by Sandra Lee
Wild canines are pack animals and need a clear and defined hierarchy to survive. The domestication of dogs makes that hierarchy less critical for survival but no less important socially. After all, the family pet has a preordained social structure in the shape of us humans who house, feed and water the four-legged fur kid from the moment it arrives home. That’s not to say that all dogs accept that they are lower ranked than humans and when they don’t it is trouble. As cute and lovable as he was, the now world famous Labrador Marley, of the book and film Marley & Me, was a terror. Not for nothing did newspaper columnist and author John Grogan give his best-selling book the sub-title Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog.
It was too early to really tell how Rafi and his sister would turn out, or if they would grow to be another Marley or, more challenging, a pair of Marleys, but that wasn’t an issue right now. Once again, the pups had done the work for the humans and made the difficult choice for them. Just as Rafi chose Wendy, his sister chose him and he reciprocated.
Wendy parted with another $375, scooped up her squirming brood, gently put them in the box and took them home. Their family now truly was complete.
Chapter 4
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Rafi had a sister who needed a name. Nic and Marcelo had drawn on The Lion King to choose Rafiki and the brothers, eight and five, chose to stick with the film. They were methodical in their choice and, with their sister Gemma, ran through the female names of their favourite characters. Nala, who is Simba’s mate, was discounted immediately because it sounded too close to the Spanish ‘nada’, which when translated means ‘nothing’ and that wouldn’t do for their pup. She was the polar opposite of nothing and meant everything to the family, especially Nic, who was overwhelmed when he jumped in the back of his parents’ car to discover a second pup en route to its new home.
‘We always wanted pets. For a long time we had been talking to Mum and Dad about it and one day we came home and there was Rafi, and that was amazing, and then two days later we had another,’ Nic says now. ‘That’s why it was so emotional. It was already a big thing having one dog and now we had two.’
The family moved through the animated cast, ticking off this name and that. Shenzi was sweet but she was a hyena. Enough said. Sarafina? Almost, but not quite right. Finally, they found the one they all agreed was absolutely the prettiest, Sarabi.
It was perfect for their pup. The name belonged to –Simba’s mother, the lion queen who, like Rafiki, was no one’s favourite character in particular but, when translated, it means ‘mirage’ and as we know, every mirage is beautiful. Sarabi fitted their delectable dog to perfection. As the children had done with Rafi, they shortened Sarabi to Sabi and pronounced it Sah-bee*.
Now happily named, the pups trotted around and the house pulsed with excitement as the dogs clumsily explored their new environment, stopping to sniff everything and piddle at the same time. They crab-waddled from one side of the room to another, bumped and slid into objects, skating along on their oversized paws, which reminded Wendy to go on a puppy-proofing mission. Rafi and Sarbi were inseparable, a canine comedy team. Gemma says they were ‘partners in crime’ who egged each other on and grew in confidence with each new move.
Sarbi forged ahead of Rafi, poking her head around each corner before stopping suddenly to wait for her sibling to catch up with a little hey, this way, flick of her head. Rafi charged on bouncily. Buoyed by Sarbi’s adventurous spirit the sooky boy had morphed into a fearless hound in search of who knew what and the vague promise of a scent on the wind. Back and forth they went, you go, no, you go. No matter where they went, Rafi and Sarbi went together.
Sarbi climbed over Rafi and tumbled headfirst on to the floor with abandon and Rafi copied the exact same move, climbing over his sibling and somersaulting to the floor with a thud. They took turns repeating the manoeuvre like skilled circus performers and thumped their tails on the floor with delight, yipping and yapping like pups do. Their playtime was a synchronous dance with the mutual benefit of happiness and exercise. Ralph Waldo Emerson crisply put it thus: ‘It is a happy talent to know how to play’.
Despite their frenzy of exploration, the pups’ energy seemed infinite and their little tanks produced a staggering amount of puppy pee requiring hourly toilet training trips outdoors. Eventually though, they tired and collapsed with exhaustion, curling in as one, a mass of rising and falling fur, out of which came a chorus of soft, puffy snorts. ‘They were little black balls of love,’ says Wendy.
It was decided that the pups would sleep in the boys’ bedroom, in the cardboard box where the children had created a cosy nest for Rafi two nights previously. Gemma continued to sleep in the same room, not wanting to miss the action, giggling with joy at the pups’ antics, encouraging their cheekiness. The plan was short-term and would last only while the pups were tiny and getting accustomed to the family. After that they could sleep outside. Their thick, long double-coats were as good as waterproof and would protect them from the vicissitudes of the weather in that part of the country. The Southern Highlands could be covered in snow in winter and as warm as the tropics in summer. But, before the lights had even been turned out that first night, the plan and the box were both abandoned. Gleefully, it should be said. Sarbi and Rafi had burrowed under the blankets and snuggled in with the compliant boys. If happiness could be empirically measured, it was off the scale that night in Bowral.
The puzzlement of pups is not that they are so adorable— that’s a prewired by-product of biology—but how they choose us as companions.
Rafi bonded instantly, irrevocably, with the oldest and youngest siblings, Gemma and Marcelo; the livelier, more energetic and rambunctious Sarbi had enigmatically gravitated to Nic, the middle child. There was no reason to it. Nothing had happened that would set one pup on one course and the other on another. Both had been equally indulged with love and affection, over-indulged even, and yet, somehow, canny canine choices had been made, apparently not at random.
Sarbi had not been home more than a handful of hours but the connection with Nic was as if chiselled in stone. As soon as the older brother sat cross-legged on the floor, Sarbi clambered into his lap and squirmed like quicksilver, circling twice or thrice until she found the right spot of warmth, and plopping down to make herself at home. By lights out, the bond was firmly established. Perhaps, as if guided by some divine doggie deduction, Sarbi understood that Rafi had already made his bond and so cleverly opted for the equally attractive alternative. Another shrewd piece of puppy logic also quickly became clear. Sarbi and Rafi eyed Wendy and Carlos as the joint alphas of the pack— something all dogs look for as soon as they find themselves in a new family—and diplomatically bounced from one to the other for tickles and hugs.
The good news was that with Sarbi beside him, Rafi’s whimpers and plaintive cries from the previous two nights had all but ceased. The separation from his large pack must have seemed an eternity to him those first 48 hours but he was now reassuringly reunited with a part it, no matter how small. Sarbi was Rafi’s comfort; that much was evident from the moment Wendy put the little guy back in the pen at the pet shop and now it was blindingly obvious. The female pup had a dominant and more independent personality, which turned out to be a good thing.
Finally, the entire family—two parents, three children and yes, even the two balls of fur—got a good night’s sleep. Wendy’s plan had been a success, an ultimately joyous one at that.
The Austrian zoologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz was a fascinating and occasionally controversial man who dedicated his life to the study of animal behaviour, particularly how various species such as birds and dogs interacted with us humans. Lorenz spent decades knee-deep in research—‘observation’ he liked to call it— and wrote with affection and humour about the animals he so dearly loved. He was so dedicated to the cause of ethology, the study of animal behaviour, that he taught himself to walk and talk and splash like a duck and when needed for science
, did all three. He could honk like a goose and had no compunction about spending hours on hands and knees in hides to see what the animals did in their natural habitat.
An animal lover par excellence, Lorenz had bonded as a child with a wild goose, or more to the point, the gosling had bonded with him as it would its mother and followed him everywhere, trailing as geese offspring do. This magical experience, known as imprinting, set the inquisitive boy on a lifelong path of discovery about animal behaviour and comparative psychology. Later, when he had completed a medical and zoology degree, Lorenz put the groundbreaking theory of imprinting on the scientific map. Imprinting, or ‘stamping in’ as Lorenz called it in his native German, is a survival instinct for infant birds. They bond with the first thing they see for protection from predators and mishaps. Usually, the hatchlings imprint with the mother goose but Lorenz’s scientific experiments showed how goslings and ducklings would attach themselves to humans in the absence of their ornithological mothers just as that first gosling had imprinted on him in childhood.
In the mid 1960s Lorenz, by then a household name in scientific circles and accepted as the godfather of ethology, broadened the scientific corpus about the animal-human connection. He called the inter-species relationship ‘the bond’ and defined it as behaviour patterns of an objectively demonstrable mutual attachment. Previously, it was understood that the primary goal of a species was procreation in order to guarantee survival, but the breakthrough on imprinting made by Lorenz and fellow scientists changed that one-dimensional assumption.
Dogs were different again. Dogs took the bond to a higher level. Was it a better bond? Well, if you love dogs you know the answer to that and comparing dogs to geese is rather like comparing chalk to cheese. Doesn’t really make sense.
The relationship between our more primitive human ancestors and wild dogs, or wolves in the very first instance, was initially built on the mutual needs of feeding, hunting, protection and cohabitation and is often said to be one of the reasons why Homo sapiens survived so well when the ice age Neanderthals, who showed no primitive affection for dogs whatsoever, didn’t. Thousands and thousands of years later, though, modern man and his domesticated dog are bonded in something else as well, something more emotionally compelling—companionship. And companionship has primacy above nearly all other benefits, particularly in Western society where man is dog’s best friend and vice versa. As Lorenz puts it in Man Meets Dog, his seminal book first published in 1949, ‘there is no domestic animal which has so radically altered its whole way of living, indeed its whole sphere of interests, that has become domestic in so true a sense as the dog.’
Cats? Well, yes and no. In fact, forget the feline. When it comes to companionship, the cat doesn’t hold a candle to the dog. Sure, it has made its way into our hearts and homes but cats—no, not your cat—don’t need us like dogs need us. Have you ever seen a cat dance, pant, paw and twirl with unbridled excitement upon your arrival home? No? Didn’t think so.
The flamboyant Lorenz was right when he wrote: ‘The whole charm of a dog lies in the depth of the friendship and the strength of the spiritual ties with which he has bound himself to man.’
Much more recently cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz expounded on Lorenz’s work in her wonderful book, Inside of a Dog. Horowitz creates a mystical world— the umwelt (OOM-velt)—for the canid clan and writes about what life must be like from the dog’s point of view at ground level, absent the anthropomorphisms we humans tend to project on to them. She respectfully treats the dog as a dog.
Like Lorenz, Horowitz describes the various ways through which humans and dogs bond. One is contact or touch; another is the greeting ritual—a physical burst of feverish exhilaration that highlights recognition between dog and owner and acts as acknowledgement of their bond. But what really separates dogs from other species, according to Horowitz, is the actual ‘timing and pacing’ of the dog–human interactions.
Dogs know when they will be walked, the time during that walk when they will be let off the leash, the times they will be fed, or allowed to play. Dogs also know the time for bed. Dogs anticipate all of these activities with the precision of a Swiss watch and let their owners know with a nudge to the thigh or a paws-down play-slap and a come on, get a move on rumble of a growl that turns into a single, high-pitched roooph. Owners usually comply. Why not? We are bonded and the timing is a tonic.
According to Horowitz, ‘human companionship has become dogs’ motivational meat’. It works the other way round, too. Yet the curious, or rather, marvellous thing about this inter-species, human–dog bond is the speed with which it occurs. Strangely fast.
Dogs know how to effortlessly inveigle their way into our hearts. Like card sharps and con men, they know an easy mark when they see one. Witness Rafi and Sarbi.
* Sabi ultimately would be spelled phonetically as Sarbi by the Australian Army, which is the spelling I will use.
Chapter 5
IT’S A DOG’S LIFE
All dogs have a capacity to understand words and sounds. Moreover, they can detect and isolate the nuances in human language even though they can’t actually speak it the way we two-leggeds do. Scientists and ethologists call it the receptive language ability and it applies equally to canines as children. It is easiest to think of it in terms of how toddlers learn language: by hearing and understanding a word but without having developed the ability to speak it. A thirteen-month-old can point to a dog and know what it is, but will not be able to say ‘dog’, only some cute version thereof. As Stanley Coren points out in How To Speak Dog, humans would do well not to underestimate that same knack in dogs.
The average hound can understand between 110 and 200 spoken human words or signals, or a combination of both, but the really clever ones can be quite loquacious, in a silent sort of way. One German dog trainer boasted of teaching his dog 350 words and added that the dog was able to correctly pick out the individual instructional words from a longer sentence and do what he was required to do. Say ‘walkies’ and your dog knows what it’s been invited to do. Say ‘do you want to go for a walk in the park?’ and it will pick out the word ‘walk’ and greet you with a physical response that says, do I ever? if it hasn’t already beaten you to the front door.
Say the word ‘treat’ and your dog will react differently to an utterance of ‘no’, which, almost universally, will be met with a look of abject dejection if not an overt sigh of displeasure. (Dogs, Coren points out, actually do sigh and their sighs can have a range of meanings.) Compare ‘bath’ and ‘bone’, both short, sharp, strong B-words, and you’ll notice how ‘bone’ is understood as a good thing. Not so, ‘bath’. ‘Bone’ will probably result in your dog licking its chops and his ears standing at attention with greedy expectation. ‘Bath’ might turn a happy-go-lucky hound into a sullen, immovable block of a dog with the paw-brakes on, one who wants to remain smelling as doggie as possible. Or try saying ‘bad dog’ in as neutral a tone as possible, minus emotion and volume, and London to a brick your dog will still slink into its I’ve just been berated submissive pose, with its tail under its rear legs and ears flattened, just as it would if you really had said ‘bad dog’ and meant it.
A dog’s receptive language abilities, then, are limited by the time spent listening to its owner and what that human decides to teach his or her four-legged friend over and above the usual commands of sit, stay, down, come.
Sarbi and Rafi were blessed. They had five eager and devoted teachers and the pair proved to be very quick learners. Gemma knew the pups were beginning to understand English when she noticed how they chased and retrieved tennis balls with, well, the zeal of retrievers. The kids would say ‘tennis’ with a particular intonation and Sarbi and Rafi instantly stopped whatever they were doing and froze, stone-like.
Tennis.
Their ears pricked up, their eyes widened and they cocked their heads, quaking with anticipation.
‘They looked like little cartoons,’ Gemma says.
The dogs quivered, practically levitating, as they fell over each other, crashing through the back door and tumbling down the steps to the backyard. Sarbi and Rafi had not only learnt the word ‘tennis’, but every variant of the consonant T.
‘We’d tease them by saying things like, “Anyone feel like a cup of Tea? Sounds very TempTing doesn’T iT?” emphasising all the Ts and watching the dogs salivate over the sound. If you played that game, though, you had to then go and throw the ball a few times. It was just too cruel not to.’
Sarbi was more obsessed with chasing the ball and retrieving it than Rafi. Her enthusiasm was boundless. She chased with a blind insistence that bordered on the obsessive. If she couldn’t find a ball, she picked up pebbles and dropped them at the children’s feet, her front paws splayed and ready to pounce, staring at the rocks with catatonic intensity as if the pile of pebbles was her sole purpose in life. Sarbi was impossible to distract or pat while a pile of pebbles or a tennis ball lay before her. She sidestepped any attempt at physical contact and peered more closely at the stones, more urgently and insistently, hoping someone would get the hint and throw.
Sarbi and Rafi were competitive and frequently fought in their pursuit, occasionally drawing blood while wrangling for the ball but Rafi usually tired of the effort after about 45 minutes. He signalled game over by collecting all the balls in front of him and guarding them proprietorially, deliberately denying Sarbi access.
When the dogs were left at home alone, Sarbi gathered rocks and stocked them in neat little piles on the steps leading to the house, where they couldn’t be missed if anyone wanted to cross the threshold. ‘When I arrived home from school she would have her head poking out from between the steps, staring ferociously at the day’s rock collection and dribbling all over it until I let her out and threw them for her,’ says Gemma.
