For the Love of a Dog (29 page)

It would take a whole book to describe the entire period I spent with Blaze, and the next two months that he spent with a wonderful couple, Carol and Jim, who continued the process on their farm in northern Wisconsin. What I’ve written here is sufficient as a starter kit for dogs who are uncomfortable around strangers, but haven’t gotten themselves (or you) into trouble yet. You can use these methods to prevent defensive aggression in shy dogs, and to manage and treat low-level problems in dogs who are nervous around strangers, but
please
don’t take what I’ve written so far and start trying to treat a case of serious aggression without consulting a professional. You wouldn’t try to neuter your own dog from information you got from a book, and treating
aggression deserves to be taken as seriously as surgery. In both cases, a botched job can be fatal. This said, here is a summary of the process for those of you interested and able to pursue it:

• First, manage the situation so that, no matter what happens, everyone is safe. Saying “I
  think
  it will be okay” does you and your dog no favors. Be sure that no one can get hurt or scared before you go any further. For example, when Blaze lived with me, I kept my door locked at all times so that no one could walk into my house unannounced.
  

• Second, write out a detailed list of everything that might be a trigger to your dog’s fears. Get really good at observing your dog and at noticing subtle signs of tension. Do all that you can to avoid eliciting the “wrong” emotion, and all that you can to elicit the one you want.
  

• Third, figure out what your dog adores most and only let him have it right
  after
  the appearance of a trigger. Food works best for most dogs, but ball play can be a great tool in conditioning. I played ball with my noise-sensitive dogs every time the sky darkened before a thunderstorm. It didn’t make them love thunder, but it stopped Pip from clawing my face into hamburger meat when it did.
  

• Fourth, link up the trigger with the treat (in that order), starting with the lowest possible intensity of whatever it is that scares your dog. Gradually increase the intensity—for example, in Blaze’s case, linking treats with first a car driving up, then a person on the couch, then one walking through the doorway.
  

• Don’t go too far too fast (which, sigh, is what most people do and why the paragraph above is so important). I didn’t let Blaze anywhere near anyone, except Jim, for the first six weeks that I had him, and even then it was only with dog-training professionals whom I knew and trusted.
  

• Don’t ever stop conditioning, whether for prevention or treatment. My dogs still get treats when workmen come to the house, even though they are elderly and they’ve always loved workmen.
  Be sure you understand that if you have a serious problem, you will have to manage it to some extent the rest of your dog’s life.
  

• Again, don’t do this by yourself if you have a dog who has injured someone or might do so. You wouldn’t open up the back of your television and just start messing around with the stuff inside unless you knew what you were doing, so don’t do the equivalent with your dog. Televisions can electrocute you; dogs can hurt people, and/or get their owners sued, so do everyone a favor and take this to heart.
  

There are lots of other things you can do for fearful dogs, from nutritional programs to exercise routines to trick training, but they are beyond the scope of this book. If you want to learn more, see the References section for a list of some sources of complete treatment plans.

Blaze, I am gratified to say, is fine now. He’s living on a farm with a woman who understands Border Collies and has lots of other dogs, and he gets plenty of visitors to keep him used to company. I went to see him about a year after he’d stayed with me, and drove unannounced into the farmyard. Blaze was loose in the yard, and he ran toward my car with his tail wagging in a huge, loose circle. Long before I think he recognized me, he was running up to me with his face open and relaxed, his eyes squinted, and his ears dipped in a friendly greeting. Lefty, the dog traumatized by the twelve-year-old boy, is fine, too. His family followed the steps described above, gradually exposing him to friendly men who came bearing treats and tennis balls, and eventually, with great care for safety, reintroducing the neighborhood children. The stories of Blaze and Lefty have the happiest of endings, but it’s important to understand that not all stories turn out so well. No matter how good you are, you can’t fix everything, any more than a great doctor can save everyone from a life-threatening disease. Blaze and Lefty had solid genetics behind them, and the resources and commitment of a large number of people for a treatment plan. That’s just not true for all dogs, no matter how much you love them.

If you have a dog who is fearful, it’s important to do what you can
to alleviate those fears. No dog should have to live in fear all her life, and as the stories of Blaze and Lefty remind us, fearful dogs can sometimes be dangerous dogs. However, it’s equally important to respect the essence of who your dog is. I work with and talk to professional dog trainers all over the country, and my impression is that many of us put too much pressure on ourselves to turn shy, inhibited dogs into bold, fearless ones. I don’t know how many trainers I’ve talked to who broke down in tears of relief when they finally realized they didn’t have to keep trying to “fix” a dog they got who simply wasn’t suited for performing, or even for being comfortable at the dog park. Often the trainers have been told that they are just not skilled enough, or just not trying hard enough, when all along they have a dog who could no more do what they ask of her than most of us could win the Tour de France.

Perhaps the saddest cases are families who have a beloved dog who simply can’t tolerate the addition of a toddler to the house, no matter how much training and conditioning the owners are willing to do. I meet dogs who appear to be flat-out miserable about a new child in the family, not so much because they are jealous but because they can’t tolerate the noise and unpredictability of a little human scrambling around the house. Although many cases can be resolved, sometimes the only thing to do is to find the dog a quieter home, hard as that is on the family who loves him. Greater love hath no human.

And greater love had no humans than Blue’s owners, who dedicated themselves to curing his thunder phobia. I had been worried, terribly worried, about his prognosis. It would have helped greatly if we could have brought him inside, but Blue couldn’t do his job from the living room. Neither could he be medicated and still perform his job
(
“Hey, deer, how’s it going?”), or be safe outside by himself. In addition, thunder phobias are especially tricky, because you can’t ask the storms to represent themselves in a gradually increasing series of intensities throughout the summer. We did the best we could. Barb and Dave built him the finest “safe house” a working dog has ever had. They constructed a huge igloolike doghouse, insulated with over two feet of straw to dampen the transmission of sound. It had a double entrance so that Blue could crawl inside and turn 90 degrees to the right into a cozy, dark den, well protected from the storm. For six weeks
,
Barb practiced a counterconditioning program. She ran to the doghouse at the first sign of an approaching storm, crawled into the house with Blue, and gave him lamb and chicken every time she heard the faintest crack of thunder. Every night that summer I lay in bed thinking of poor Barb, hiking across the fields to Blue whenever a storm came up. A few times I hauled myself out of bed and drove to their farm, ran across the mud in the pouring rain, and sat with Barb in a communal mix of misery and shared excitement, while Blue licked our faces and snarfed down chicken
.

There were a lot of storms that summer—good for curing Blue’s phobia in some ways, hard on Barb and Blue in others. One night yet another storm rolled in, but this time Barb was out of town. Husband Dave thought it was time to see if we’d made any progress, so he got out the binoculars and looked to see what Blue would do when the first thunderbolt sounded. Bless his heart, Blue ran to his safe house and stayed there until the storm passed, the emotion of fear countered by the cozy goodness of cuddling up in his house while the storm raged outside. Blue was fine all the rest of the summer, guarding the growing vegetables from the hungry mouths of deer, staying off the highway in storms, preferring his safe house to the dangers of the open road. I wish I could tell you he’s still there, but one morning the next spring Barb and Dave found him lying dead in the field. He’d been healthy as a horse the day before, and he didn’t have a mark on him. The vet thinks perhaps his heart gave out
.

Although Blue’s death was a great sadness to Barb and Dave, they are buoyed by the knowledge that his last year was full of comfort, rather than fear. Thanks to their dedication, the storms that had been a terror to Blue became a mere inconvenience. I think of him still, snoozing on a patch of rich black soil, soaking up the summer sun during the day, on guard all the night, watching over the farm like the good dog he was, taking care of the special people who took such good care of him
.

Carley sat demurely in my office, soaking up attention and petting as only kids and dogs can. She was a lovely dog a Springer Spaniel cross with limpid brown eyes and fetchingly long ears. She came when called, sat when asked, didn’t jump up on company, and had been housetrained easily and permanently at a relatively young age. You couldn’t get much more obedient—or cute, for that matter—than Carley. There was only one problem: the deep, nasty bite in Martha’s hand. It had happened a few weeks before our appointment, when Martha tried to comb some burrs out of the fur on Carley’s back legs. Carley hated having this area brushed (as many dogs do), and let Martha know it by turning her head, closing her mouth, and staring at the hand that held the hateful brush. As Carley matured, her stares moved from Martha’s hand to her eyes, and Carley began to back up her threats with growls. By the time Carley was two years old, she’d begun snapping. A few weeks before our appointment, Carley had growled, lunged, and sunk her teeth into Martha’s hand
.

It was a bad bite, but Martha’s feelings were more hurt than her hand. It’s shocking when your best friend attacks you, and that’s exactly how Martha felt—shocked. Carley may have been a dog but except for their disagreement over grooming her hindquarters, she and Martha were bosom buddies. They went everywhere together and seemed to love each other equally. Carley moped when Martha left town; Martha passed up travel opportunities because she preferred being home with Carley
.