What the Dog Knows (2 page)

My epiphany was not that working dogs are miraculous—by themselves, they aren't—but instead, how inextricably linked their success is to the quality of their handlers, and the trainers who train the handlers. Working dogs' success is far from a given: It takes imagination, deep knowledge, and constant work to train and handle dogs who work with their noses for a living. These are the dog people whose lives and
careers are so interwoven with working canines that it can be difficult to see where the person ends and the dog begins; they complete each other. Not because the work they do is smooth or easy. The opposite is true. Often they are working in dangerous environments, or in the midst of devastation—whether from crime, war, climate change, earthquakes, or airplane crashes. The rare perfection of that human and canine partnership in our weird, complex, mechanized world is what keeps working dogs from obsolescence. Working dogs are a holdover from simpler times. Sometimes they're seen as a sentimental and unnecessary indulgence. Not all dog-and-handler teams are effective. But when they are good, they are very, very good: They can distinguish scent, cover territory, and accomplish tasks that no machine is capable of. We have new needs for the old work of dogs.

I don't handle and train dogs full-time. I probably will always be a serious hobbyist. Despite the nightmares I have when I make errors, I still return. I'm hooked. As I get better at juggling university demands and training demands, and as I learn to deal with the inevitable sadness, what remains is the intense physical and mental challenge of stripping a search to its essential elements so the dog can do his best work. Walking in the woods with Solo, as scent starts to loft in the morning warmth, I can concentrate so fiercely on our surroundings that time slows and warps. Or I can simply enjoy a night of training as the fireflies come out and Solo waltzes through solving a complex scent problem, a dancing figure in the dark.

He is a dog who both lives and narrates as his brown eyes snap with pleasure and impatience and he comes bounding across a cow pasture to lead me back to what he has discovered two hundred feet away.

Hey, come here, will you? Quick. The dead stuff is over here. Let me show you.

Being an only child is a disease in itself.

—G. Stanley Hall,
Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children
, 1896

The German shepherd pup had to be lifted out of the slit in his anesthetized mother's womb. A heavy lump. A litter of one.

He had a gorgeous head and great strength for a newborn, said Joan, the breeder in Ohio, in her e-mail to me. His strength wasn't a huge surprise, as his mother's nutrition flowed to him with no competition. I gazed at the first post-C-section photos of him: nestled comfortably and solidly in Joan's cupped hands in one shot, latched on to one of his young mother's eight teats in another shot. He had his
choice of milk dispensers. He looked squashy and squint-eyed. His head looked like a mole's, not gorgeous at all, although Joan would know better. This single pup was her twenty-fifth litter of shepherds. He would be Vita's one and only.

The pup had something in addition to looks, strength, and remarkable sangfroid for a newborn. He also had a fine nose, Joan wrote. “Yesterday, even within hours of coming home, he woke up when I entered the room and his nose was working scent!” I barely registered the irrelevant news. I knew abstractly what “working scent” meant, but it didn't interest me. I'd taught my previous two German shepherds to keep their big noses away from visitors' crotches. “No sniff” was a standard command in our house.

The most important news, the lead, was buried a few paragraphs into Joan's e-mail: “You have the choice to have our little prince as we see how he develops.” She assured me that we could discuss any concerns I might have about his being a singleton, and that she—and her pack of adult shepherds—could help the pup overcome the issues he might have.

Concerns? Issues? David and I had just won the puppy lottery with a handsome, healthy male. We had a pup. I had been stalking my e-mail in-box for the last week, waiting for the birth announcement. It had been almost a year since our beloved gentle shepherd, Zev, had died. The next chapter of our life with shepherds had finally arrived. I ran to find David, working on his logic courses in the study. I flitted around the living room. I landed in front of the computer to read the entire e-mail aloud to him. David patiently stood and listened as I made the words real. I waited for my euphoria to dissipate before I e-mailed Joan back, so my tone would be mature and balanced. All that planning and work and cost and emotional investment for one lone pup instead of a squiggling mass of them. Others on the waiting list would be so disappointed with the news. I knew all of that. Then I gave in to being overjoyed.

I had fallen in love with this Ohio breeder's line of shepherds, and
the idea of this pup, ten months before. Joan Andreasen-Webb bred and raised German shepherds from West German lines, nourishing her pups with goat milk, a raw-meat diet, and lots of early exposure to the world. Her adult dogs lay on the sidewalk under café tables; they attended children's reading hour at the library; they herded sheep and starred in a ring sport called Schutzhund that I knew little about, except that it involved biting on command. A couple of her pups even became police K9s. As a reporter decades before, I had done a ride-along with a police K9 and been both impressed and horrified by the dog's intensity and deep-throated bark. I didn't want that in a German shepherd. This pup was destined for two jobs: to lie quietly beneath my desk while I worked, then leap up and reign supreme in the obedience ring, a hobby I'd abandoned when Zev became too sick to compete.

I finally stopped daydreaming and looked up “singleton” on the web. In mathematics, a singleton is a set with exactly one element. In humans, it's the way most of us arrive, as a single newborn. In dogs, “singleton” means exactly the same thing, only with horror stories attached. The web is like that, though. You can look up the common cold, and the symptoms read like it's the plague.

Pups in standard litters give and receive thousands of signals from each other daily, as they tumble over one another, licking and biting, squealing in pain, pissing and licking in apology, and then easing up on the bite. The scrum of a litter gets a pup ready for the rough-and-tumble of the dog park, the next-door neighbor's snappy Chihuahua, and the chance encounters with weird people—and children. A singleton pup, though, lives in a universe of “yes.” They tend to lack “bite inhibition.” They have “touch sensitivity.” They are “unable to get out of trouble calmly and graciously.” (Although I wasn't an only child, I related to that last one.) They have an “inability to handle frustration.” (That one, too.) Joan had told me about the potential upside, and I went on to read those sections with great relief. Singleton dogs can make extraordinary companions, as they bond closely to people. Sometimes.

David and I avoided the what-ifs that night. We had named this pup even before Vita came into heat: Coda, literally “tail” in Italian, the musical movement at the end of a composition—a looking back, a thoughtful reflection, a summation. This pup was going to complement our academic and social lives, not disrupt them. I recently had been granted tenure at a good university and was finally building up a head of steam to chug through academic life like the little engine that could, producing research and fulfilling my destiny as a spunky and hip faculty administrator who wore cool black outfits and could speak truth to power without compromising my principles. Nothing would stop my momentum. Perhaps I wasn't an academic superstar, but I was pretty darned good at what I did. A pup was a simple gift, my reward for that work, and a welcome distraction from what felt like an increasingly long university engagement.

We were realistic, or at least that's what we told ourselves. We expected this pup, from West German breeding lines, to be higher-energy and tougher than Zev, who mostly loved to lie in the grass and smell the flowers. We already had a dog who took some of our time and energy: a beautiful female Irish setter we had adopted from my father several years before to help him adjust to a new life with a lovely woman who wasn't accustomed to large and quasi-uncontrollable dogs. We offered to take Megan to lighten the dog load. I lied to David and told him it would be fun, a real adventure, not just a filial duty, to adopt a year-old Irish setter in heat.

Though Megan was now four and had graduated beyond those moments when we fantasized about placing her on a nice farm in the country, my feelings about Irish setters hadn't changed much since childhood. They had filled our small house in Oregon with their gaiety, their indifference to obedience, and their uncanny ability to bolt. They would disappear into the dark fog of the Willamette Valley, cross-country journeys to nowhere, ending up lost, miles away from our little house on the hill. Always at night. Their other sins were insubstantial:
jumping on guests, snagging empty rolls of toilet paper to play with, occasionally slinking up onto beds and easy chairs when no one was paying attention. My father loved their minor mutinies, loved to stroke their silky setter heads. They distracted him from a grinding schedule: a demanding research career; a wife who, because she was paralyzed, needed nursing; and three occasionally wild children who needed raising. The setters and their escapades were his only vacation.

Unlike my father, I didn't want dogs as a distraction; I wanted dogs who would engage completely with me and vice versa. By my early twenties, I had settled on German shepherds as my favorite breed. Partly because I loved their intelligence and dignity and their physical resemblance to wolves, partly because they were the antithesis of setters. David met me when my second shepherd was still a young dog and fell in love with him. Zev was an easygoing ambassador for the breed.

David and I realized the squashy mole needed a name that suited him better than Coda. His entry into the world felt less like a tail end and more like something improvisational. So David, a lover of jazz, renamed him Solo.

Animal behaviorist and author Patricia McConnell, who has devoted a good portion of her career and research to dogs with behavior problems, has a chapter in one of her training books on anger management in dogs. She wrote about her reaction when her favorite border collie gave birth to just one pup: “I'm supposed to help people, not cause the very problems I'm trained to alleviate, so when the vet confirmed that the litter contained a total of one puppy I was beside myself. You might think that it wouldn't be a crisis but it felt like one to me.” McConnell briefly considered euthanizing the pup before rejecting that idea as she held the small warm bundle of fur. “Over the years I have seen what appeared to be a disproportionately large number of singleton puppies with serious behavior problems.” She was the dog behaviorist who knew too much. Nonetheless, she decided she would
experiment. For the good of her research and perhaps the good of future clients who came to her in desperation over their singleton dogs.

When he was only five weeks old, McConnell wrote, the border collie pup growled at her in fierce aggression, lips curled back from tiny milk teeth. “All I had done was touch him.”

•  •  •

You like me because I'm a scoundrel. There aren't enough scoundrels in your life.

—Han Solo,
The Empire Strikes Back
, 1980

Joan nicknamed the singleton pup “HRH,” for His Royal Highness. Solo was the king of everything. He had the canine equivalent of an Exeter education before he was eight weeks old. Being a litter of one had its perks. Joan took him everywhere with her: to acupuncture appointments, to Lowe's, to friends' houses, on walks in the woods to explore. I followed his exploits via e-mails and photos. He had everything a puppy could desire and beyond. Everything, that is, except other puppies to interact with. His young mother, Vita, an intense West German import, wasn't a mentor. Her idea of mothering Solo was to nurse him frenetically and then race away like Road Runner from Wile E. Coyote, leaving him “in a cloud of dust.” So Solo's great-aunt Cora, with her fawn-colored coat and sweet face, her impish sense of humor and tolerance for unusual puppies (because she had been one herself), took over the task of raising him. It is always thus in extended families, and some are the better for it. Solo interested and amused Cora. She taught him her love of toys and games, and he got away with everything. In one picture, Solo is walking across Cora's reclined body, carrying his favorite stuffed duck, leaving dents in her plush coat.

Solo was no longer a squashy mole; I could now see that his head was going to be glorious. Part of that big block of gorgeous was dedicated to his olfactory system. Even at a fast run toward Joan, he often
screeched to a halt, nostrils flaring at some wayward scent. “His nose rules,” Joan said. That wasn't welcome news. Megan, because of her hunting lineage, froze at the sight of a bird, cat, or squirrel, every synapse alight and devoted to that one task. I had planned for a dog who would focus only on me. I knew it was going to take a year or so to get him up to speed, but I'd always watched with a touch of scorn as obedience handlers with flop-jowled bassets and beagles had to plead with their dogs to raise their snorkeling, scent-mesmerized noses off the ground and pay attention to them.