during which they imbibe a bit of wine and good Southern bourbon. The closest thing to a gang our neighborhood will likely ever see, Sally and the other original Ya-Ya Winos had first met years earlier while walking their respective pets. Based on their mutual love of dogs (to be fair, some members of the group have also had cats, like Nora’s big fluffy orange cat, Slick), these crusty, savvy seniors—ninety-year-old Miss Lucy was the oldest, followed by Sally, Theresa, Nora, Marie, and Marge—soon developed a ritual of daily walks and twice-a-month get-togethers at one another’s houses.

  About an hour after Nora’s visit, I looked out the window and saw her and two other members of the Ya-Yas, Marie and Theresa, approaching the house with their dogs. Nora had her Heinz 57 variety, Annie, a sweet swaybacked mutt with a penchant for eating dirt. Marie, a laid-back California transplant with light gray hair falling just below her chin, had her handsome golden retriever, Fafner. And Theresa had her miniature schnauzer, Holly. Tall with strawberry blond hair and porcelain skin, Theresa is a true Southern belle, and she was elegantly dressed for the walk as she is for every occasion. Sally put the puppy on the leash, and I went out with them to say hello to the ladies.

  Marie said, “You should have gotten another dog ages ago.”

  I said, “Yes, we were just waiting for the right one.”

  “She’s adorable,” Theresa said.

  “I told you all she was,” Nora said.

  Marie asked, “What are you going to call her?”

  Sally said, “Nothing’s struck us as fitting her just yet. Let us know if you have any suggestions. In the meantime, her name is Puppy.”

  Fafner, Holly, and Annie were milling around sniffing at the puppy. She sniffed back, but as with the dogs at the back fence she stood quite still and showed little interest in them. Nothing in her body language indicated fear or distress. Her ears and tail weren’t down. But she was plainly much more interested in the people.

  Introductions over, the walk began. The puppy didn’t want to leave our yard. Sally
beckoned to the puppy, gave a slight tug on the leash, and said, “C’mon, Puppy.” But she didn’t want to go. Sally wasn’t about to put up with that, but she was too wise to engage in a contest of wills. I watched from our front porch as Sally scooped the puppy up. The puppy instantly relaxed in the cradle of her arms.

  As Sally carried the puppy into the street I noticed the feral cat stalking toward them. Before I could say anything a car turned onto our block and the cat darted away. Sally turned back to the house and waved at me as she waited for the car to go by, and then the Ya-Yas trooped away on their constitutional.

  At dinner Sally told me that she had carried the puppy most of the time. But on the last little stretch, the puppy had walked along on the leash very nicely.

  “I’m still worried about that feral cat,” I told her.

  “That cat’s doing anything to the puppy is unlikely, if you ask me.”

  “Well, I’m going to talk to the neighbors about not putting out food and water for it. Let it move on to some other neighborhood.”

  “John, you’re really overreacting.”

  My voice rising sharply, I said, “Well, if you don’t want me talking to the neighbors about the cat, maybe I’ll have to call animal control about it.”

  Sally’s voice rose to match mine as she snapped, “That’s ridiculous!”

  I was about to launch into a vehement reply when Sally said, “Where’s Puppy gone to?”

  The puppy had been lying quietly on the living room rug after eating her dinner. But now she was nowhere to be seen. Sally and I got up from the table and both called, “Here! Here, Puppy! Here, girl!”