For the Love of a Dog (38 page)

Every night, as I get ready to do the farm chores, I ask Lassie if she’d like to “go to the barn.” The most expressive of dogs, Lassie has a face that lights up and softens; her mouth opens and her eyes shine like Christmas tree lights. She stretches, play-bows, and runs to get her favorite toy, which she flings toward me as I lace up my boots. It doesn’t seem possible that she could be happier
.

When we get to the barn, it’s Lassie’s job to hold the sheep away from the feeders while I pour in their grain. As soon as we enter the building Lassie’s face changes. Her joyful look of anticipation is gone, replaced by a tight and focused expression appropriate for the work at hand. Holding hungry sheep off the feeders isn’t easy work; sheep love their grain and don’t hesitate to fight for it if they think doing so will be to their advantage. Often, when Lassie is holding off the sheep, she looks tense, sometimes even downright nervous. At that moment, I don’t think you could describe her as happy. Fully engaged and highly motivated, yes, but not necessarily brimming with the joyful emotions we usually think of as “happiness.”

If you could sit in my living room and ask Lassie if she liked working sheep, I think she’d say she loves it like life itself. I say that because she never turns down an opportunity to work sheep, and because on the way to the flock she is the embodiment of happiness. Another way to describe her at that moment is in a state of “eager anticipation,” and anticipation turns out to be something that plays a key role in the happiness of both dogs and people
.

One of the most interesting things to come out of the research on happiness is that the search for happiness is at least as compelling as getting what you thought you wanted. Jaak Panksepp, one of the world’s experts on animals and emotions, describes what is now called the “seeking” circuit in the brain. Remember the rats who would press a lever until they dropped from fatigue in order to stimulate a pleasure center in the brain? Researchers have found that this area has more to do with the anticipation of something than with actually getting it. If you think about it, these findings fit intuitively with our own life experience. Aren’t you often at least as happy when you’re excitedly anticipating a
trip as you are when actually traveling? I went to see the comedian Jerry Seinfeld not too long ago, and he was just as funny as I hoped he would be; I must have laughed nonstop for an hour and a half. But, when I think about it, I was actually happiest as I walked into the theater, when I was brimming with what Panksepp calls “intense interest, engaged curiosity, and eager anticipation.”

Think of your dog’s excitement when you’re mixing her dinner or getting her leash for her walk. Does she seem as excited as when she’s actually eating her dinner, or on the walk? This tendency to feel excited and energized when anticipating something was first discovered by a researcher named Wolfram Schultz, who trained monkeys to press a lever for a food reward. The experiment included a light that came on right before the food was released. Schultz found that the monkeys’ brains had the highest levels of dopamine
right after the light came on
, but
before the food was released
. That means that the monkeys were more excited when they were anticipating the food than they were when they actually got it. That doesn’t mean that the release of dopamine made the monkeys feel good. Rather, dopamine got their attention and caused them to anticipate something good. That feeling of anticipation is exciting and energizing, which is why dopamine is a key player in all kinds of addictions.

Not only are we excited when we’re anticipating something, it turns out we’re most stimulated if we’re not sure we’re going to get it. If you first establish an association between two events—say, a light coming on, and food dropping into the cage—you get higher dopamine levels if in later trials there’s only a 50 percent chance of the second event occurring: that is, food drops into the cage only half the times the light goes on. This is why Las Vegas is the most popular vacation destination in the country. Gambling is all about anticipation and all about uncertainty—no wonder people become addicted to it. The importance of uncertainty also explains why some dogs turn up their noses at the same old treats they’ve been getting all year. Trainers know to mix it up, so that their dog never knows what wonderful thing is coming next.

Besides varying the type of reinforcement, keep in mind that how often you reinforce is important, too. Casinos in Las Vegas are careful to ensure that people get reinforced (i.e. win) often enough to keep coming
back. You need to replicate that level of reinforcement, so that your dog doesn’t give up on you. If you teach a dog to expect something that he really wants, and then withhold it too much of the time, you’re going to create the kind of frustration we talked about in the anger chapter. There’s a balance here that can take some time to sort out, and is undoubtedly dependent on the individual and the situation. I think knowing when to reinforce and when to hold back is one of the distinctions between great animal trainers and mediocre ones, but novices can do well by following this formula: don’t decrease your dog’s frequency of reinforcement until you’re willing to bet ten dollars that your dog will do what you ask. Most novices move to intermittent reinforcement before the dog is ready, not understanding that every change of context or increase in distraction makes the exercise more difficult for the dog, and initially requires going back to 100 percent reinforcement.

You can take advantage of the phenomenon of anticipation in a good way, by teaching your dog what trainers call a bridge. A bridge is the equivalent of the light in the monkey experiment, a signal to your dog that something wonderful is about to come. A simple way to do it is to use a hand-held clicker, and start by giving your dog a tiny treat each time you click. In just a few sessions, your dog will go into that happy state of “eager anticipation” every time she hears the sound of the click. This not only takes advantage of your dog’s “eager anticipation” circuit, it also means that you can time the click to the exact instant your dog does what you want.

You can use this method to train a dog to do everything from simple sits to amazingly complex tricks. You don’t actually need a handheld clicker to create a bridge; you can do the same thing with a visual signal, a tongue click, or a word you’ve chosen and use only for this purpose. The clicker has the advantage of being a unique and easily identified sound, but it does require that, during training, you have to remember to put it in your pocket—easier said than done, for some of us.
⁶
I use clicker training for teaching tricks and to sharpen my timing. My dogs seem to love it; if they could talk, I suspect they’d tell me to stop writing this stupid book and get the clicker out. There’s a whole world of clicker trainers out there, and I encourage you to check it out if you’re interested. (I’ve included lots of resources in the References, including information about the queen of click-and-treat, Karen Pryor, and her clicker seminars around the country.)

It’s amazing how fast you can train a dog when you use a method that, like this one, makes clear exactly what it is you want your dog to do. The same method, using positive reinforcement after a precisely timed bridge, has been shown to radically improve the skills of children in gymnastics training. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t, given that the basic principles of learning are universal.

Given how much happiness our dogs give us, it’s not surprising that most of us want to reciprocate, by making them happy, too. Neither is it surprising that we often use food to try to do that—what could be more universal in the animal world than the joy of getting really good food when you’re hungry? However, food isn’t all that dogs need, and sometimes—just ask your vet—it’s the last thing they need. Being overweight isn’t any better for dogs than it is for people, but many of us find it surprisingly hard to restrict how much we feed our dogs.
⁷

In some ways it seems absurd that people have such a hard time regulating how much food they give their pets—after all,
we’re
not the ones going without tasty snacks during the day. I suspect it’s because we want our dogs to be happy and to feel loved. Food is one way to make that happen. It compensates for the times when we don’t know what our dog wants, or know perfectly well, but are unable (or unwilling?) to provide it. However, treats on demand aren’t enough to make a dog happy, any more than a plate of doughnuts is enough to meet our own needs. If we want to make our dogs happy, we need to expand our repertoires. The following paragraphs present some thoughts and ideas
about what dogs need to be happy. The list isn’t all-inclusive—that would require a book of its own, but it includes some of the things I think are often not obvious, even to people who love their dogs.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the basics. Everyone reading this book knows that dogs need fresh water and good food. I hope they also know that, almost as much as food and water, dogs need social companionship. It breaks my heart to see dogs stashed, isolated and alone, in kennels at the far end of the yard. Our dogs need us, or at least the companionship of other dogs, to be truly happy. That wild, crazy dance your dog does when you get home isn’t just about getting dinner, it’s about having the pack back together again and all being right with the world.

Dogs also need exercise, but I think we too often think about physical exercise and ignore the importance of mental exercise. We’re not the only animals whose brains need to be stimulated. Decades ago, when dogs lived outside and mostly off leash, they pretty much entertained themselves. We didn’t need to go out of our way to provide them stimulation; there was plenty of activity in the woods or the farmyard to keep them busy. Of course, we can’t and shouldn’t go back to letting our dogs run free, but we need to acknowledge that dogs who spend all day alone sleeping on the couch can get pretty bored if that’s the sum total of their activity. If you’re like me, you might be bushed when you get home from work, but if you choose to have a dog, he needs you to do more than open the back door and let him out into a fenced yard when you come home. The good news is that a little bit seems to go a long way. Fifteen minutes of trick training and fifteen minutes of playing fetch can do a lot for a dog who’s been hanging out all day waiting for you to come home. If you don’t have thirty minutes at least a couple of times a day, you might, just perhaps, want to rethink having a dog in the first place.

There are many ways to stimulate your dog’s mind—and the same old walk around the neighborhood isn’t it. Remember the effect of “same old, same old” on your dog’s levels of dopamine, and see what you can do to spice things up. There are interactive toys that can entertain your dog while you’re chopping up vegetables for dinner. You can teach your dog to “go find” something you’ve hidden upstairs while you answer your phone calls, and you can teach your dog to down and stay during the commercial breaks in the evening newscast.

Ah, but what about physical exercise? We all know dogs need exercise, but how much? People ask me constantly, “How much exercise does Ginger/Chief/Pumpkin really need?” I suspect that the subtext of this question is “What is the minimum amount of exercise I can give my dog without feeling guilty about it?” That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask, given all the other things we have to do every day.

The answer is simple: it depends on your dog. My fifteen-year-old Pip can’t go on a two-hour walk anymore; she’s happy to go on a twenty-minute walk twice a day. Pippy still loves to play ball, but I throw the ball no more than nine or ten times, and only about twenty feet away. Lassie is twelve, but she still loves long walks and working sheep, so I vary her exercise and ensure that she rests up one day if she worked hard the day before. Tulip is eleven (which is old for a large-breed dog like a Pyrenees), but she still loves long walks in the country and runs like a puppy when the leaves turn color and the air gets as crisp as a cold apple.

You can’t help but notice that all my dogs aren’t so young anymore. Neither am I. It’s a bit of a retirement community out here at the farm. If your dogs are as old as mine, a short exercise period twice a day is ample. However, when Lassie first came to me at a year of age, she played nonstop with her father for hours at a time, and after a brief nap still bounced off the walls with excess energy. Young dogs of working breeds, designed to be on the move all day long, need to exercise in units of hours, not minutes. Thus, think carefully about whether you want a Border Collie or a field-bred Labrador Retriever puppy. If you do, you might be better off adopting an older dog from a shelter or a rescue group. The three factors that most influence how much time you need to spend exercising your dog are age, breed, and individual personality
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Consider each carefully, because many of the behavioral problems we see in dogs today wouldn’t happen if the dogs got more exercise. Ouch. Sorta slipped that one in there, didn’t I? I don’t want to make you feel guilty, but the truth of the matter is that most pet dogs
are
underexercised, and have too little to do with both their bodies and their minds.

Exercise is particularly relevant in a book about emotions, because of the connection between
emotion
and
motion
. Even though it’s right in front of our faces, we tend to forget how closely linked those two things are. We know that, for humans, physical exercise does a lot more than keep our hearts pumping into old age. Exercise elevates mood, strengthens the immune system, and decreases stress, and there’s no biological reason to believe that it doesn’t have similar effects on your dog. So put on your jacket and pick up the leash, or think up a new trick to teach your dog, and while you’re at it, thank your dog for helping you both have a longer, sweeter life.