Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  The grin on Puppy’s face, her pricked-up ears, and her fiercely wagging tail showed that she was completely pumped up about chasing the Jeep, and knew in the depths of her being that she had done exactly what she was bred and born to do. She was bursting with exhilaration and pride in her exploit. It was too late to administer a correction for the unwanted behavior. Any fuss on our part would only make the incident more memorable for her.

  We helped Allyson off the ground and hugged her tightly. I gently took the leash from her, and quietly encouraged Puppy to walk back to the house with us, trying to regain my composure as Sally laced her arm through Allyson’s. My heartbeat gradually slowed down after ten of the worst seconds in Sally’s and my life.

  A few minutes later we were all having lunch together, laughing with Allyson about her flying grab of the leash. Sally and I told her we were lucky her instincts were as strong as Puppy’s. After finally telling us about her good first year in grad school, Allyson bid Sally, me, and not least of all Puppy an affectionate farewell.

  Later that afternoon we had more excitement with an impromptu visit from Robin. Impatient to meet the puppy she had been hearing about for the past four weeks, and on a break between guiding white-water rafting trips, she had decided in characteristic fashion to drive all the way down from her home in the mountains of western North Carolina and surprise us. We gathered in the kitchen, giving Puppy lots of pets and soft words as we filled Robin in on events since our last conversation on the phone.

  Tanned and toned from her long hours on the river (she can beat most men in a push-up contest), Robin was standing at the sink drinking a cup of coffee. When she heard about the puppy and the Jeep Cherokee, she doubled over with laughter and almost dropped her cup.

  “You’ve got to name her Chaser!” Robin said. Sally and I exchanged looks of instant approval and laughed along with Robin, marveling at how we could have missed the obvious. We said we wanted a name that reflected our puppy’s inner self, and all the time it was right there in her behavior. As Joseph Campbell, a big influence on me, might well have said, our puppy was a veritable avatar of chasing. I instantly imagined her chasing speech as well as sheep.

  Chaser felt like exactly the right name to me. But I wanted to be sure we all agreed. So as I always liked to do in class, I went around the room and asked for opinions.

  “Sally, what do you think of the name Chaser?” I began.

  “I really like it.”

  “Robin, are you having any second thoughts?”

  “No, Dad, I still like it. What do you think?”

  “Well, I really like it too. But we gotta call Debbie on this and see how she feels about it. Everybody’s gotta like it.

  “What do you think?” I said to the puppy as she brought a ball back to me. “How do you like the name Chaser? Should we call you Chaser?”

  The word “chaser” meant nothing to her, of course. It was just an utterance of ours with two linked sounds. But at least she didn’t find the sounds unpleasant, judging by her continued happy focus on play with the ball as we each tried out her prospective name. It seemed like a name she could learn to like.

  Before Robin left we called Debbie in Brooklyn, and the vote was unanimous. Our puppy was now Chaser.

  That evening Sally and I reminisced about how Robin and Debbie had named our dogs going back to Bimbo, the big German shepherd mix we got when they were in the middle of elementary school. Bimbo’s name fit his rambunctious yet goofy personality, which made him a great companion for Robin and Debbie in their adventures. After Bimbo came Yasha and Grindle, both perfect names in their own way. Yasha, half Border collie and half German shepherd, had the heart of a Cossack warrior chief and the temperament of an imperious virtuoso. Grindle was named ironically for Grendel in Beowulf, but creatively misspelled by me. In no way a monster, Grindle was a beautiful big purebred German shepherd with the softest of hearts who was fiercely devoted to the whole family, especially Sally.

  It was good to have our new family member’s name. But chasing the Jeep had excited her so much that I had to devise a lesson memorable enough to counteract it. We couldn’t risk another incident like the one we had just experienced.

  The speeding Jeep was a blessing in its way. It demonstrated without a doubt that Chaser had a strong herding drive. Herding is more than chasing, of course, but the underlying behavior for herding is chasing. Add chasing in a designated direction, and you begin to get the countless variations and possibilities that make up a working Border collie’s responsibilities and problem-solving challenges.

  On the other hand, chasing cars was an all-too-lethal challenge. In my mind’s eye I kept playing back the nightmare moment when the Jeep turned and Chaser raced to cut it off. Fortunately, she failed in her attempt. But it was too close a call.

  As I watched Sally playing with Chaser, I recalled Wayne West’s telling me about refusing to sell some people a dog because they didn’t have a fenced-in yard. Wayne said, “If they ain’t got the facilities to keep a Border collie, I don’t sell them a dog. I tell them, ‘This dog won’t last two weeks. It’ll get run over. Whether it’s a car or a bumblebee, this dog’s gonna try to work it and herd it. And the car is the most challenging and exciting thing for the dog to pursue. The dog’s gonna be out there running after the car. And if a dog gets started doing that, it’s hard to break them of it.’”

  Tomorrow I would have to redirect Puppy’s powerful impulse to chase, without quashing the impulse itself. I couldn’t let her continue to have an unbridled instinctual desire to chase cars. But sure as shooting, I did not want her to lose the instinctual joy of chasing, either.

  6

  Chaser Learns What Not to Chase

  NOW I HAD two problems to deal with: chasing cars and that darned cat.

  Driving back from Wofford the next day, I had time to stew about the threat of the cat. I was completely flummoxed by Sally’s casual attitude, particularly after the last run-in with the cat. Both my eyes and my gut told me that the cat was stalking Chaser. She was less than half his size, so Chaser was no bigger challenge for him than a squirrel. As soon as I got home, I would insist that we call the animal shelter. Working myself up, I rehearsed my argument out loud. Maybe I was being a little childish, but the cat had to go.

  When I hurried through the door, Chaser ran to meet me, wiggling and squirming on the floor for my attention like a fuzzy little inchworm. I couldn’t help but smile, and the tension in my back and shoulders started to fall away as I knelt down to scoop her up in a hug.

  Sally came into the living room and walked up to me and gave me a kiss before I could get a word out of my open mouth. I took a breath and began again, feeling much less agitated than I was in the car. “Sally, I need to talk to you about . . .”

  “Okay, hon, just a minute,” Sally said. “Before I forget, I want to tell you I’ve taken care of the cat.”

  Stunned by that, I asked, “What do you mean, sugar?”

  Sally explained that she had been picking the brain of Lynn, our neighbor three blocks over and an avid cat lover, about the best way to deal with the feral cat. Lynn’s first suggestion was that we adopt the cat. Sally confessed that she thought that would be unfair to the cat with all of our attention showered on our new puppy. Lynn said she completely understood and would put some thought to it.

  While I was out that morning, Lynn had come by the house with a cat carrier. She and Sally had walked over to the drainpipe opening in the little gully across the street, and Sally had called, “Kiiiittty! Kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  The cat had come shyly out of the drainpipe, meowed, and rubbed up against Lynn’s legs. With a little cheese, they had lured it into the carrier, and the feral cat was now a domestic cat, living with Lynn and her husband, Ken.

  I wrapped Sally in my arms and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, sugar. You are amazing!” Chaser had to get in on the hug too, wiggling and squirming against our knees with playful puppy yelps.

>   This eliminated one of my two fears. But that still left chasing cars—or anything else that brought Chaser running out into the street.

  I was blown away by Chaser’s speed in pursuing the Jeep. I knew instinct was a force to reckon with, as I’d observed many times in animals over the years, in and out of the lab. But Chaser had just given as dramatic an example of instinct’s explosively powering a behavior as any I’d ever seen. Besides that, I knew that the thrill of racing after the Jeep would almost certainly enhance her desire to chase tons of steel on wheels. It gave me a shudder to think that my overconfidence had put her in danger.

  Instinct is powerful stuff. The release of an instinctual behavior is inherently self-reinforcing. And the more memorable and exciting a behavior is, the more likely an individual will be to repeat it. That was what made the Jeep incident so troubling. It was the most exciting experience in Chaser’s young life and thus very positively reinforcing. She was going to be vulnerable to repeating the behavior of chasing cars unless I took effective action.

  At the same time, I didn’t want to quash her instinct for chasing. I was already making use of that instinct to teach Chaser the names of the objects we played with every day. I wanted to get the full energy of her chasing instinct—the energy that had startled and even frightened me with its intensity the day before—focused on every detail of that play. So I couldn’t be heavy-handed. I had to channel that instinct carefully, as gently as possible.

  The modern concept of instinct goes back to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. However, the study of instinct lay dormant until the 1930s, when European zoologists began to study the behavior of animals in their natural environments. This was the birth of a new science of animal behavior called ethology. The founding generation of ethologists and their immediate successors cast new light on instinct. They established that instincts have survival value or else the instincts themselves do not survive; that all members of a species have the same instincts in common, although the strength of a particular instinct varies from individual to individual; and that the instinct maintains its essential features over the animal’s life span. Compared to a reflex, such as your lower leg kicking after the doctor taps your knee, an instinct is infinitely more complex and may consist of a series of behaviors.

  Ethologists have shown that an instinct consists of two major components, a fixed action pattern and a releasing stimulus. The energy for the fixed action pattern is stored up in the animal, while the releasing stimulus, as the name implies, merely releases the energy. The fixed action pattern and the releasing stimulus are like a stick of dynamite and a fuse. The fire of the burning fuse is nothing compared to the explosive power of the dynamite.

  The Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen began studying that explosive power as a child by observing the mating and nesting behavior of two-to-three-inch-long stickleback fish in his backyard pond. Fortunately he continued that study as an adult, and in 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research that included the instinctive mating and reproductive behaviors displayed by male stickleback fish.

  There comes a time when the male stickleback fish selects an area as his territory. If another male appears, the first male attacks furiously and always wins. Tinbergen concluded that energy for fighting is built up in the first male, just waiting to be released, and this built-up energy enables him to defeat the intruder. Having defended his territory, the male stickleback builds a round nest with sticks and weeds. When a female stickleback fish with a swollen belly appears, the male performs an elaborate mating dance to lure her to his honeymoon nest. Once the female enters the nest, the male noses her tail, and she ejects thousands of eggs for him to fertilize.

  Like all instinctive behaviors, the male stickleback fish’s mating behaviors fly under the radar of consciousness. The male stickleback fish also illustrates that instinct is often linked to critical developmental and maturational stages in the life of an organism. If something hinders normal expression of the instinct during these critical stages, it may not achieve full, or even partial, development.

  We know that there is a critical period for social development in young dogs. I suspect now, as I did then, that there may be a similar critical developmental period for developing and channeling the herding instinct. Sally and I were trying to channel our puppy’s chasing and herding instincts into pursuing balls, Frisbees, and other toys. For Chaser, as for all dogs, the stimulus for her chasing instinct could be anything moving, such as sheep, rolling balls, flying Frisbees, squirrels, cats, and Jeeps. Much of what I’d been working on with Chaser during the past month was providing safe stimuli for chasing in the confines of the yard, with the goal of neutralizing the effect of dangerous stimuli like squirrels, cars, and big feral cats that could draw her into the street. But honestly, balls and Frisbees were poor substitutes compared to cars and critters.

  A simple solution was available: confine Chaser to our fenced-in backyard with walks only on her leash. I quickly rejected that option. I wanted to enlarge Chaser’s world, not shrink it.

  I recalled reading that having someone in a moving car squirt water on a dog with a water-blasting toy, or throwing tin cans to clatter in front of the dog, can inhibit car chasing. However, the mental image of Chaser’s cutting across a corner to head off the Jeep led me to reject both of these methods as too dangerous.

  Somehow, some way, Chaser had to learn that chasing a ball or a Frisbee in the yard was different from chasing a squirrel, a car, a ball, a Frisbee, or anything else in the street. There were two means I could use to influence Chaser’s behavior, positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. All of my training thus far had emphasized positive reinforcement. But something inside me said that we needed to employ a few negative reinforcement procedures now in order to protect her fully and permanently from literally leaping into danger.

  I’ve already said a little about positive and negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is certainly not punishment. The essence of punishment is that there is no way to escape or avoid it. By contrast, negative reinforcement motivates a learner to act in a way that escapes or avoids anything uncomfortable or dissatisfying, such as learning to carry an umbrella to avoid getting wet in the rain.

  Sometimes positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement are both necessary to change a behavior. In the early 1970s negative reinforcement began my effort to stop smoking. Positive reinforcement completed the process, enabling me to stop smoking and never miss it.

  I started smoking in my senior year at Abilene Christian College. The habit strengthened in graduate school at Princeton Theological Seminary to the point where I couldn’t study without smoking. I couldn’t concentrate without a cigarette in my hand.

  Robin and Debbie hated my smoking and often complained that I smelled of tobacco even when I didn’t have a cigarette going. When they were in elementary school they began to roll down the car windows in the middle of winter, no matter how cold it was, dramatically coughing and gagging at the unpleasant smell. To avoid the negative reinforcement of the blasts of cold air in the car and the girls’ frequent distress and disapproval, I decided to stop smoking.

  A month later I was drinking beer with some students in a local restaurant when one of them offered me a cigarette. I said I’d quit. The student asked me how long it had been, and I told him I’d gone a month without smoking. He laughed and said that he’d quit smoking several times, once for as long as six months, but he always wound up going back to it. I asked him if he ever got to the point where he didn’t think about smoking. When he said no, I said, “Give me a cigarette.”

  Robin and Debbie were persistent, and I decided to try to quit smoking again a few months later. I confess another form of negative reinforcement also motivated me: smoking was decreasing my physical endurance and cutting down on my kayaking and windsurfing fun. Still, I knew I also needed positive reinforcement to motivate me to stay with it and succeed. I had been reading about
a new style of rubberized, inflatable canoe that was coming on the market. I couldn’t justify spending money on something so selfish, rather than something for the family, but I told myself I could buy the canoe if I used money saved by not buying cigarettes.

  Like a kid saving for a new bike, every morning I put the money for a day’s cigarettes—I was smoking about a pack a day—into a jar on the kitchen table. Whenever I felt the urge to smoke during the day, I added a little more money to the kitty. In the evening I dumped all the coins out on the living room floor to count them. This always engaged Robin and Debbie, who eagerly helped me count the money and then cheered and did a little dance to encourage me to stay steady on my path. This became a daily after-dinner ritual for the whole family, and we were all looking forward to the new canoe together. My dream became our dream, which made it all the more motivating.

  I also conditioned myself not to think about smoking. My initial goal was not to think about smoking for thirty minutes. If I managed to do that, I rewarded myself with five minutes of visualizing running rapids in my kayak. Slowly, I extended the time not thinking about smoking to forty-five minutes, an hour, and longer periods.

  After a couple of months I got so good at not thinking about smoking that people could smoke in front of me and it didn’t affect me at all. Smoking was traditionally allowed in the college. I had smoked frequently in class, and students did too. Coincidentally, the college at that time decided to ban smoking in classrooms, and the chairman of the Psychology Department told me, “Pilley, you’ve got to stop students from smoking in your class.”

  “They’re not smoking,” I said. When he insisted that they were, I realized I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t even notice when people were smoking around me. To top it off, I could walk up multiple flights of stairs at Wofford without getting out of breath. Around the same time I had saved up so much cigarette money that I could buy the inflatable canoe. Lovingly dubbed the Rubber Ducky, it was virtually impossible to capsize and became a favorite of the entire family, especially the girls.