The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (9 page)

Treats you can eat, some trainers say, is an awful way to teach, because (1) dogs should be conditioned to have meals in bowls and nothing in between, and (2) even if the treats are healthy, homemade, and non-fattening, food treats only condition the dog to attach behavior to food.

That is all just mean. It's not as if a dog would feel rewarded if you gave it, say, a star, like the sticky stars I used to get all the time, which I really like remembering. There are probably teachers of little kids who say it's a terrible practice, since it only conditions the kid to go for stars. If someone came into my classroom when I was little and told my teacher to stop giving stars, I would have decided to quit school. Failing that, I would have stopped being interested in learning. What would be the point of learning if there were no stars?

Dealing with menacing behavior.
One thing you have to figure out early is, what are the warning signs in a dog's face, tail, posture? Dogs are animals. Remember this. Just because they're not wolves doesn't mean they're not animals.

Establishing trust.
If you don't know how much it matters, get another career. Get a career that doesn't have animals.

Fear.
The major factor in alpha-ness and certain types of training.

Hope.
Can I have it? Can I actually figure out what it actually is?

Humping.
Dogs hump dogs in order to (1) literally be “top dog,” or (2) have fun. Be able to tell the difference. (This is humping in the non-reproductive sense.) Do not be surprised to see a neutered male hump a male. Common thing! Probably they miss their balls, even if they lost them when they were babies.

Jumping.
Don't allow! Say NO JUMP. Or you can say DOWN.

Leash training.
Some trainers continue using the old method of leash learning in which a dog is yanked suddenly and hard, in a way that cuts off its air. The dog is conditioned to know that if correct leash walking doesn't happen, strangulation will take place. Trainers who use this method say it's quick and effective. Some say it's part of following what God said to do in Genesis about who gets to be the ruler of animals.

Maybe trainers who quote Genesis to explain their techniques would say that the part in the Bible about “do to others what you'd like to have done to yourself” does not include dogs. But what about the act of yanking when the one being yanked is you? Do you want to have your shoulder dislocated? Do you want to have injuries to your hand? Do you want to hit the ground headfirst, and there goes your brain?

Dogs on leashes are going to try to chase things. Plus, sooner or later, a dog on a leash will be attracted to something dead, like a rotting fish on a beach, or roadkill. The dog will think there's something wrong with you because you don't agree that a stinking, guts-exposed, maggoty corpse is thrilling. The dog will want to roll around in the dead thing. The dog will want to smell just like it. The dog will want to
exult
in it.

So you have to deal with how disgusting dogs are. You have to hang on to the leash. You have to say, “Walk with me nicely, dog.” You have to be a good manager, which is different from being, say, a fascist.

Loneliness.
There is no worse loneliness than the loneliness of a dog who never was anything but lonely, because the loneliness is normal, like a heartbeat. Do you think it's easy to go to the place inside a dog where the loneliness is, when you can't even do it with yourself?

Obedience, types of.
I'm thinking trainers are right when they say it's possible to teach a dog to make good decisions because making good decisions is cool, and there are always rewards of treats. (To be continued.)

Pack.
A pack without the fear thing is dogs being okay while being together.

Patience.
Have it. If you don't have it already, get it. If you get it, keep it.

Sit, come, stay, lie down,
drop it.
The basic commands. The starter stuff, best learned young. Five like the fingers of a hand. You can pretty much take it for granted that abused rescued dogs don't have a certificate from Puppy Class saying they've got the basics, from back when their minds were open and new.

I learned “five like the fingers of a hand” from my boyfriend in college. I'll call him Made Me Happy. He was a transfer, and almost completely alien to me because he was in science. His major was chemistry. He'd come in with a grade average of close to perfect. I thought it was funny that he believed the alien was
me.
He called my major “sitting around reading stuff dead people made up a long time ago.”

We met on his first day. One afternoon, a few weeks later, I went to his room as we'd planned and found him worried and upset, when his usual way was a calmness I envied, and counted on. He showed me a paper he did for a class in I don't remember what—some requirement that wasn't science or math. It was so marked up with corrections and negative comments, I almost couldn't see what he'd written. I looked it over. I was ready to take his side. I was thinking his professor was maybe an alpha, or a hostile-to-transfers snob.

But Made Me Happy had problems. Many of his sentences were like listening to someone speak whose mouth is full of food. He thought papers had to always be done in five paragraphs, the way a hand has five fingers, with the pinkie as the introduction, the thumb as the conclusion, and the middle three as the place where you work out the stuff you promised to do in the pinkie. He told me “like a hand” was how he'd been conditioned to put down his thoughts, not that he said
conditioned
. He said
taught
.

And he didn't know he didn't know the basics. He didn't have a learning disability; he just really didn't know. His commas, for example, turned up in weird places, like shoes on the wrong feet. He'd never received a grade of less than B+ on anything, and now he was looking at an F.

I wish I could say I became his tutor, not the person who corrected his assignments before he handed them in.

I also got him to take a creative-writing class in poetry, with an elderly professor who loved, absolutely loved, poems in forms. I didn't take it, because I couldn't, because, as in all the creative courses, you couldn't just show what you'd written to the prof. You had to show everything to everyone. But I was proud of myself for predicting that Made Me Happy would be brilliant in there. He didn't say
form
. He said
formula
. His specialty became the haiku, because, he said, by the time you realized if it was good or bad, it was over. He wrote tons of them.

One was about me. The prof gave him an assignment, special for him, to write one that had, for a change, (1) a human being, (2) an emotion, and (3) something green, from the actual world of nature. He wrote it in about two minutes, like it was waiting in the tips of his fingers. He did the title in seventeen syllables too; that's where he put the emotion. He called it “The Moment I Fell for Evie, and She Thinks It Wasn't on Purpose.” It went like this:

 

Outdoors on green grass,

Evie lay reading, alone.

I tripped on her feet.

 

We didn't last as boyfriend and girlfriend. In one of the last conversations we had, while we still were okay with each other, he asked me to promise him I'd try a poem of my own, and of course it had to be seventeen syllables. He used to nag me all the time to stop just writing things about things other people had written. So I promised I'd try. I said I'd write a haiku if something came up that could only be said in haiku. I'd know it when I met it, he told me.

I liked correcting his papers, even though it meant staying up later at night than I was already doing with my own classes. And that was how I started to give myself little treats now and then of cocaine.

Trouble.
Do you think that being around rescued dogs is sunshine and blue skies? It's not. It's really, really not. Rescued dogs are dogs in
rehab.

Victories.
They happen. But most of them happen very slowly, like evolution.

Wolves.
Who doesn't have ancestors? We used to be Cro-Magnons. Birds used to be
dinosaurs.

Worst things to do.
Never believe the whole point of education is to help a dog think about things and make intelligent decisions. Train their bodies and not their minds, which you don't even think they have. Yell at a dog you are training. Physically punish. Lose your cool if a dog gets menacing. Feel good about getting pleasure from someone's submission to you. Only have one way of doing things. Always think you're more important than the dog. Never be generous with praise and rewards. Never smile. Get into cocaine way too much, then say it's not your own fault, and you did it for a really good reason.

M
RS. AUBERCHON LEFT
her room to start lunch and check on Evie, who was outdoors with Hank. She'd been reading Evie's Sanctuary application. Finally, it had arrived in her email.

Her brain was spinning. There was a shortage of recruits this year, but what was wrong with them? Yes, they were idealistic, and yes, Mrs. Auberchon was thinking, as if debating herself, they were living in a sort of bubble up there, in a very unworldly way, with their heads full of dogs, dogs, dogs, and their eyes always looking for brightness and silver linings, and never mind the fact that reality keeps bringing messy, dark, sometimes awful complications.

They never learned! Just because the Sanctuary staffers were nuns was no reason why they couldn't do a simple thing like refuse an application that so obviously needed to be refused. They weren't even nuns
really.
They never mentioned a single religious-type thing. The lodge was not a convent. They wore clothes they bought from catalogs or the Internet, all casual; often they were dressed in sweatpants, sweatshirts, jerseys made purely for comfort and durability. “Ex-nuns” might be a more accurate description, but they were so private, they made you feel their own pasts were nothing to know about, or even ask about, just like dogs who came to the mountain with zero paperwork or information. How long had they been up there? A long time. Certainly longer than Evie had been alive. All right, they were aging, and it was possible one or two of them might be losing some eyesight, but that was no excuse.

Evie's application was
alarming.
There was not a single detail, not even in the section for the bio. All she'd put was this: “I went to school for what felt like forever, then I felt I was through with it, but here I am, ready for more school.”

Had she ever worked with dogs?

Yes, she had answered.

Would she describe her personal history with dogs?

She'd left that blank. She'd left all the other questions blank too, except the last one. She wanted to talk to aliens?

The last question was, “What would you choose for a career if you lived in a world that had no animals?” Mrs. Auberchon thought of it as a throwaway, although it was asked on purpose so the nuns could get a feel for an applicant's talents and interests. Before Evie, everyone answered that question by saying they'd be teachers of children, or they'd undertake some sort of work to bring animals back into the world somehow. Or they'd be something in a helping profession, such as social worker, nurse, counselor, or occupational therapist.

“If the world had no animals and I couldn't be a dog trainer, I'd become someone who talks to aliens professionally.”

This wasn't something to look on the bright side about. Mrs. Auberchon could not get Evie's words out of her head. Instead of just answering the question, she'd gone on and on about it.

It was hard to get through all those sentences, but one thing was clear. All along, the one thing Mrs. Auberchon hadn't considered was that
Evie was
mentally ill.
Naturally she'd be vague about her past in the application! She must have been in some kind of treatment place. What about her family? Did her family encourage her to apply to the Sanctuary because she embarrassed them, because they wanted her out of their hair? What about her mother? Mrs. Auberchon was not a mother, but she felt that if Evie were her daughter, she would never . . .

She forced herself to stifle that thought as she entered the kitchen. She looked out at the radiant, white-sun clarity that only came on certain winter mornings, like a holiday. But it didn't feel like a holiday now. Mentally ill! In the past, when new trainees had to leave for mental health reasons, they'd been more or less all right to begin with, and Sanctuary dogs were involved in their breakdowns. There'd been people who came from sheltered lives and couldn't take being face-to-face with broken dogs, when all the damage was done on purpose, by a human. There'd been people who wept and couldn't stop, and people who shut down, just shut down, and people so overwhelmed they couldn't sleep. It wasn't as if the Sanctuary was up front about the condition of their animals. Did they say on their website or in their advertising that their rescues were hard-core cases? That it was a place where dogs came when other places despaired of them? They did not. Always it was, oh, all we care about is the future. Oh, all we care about is what our dogs are going to be, not what they were.

But this was different. New trainees who fell apart because of broken dogs did not say they wanted to talk to aliens.

Hank was in the pen, pacing, tail down. His agitation was intense. He was trodding the same path over and over, his tracks two furrows in the snow. Where was Evie? She was supposed to be outside the fence, working on getting him to interrupt the pacing with commands to
look up,
and maybe try for eye contact with a human.

Then Mrs. Auberchon spotted her. Evie was coming from the back of the inn, trudging in snow past her knees, and she was carrying something, large and heavy—she was dragging and carrying it, combined. It was one of the big metal trash barrels, minus its lid. The trash had been taken a few hours ago. The barrel now contained snow.