Born to Bark (4 page)

He was mostly white but had a chestnut-brown saddle-shaped patch that reached over his back and down his sides almost to his belly. The brown started again near the base of
his carrot-shaped tail and moved upward about three quarters of its length, leaving a prominent white tip. The color and the patterning (except for his face) were almost identical to that of my beagle, Skipper. Most important was that he had a white tail tip, which Skippy had also had and I had always thought was a unique aspect of Skippy’s coloring. When I looked at this new dog with the same special color markings as my beloved beagle, I knew that God had sent him to me and that this dog was supposed to keep me company in the same way that Skipper had. That white tail tip m
arking gave him his name, which would be “Tippy.”

Many years later I would learn that this color pattern is not at all unique among dogs. Dogs use their tails to signal their emotional state, including threats, assertions of dominance, and expressions of submission. A white tip helps to make the position and movement of the tail more visible to other dogs. But at my age, then just shy of nine years, I simply viewed that white tail tip as a divine message that this dog was destined to take the place of my beagle.

Having read the puppy-training books I had taken from the library, I knew how to begin civilizing my dog. First, I had to housebreak him. At that time, the use of kennel crates for housebreaking (to my mind the most efficient method) was not widely known. So housebreaking became an extended process, and the occasional “accident” continued to occur at intervals until Tippy was about a year of age.

Coincidentally, my brother Dennis was just over 3 years old and going through the late stages of his own toilet training at the time. My mother tried to make the process for Dennis as nonconfrontational as possible, but other people were involved in my brother’s toilet training as well. Since my mother had gone
back to work, my brother was often left with my grandmother, Lena, who felt that Dennis was being coddled and pampered. She would frequently point out that, when she grew up in Eastern Europe, a child of my brother’s age would be punished if he did not make it to the toilet in time. She was not one to use physical punishment, but when he had an occasional “accident,” she would wave a finger sternly in Dennis’s face and say, “You’re a bad boy!”

Because Dennis was bright, he quickly learned what the words meant and immediately put them to use whenever he found a wet spot, or worse, left by Tippy. He would track down my dog and wave his finger in his face and say, “Bad dog!” with as much seriousness as his squeaky little voice could manage. This occurred pretty often, and I suspect that Tippy came to believe that “Bad Dog” was another one of his names, like “Little Foxy,” which my father sometimes called him, and “Needle Nose,” which my mother sometimes used. As little Dennis stood there waving a finger at him, Tippy
would lick his hand and wag his tail—apparently quite happy with the extra attention that he was getting, regardless of the motivation behind it.

One day when Tippy was about 9 or 10 months old, he had an episode of “terrier frenzy” that had some important consequences for me. Tippy would go crazy trying to catch a spot of light moving jerkily across the floor, so his frenzy was really my fault, because I had borrowed my mother’s hand mirror to reflect sunlight. Our living room served as a playroom for my brother and me and, of course, Tippy. It had a frayed sofa next to a round pedestal-style table with a red glass-based lamp, and one worn but comfortable chair. A sort of chest of drawers stood in the far corner and served as
another table, on top of which was an old-fashioned 78 rpm record player and a table radio.
The only other thing in the room was a big, round, virtually indestructible rug made of a fat braid of rags that my mother had coiled in a big spiral and stitched together.

As Tippy chased the spot of light, he became more and more energized, charging this way and that, and then circling the room at high speed to return to chasing the quickly moving spot of light. Tippy ultimately became so excited that he forgot the game and was taken over by a manic or berserk state of mind, circling the room again and shooting out the door, down the short hall, and into the kitchen, where he started racing around the kitchen table. When he had done this before, he dashed up and down the hall a few times, until his frenzy had subsided, then he would return to me. Th
is particular form of play was safe only when no one was working in the kitchen, but this was a Sunday and my mother was home baking. She was somewhere between the oven and table when my four-footed tornado hit.

When I heard my mother’s yelp I was already halfway down the hall, yelling, “Tippy, come!” over and over. The little dog dashed back to me, circled me two or three times, and then headed back to do some more circuits of the kitchen. My commands to sit or lie down had no effect.

Suddenly I heard a thud and the clatter of something hitting the floor. Then there was a sudden cessation of the sound of scrabbling feet coming from my dog. When I got to the kitchen I saw that Tippy had entangled himself in my mother’s legs as he raced around the room. She had lost her balance, and although she did not actually fall, she had fumbled the muffin tin that she had just taken out of the oven so that it had hit the table at an odd angle and spilled several muffins onto the floor. For Tippy, as for most dogs, food focuses the mind. At the sight of edible things fa
lling to the ground from above, his mania stopped and he tried to gulp down pieces of the still-hot pastries. My mother grabbed a couple of muffins that were still intact and looked at me as I stood in the doorway fearing for my dog’s future.

Tippy would frantically chase any spot of light moving erratically on the floor
.

“Come sit,” she said directed me, pointing at a chair. As Tippy continued his search for crumbs and bits on the floor, my mother went to the pantry to gather the ingredients to make a replacement batch of muffins. She did not look at Tippy at all and did not look at me again until she was ready to mix the batter. Then she stopped and waved a wooden spoon at me.

“Tippy is your dog, so you have responsibility for not only what happens to him, but also for what he does.”

I glanced down to see my dog still patrolling the kitchen floor for any food fragments he might have missed. I was dreading what my penalty for his misbehavior was going to be.

My mother continued, “You called him and he didn’t come. You told him to sit and he didn’t sit. You told him to lie down and he didn’t even slow up. Your dog is disobedient and he is not under control. It is your fault!” she said pointing the spoon at me for emphasis.

She said nothing for several minutes while she stirred the batter and poured it into the muffin tin. As she placed the tin in the oven and closed the door, she said to me, “It’s your fault because you didn’t train him. I will give you exactly eight weeks from today. After that I will give you a test. I want that dog to know how to come, sit, lie down, stay in place, and walk on a loose leash at the end of that time. If he fails that test …”

My mother just left that sentence uncompleted, leaving me to imagine terrible fates for both Tippy and me.

I did not know how to train a dog. I had taught my beagle Skipper a few things by waving food at him and he had listened and responded, at least most of the time, but even his best performance would not be enough to pass a test. Tippy was going to have to learn an awful lot and I didn’t really know where to start. Even worse—it was Sunday and the library was closed, so I had nowhere to go to get the help that I needed.

The next day when school finished, I went directly to the library and pawed through the drawers full of cards that cataloged the books until I hit the subject topic “Dogs.” The library had only one book in its collection that was indexed under “Dogs—training of.” I scribbled down the number and nearly ran to the appropriate shelf, worried that someone may have already checked it out. However, there it was,
Training You to Train
Your Dog
by Blanche Saunders. I could not have known that of the few books available on the topic at the time I had accidentally hit upon the best of the lot. Through the 1950s, the dog training methods used throughout most of Europe and North America were still strongly influenced by the German military and their service dog training practices. The techniques used to train dogs reflected the attitudes of the military at the time and were based upon strict discipline supported by force if necessary, so a military dog trainer’s tools included a leash that was braided and made rigid at the
loop end so that it could be turned around and used as a whip if the dog failed to obey. These forceful methods worked and became the standard the rest of the world followed for most of the next century. Only later did people learn that more than one-third of the dogs subjected to such training regimens would break under the pressure and eventually fail.

Probably the most significant person during these early years was Colonel Konrad Most, arguably the father of modern “traditional” dog training. Konrad Most understood the importance of rewards and punishments, but believed that the best motivator for dogs was their desire to avoid punishment. Although a word of praise or occasional petting might be useful, choke collars, leash jerks, and even an occasional whipping were the mainstays of his training methods.

Hollywood would add a certain glamour to such compulsive dog training methods because of the success of dog trainers such as the American colonel Lee Duncan, who became known for his exceptional dog Rin Tin Tin. In 1918, Duncan found a bombed-out German war-dog kennel in Lorraine, France, that contained a German shepherd and her litter of pups. Duncan took one pup and named him Rin Tin Tin after the one-inch-tall wool puppets that French civilians gave to the liberating American soldiers for good luck. One of the captured German kennel masters taught him the techniques employed by
Konrad Most, and Duncan used these to train his dog. Rin Tin Tin would go
on to star in 26 Hollywood films and was credited for saving the fledgling Warner Brothers Studio from financial ruin during the silent film era.