Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (13 page)

our conversations with dogs we can choose to be
friendly, neutral or threatening, Rugaas asks the
very good question, "Why would we want to threaten our
dogs?" In every communication, we have the power to choose
how we communicate with our dogs. If we love
them, if we respect them, if we are trying
to create an event of quality, then we also have an
obligation to listen to what they have to say.
What is inescapable in every communication is this: The
common ingredient in all our relationships, whether with
man or beast, is us. As they say, "wherever you go,
there you are." To an astonishing degree, our
beliefs, expectations and assumptions color all
of our communications. A well-known experiment years
ago involved teachers and how their expectations might
impact their teaching. One group of teachers was told
that they had been assigned the brightest, most gifted
students. Another group was told that their classes
would consist of slow learners and poor students. In
reality, all teachers were assigned their students on
a purely random basis. The results were
unsettling. The teachers with the "gifted" students had
the test scores and progress to reflect just how
smart those kids were; the teachers with the "slow
learners" had test results that showed that indeed, these
were slow learners. The researchers found an
important difference in how the teachers taught as a
result of their expectations. Teachers of "gifted"
children had viewed any lack of understanding by the student as
a teaching problem; since the child was known to be gifted,
the only possible explanation for a failure to learn
lay in the teaching style. These teachers worked in every way
possible to ensure that they were able to successfully
communicate with what they knew to be gifted children. The
teachers of the "slow learners," on the other hand,
viewed a child's lack of comprehension as the
unfortunate but inevitable outcome of the child's limited
ability: If the students did not understand something as it
was taught, the teachers did not change their communication
style.
A similar phenomenon is at work among dog
lovers around the world. People frequently assume that
certain breeds or types of dog are stupid,
smart, stubborn, lazy, aggressive, friendly. And
their beliefs shape their actions, sometimes most
unfortunately for the dogs involved. Very often, what
we label as stupid or stubborn has little to do with the
dog's level of intelligence. What we really
mean when we say that a dog is stupid or
stubborn or lazy is that he's not in agreement with
us, that he's not doing what we want him to do. When
we try to force a dog to accept our particular
methodology and ignore what he tells us about its
unsuitability for him, we are really saying that our
toolbox does not contain a teaching approach that will
work for him and that we don't really care. The
failure, we feel, rests on the stubborn,
stupid, dominant, fearful (pick an
adjective) dog, not in our approach to him. A
good deal of dog training is rather Procrustean.
Procrustes was a mythological fellow who had a
special bed that he guaranteed would fit all who
tried it. And amazingly, it did-because he would stretch
anyone too short for the bed and cut off any parts that
were too long and hung over the bed. Perfect fit,
every time! And we do this to dogs, stretching them
unnaturally to suit our training demands and lopping
off the parts we don't like or the parts that don't
neatly fit within our paradigm.
everything's (ust peachy
In some of my seminars, I have the participants
play a little game I call Fruits and
Veggies. An adaptation of trainer Karen
Pryor's training game, Fruits and
Veggies offers a reminder of how much we take for
granted in our communications, an empathetic
experience of how the dog may feel and a sometimes
surprising look at how our expectations can ere
ate problems. The rules are quite simple.
Participants are split up into pairs, and each
person is handed a slip of paper meant for their
eyes only. On those slips of paper are three
simple behaviors well within the ability of the
average person, such as "hop," "blink," "take
off one shoe." (the slips are color-coded so that
each person in a pair has something different from
what's on their partner's slip.] The goal is for
each person ("the trainer") to teach their partner ("the
dog") to perform those three behaviors. There is one
catch: They may only address their partners using the
names of fruits and veggies. All normal
English is abandoned. The commands, praise and even
negatives must all be the names of fruits and
veggies. The trainers may use any technique
they care to (except painful ones), but they must not
take advantage of the human tendency to mimic or
mirror what is shown. A trainer may not stand on
one foot and then look meaningfully at their "dog"-a

human will inevitably guess that an
imitation of the trainer's behavior is expected. were
While dogs are an allomimetic species,
meaning that they will imitate the behavior of others,
dogs tend to reserve this for actions that are natural
and enjoyable to them-digging, for example, as many gardening
enthusiasts have learned to their dismay when Fido
decides to "help" with the planting.) Trainers must
somehow shape and encourage that behavior without offering
an example. The "dogs" are free to act
precisely like an off-leash dog-if bored, they
may wander away; if threatened, they are free
to yelp or growl (no biting allowed).
Quickly, participants discover one basic truth about
communication: It is most successful when the words you
use are ones that both understand. Faced with "Grape!"
or "Carrot" or "Rutabaga" (one that
inexplicably shows up frequently), the "dogs"
are often very, very confused. Diligently, they search the
trainer's face and gestures for clues as to whether
"Apple" is a command or is meant to dissuade or
is offered as praise. The word itself has no meaning;
it is the full context of body language that
gives the word meaning, just as our real four-legged
dogs come to understand "Good dog" as praise and
"Stay" to mean don't move.
At the same time, trainers frustrated by the
"dog's" lack of appropriate response
resort to the technique used by tourists the world over-
in the face of a listener's confusion, they often just
repeat the word at increasing volume. Volume,
while impressive, never equals clarity.

Trainers find themselves having trouble remembering just
what they are trying to communicate, mixing up their
words so that they're praising when they meant to give a
command or vice versa. As many have complained, "This is
much easier when I know what I mean!" From the
trainers' point of view, the behavior is one they
can easily envision, but they discover that communicating that
via a nonsensical language is not easy. Of
course, when we know what we mean in using a word,
we often slip into the assumption that the listener-our
dog-also does. "Heel" and "Down" are just as
nonsensical to a dog as "Peach!"
Successful communication requires that we understand the
listener's state of mind, their level of understanding and,
past that, the information in their minds. The information left
out of our communications is what Tor N0rretranders in his book
The User Illusion calls exformation, and it is as critical a part of
communication as what we actually do say. As
Norretranders notes, "Information is not very
interesting. The interesting thing about a message is what
happens before it is formulated and after it has been
received."
When I ask my dog Grizzly, "Where is your
bumper?" there is a tremendous amount of unspoken
information that I know he already possesses. "Bumper"
is simply the key that evokes the response I
want, but it works only because he has learned a great
deal about a bright orange plastic tube with little
knobs and a ratty rope. In his mind's eye (and
undoubtedly his mind's nose) there springs up not
only his internal representation of the thing itself but quite
possibly the memory and anticipation of all the
pleasurable experiences that go with it. To a dog who
does not have all that information, asking "Where is your
bumper?" is as meaningless a message as "Where is
Timbuktu?" There is no difference in
Grizzly's response to the word
bumper than
in my friend Wendy's response if I say,
"Let's go get some ice cream!" I do
not need to spell out for her that this will require that we
put on our shoes, locate some money, walk out
to the truck, drive five miles or so to our
favorite ice cream stand, stand in line, decide
on our flavor or style of cone, pay the cashier
and then begin eating. I also do not need to tell her that
ice cream is the sweet, very cold, creamy
shapeless stuff that comes in many colors and flavors.
The mere words ice cream
evoke all that in her mind, and her mouth begins
to water, and she's out the door before I am. If she
were an alien who just arrived on a spaceship, we'd
have to have quite a lengthy conversation in order to convey the
exformation, all left out of but still contained in the
phrase "Let's go get some ice cream!"
This is one of the big problems we have when working with
dogs or other animals. When we utter a word as
command or direction, we bring to that word a great deal of
exformation. Because we are usually quite clear in our minds
about what we intend to communicate, we forget that
what is in the listener's mind
will affect to a great deal what the ultimate

response to our communication may be. On
a frequent basis, we experience a bit of the
dog's puzzlement when another person says to us,
"Hand me that thingamajig." The purely
nonsensical word offers us no meaningful information, because
no clear image or sensation is evoked. For our
dogs, English or any other human language
is a nonsensical one, and only experience helps
them understand what we mean when we utter any word.
Training is a way of developing our ability
to communicate with our dogs (though like many of our
conversations with other humans, sometimes it's much more
to the dog than with him right-brace . When we train, we
are inventing our own mutual language so that when we say
"ball" or "stay" or "come," we can excite within
the dog's mind the images, sensations or even
scents that we intend to. For his part, the dog learns
ways to excite within us what he intends-thus, a
meaningful bump of his nose against a doorknob
creates in our minds an indication that he needs to go
out, and if he is a puppy, we may have vivid
images of what our carpeting will look like if we
ignore this message.
It's safe to say that one of the most common failures
of communication is that we take much for granted and
forget how much exformation there is in even a simple
request. In our mind, there may be a very complete
home movie about what we mean when we say
"Sit" or "Stay" or "No." But if we
haven't made sure that the dog has also seen and
understands that home movie, we're going to have problems.
We'll be frustrated, and the dog will be too. We
are, quite often, asking our dogs for that thingamajig, and
they make the best guesses they can based on what
we have taught them.
A common response to Fruits and Veggies is a
deeply empathetic understanding of how dogs feel on
the receiving end of what we are trying to communicate.
Many participants report being
seriously confused, and they appreciate that
"Potato" is as meaningless as "Sit" may be to a
dog. As one woman noted, "No wonder my
dogs look confused." Others figure out what each
word means, but when asked just a few minutes later
to perform Mango, Peach and Kiwi, often confuse which

word goes with what action-even though they
clearly understand the three behaviors they were taught.
You can see them sorting through the behaviors, trying
to remember which word goes with what action; they are often
wrong. Real dogs of course have the same problem,
though if they mix up commands, for example offering a
down when they are asked to sit, they may be viewed as
disobedient instead of simply confused or unsure.
We often expect our dogs to learn and perform with far
greater alacrity and precision than we are capable of
ourselves.
One man who had been working with a woman who used a
lot of physical guidance and actually moved his
body in specific ways discovered that he was
increasingly angry about being handled while being told
"Raspberry." He did not understand what she
wanted, and he disliked her attempts to force him
into the position, however gently. Suddenly, he
understood why some of the dogs he had worked with had
twisted out of his hands or even growled-he had thought
they were just being stubborn or had bad temperaments.
Even years after the seminar, he still remembers his
confusion and resentment. Before ever laying hands on a
dog or trying to teach them something new, he thinks,
"Raspberry" and is careful and considerate in his
communications.
But one of the most important messages people carry
away from this exercise is an understanding that they began the
game with assumptions about the willingness and
intelligence of their "dogs." Every participant starts
the exercise with the belief (conscious or not] that their
dog is willing, cooperative and intelligent.
No one looks at their partner and thinks, "Oh, a
sneaker-wearing pants-and-shirt type. I know they can
be stubborn." No one assumes that a lack of
response is due to stupidity, dominance,
submission or a desire to deliberately defy.
Real dogs, however, are not universally extended the
assumption that they are willing, intelligent and
cooperative. More than one student has walked
into training class on the first night and told me,
"This dog is stupid." They know this, of course, not
because they've tried diligently to educate the
dog but because the dog has failed to automatically
become Lassie. The most important goal any
instructor has is to open her eyes to just how willing
and cooperative and intelligent dogs are when we
are able to communicate effectively with them.
Our assumptions and expectations about dogs can lead