Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (14 page)

us down the path to pure frustration for both
dog and trainer. But unlike the "dogs" in the
Fruits and Veggies game, our real dogs can't
offer us feedback in English about how they felt or
where we went wrong. But they do tell us-over and over
again-using the eloquent language of Dog. Learning
how to understand them requires time, practice, study
and a desire to know more. Most of all, we must first
believe that the animals have something to say. It's
strange how difficult that first step can be, though we
already know from our human relationships that half of
successful communication lies in our willingness to hear
what someone else has to say. At work in every
episode of Lassie was the understanding that this dog had
something to say, and folks who knew her well
regarded her communications as meaningful. This simple
assumption-that something important can be transmitted
from the dog to us-is an essential key to the understanding
we are seeking.
In Kinship with All Life, . Allen Boone ponders the many
stumbling blocks within himself that prevented him from
connecting with the dog Strongheart.
He realizes that the problems of
communication were founded in his assumptions and ideas about
animals, not in the animal itself: "And one
of the most arrogant of these ideas was the conceit that
while I ... was fully qualified to communicate
certain important thoughts down to animals, the
animals . . . were able to communicate little of real
value up to me."
While we might wish for a real-life Dr.
Doolittle to help us talk to the animals, we
don't need one. We simply need to learn what
Dr. Doolittle knew all along-the animals
have something to say. Dog training places a heavy
emphasis on communicating to the dog, and not necessarily
with the dog. Though we spend a lot of time working to make
our dogs responsive to what we have to say, a
better approach might be to follow the advice of
Saint Francis of Assisi: "Seek first
to understand; then to be understood."

pigs in pokes
Listening means an awareness, an openness to learning
something new about another person . . . listening with the
intent to learn is an approach to a different type
of conversation.
elizabeth deboi.d

A WHILE AGO, I READ AN ON-LINE
DISCUSSION between a concerned dog owner and a
professional dog trainer. After describing the
dog's behavior in detail, the owner asked for
specific advice on how to use a particular
training technique. The trainer answered at some
length, which prompted the dog owner to ask if it was
important to try to figure out why the dog might be
feeling the need to act in such a way. The trainer's
response was essentially that what the dog was feeling
was not really important; only what he was doing
mattered. This in and of itself is reasonable advice. But
then the trainer went on to modify this by noting that it was
not possible to ever really know what another being was thinking
or feeling, and so we shouldn't even guess. She
admitted that perhaps "some" trainers with a real gift for
reading body language might be able to make a
pretty educated guess and be right most of the time, but
most dog owners couldn't (and, it seemed implied,
shouldn't bother to) develop that degree of skill.
After all, the trainer concluded, if we do guess,
"What if we're wrong?"
What if we're wrong? So what if we
are? Will the seventh veil of the temple rend because
we've misunderstood another being? Will the stars fall
from the heavens because we thought a dog (or a person or
any other living being) meant one thing when actually they
meant something else? This trainer's response made
me intensely sad. Within the context of a
trusting, loving relationship, we needn't be afraid
to guess if our guesses spring from loving
curiosity and an honest desire to know. If we are
wrong, then we have a chance to learn. To my way of
thinking, the ongoing process of learning to understand
another being is a key point of any relationship,
delightful, astounding and valuable beyond description,
eclipsed only by the value in learning to understand
ourselves. To me, a relationship is a journey
into uncharted territories quite unlike the familiar
convoluted trails of my own mind. Such a journey
requires that I be willing to try-even stumble
down-new trails. Within a loving relationship, there
is no need for fearful caution, only respectful
consideration. With each new person or animal I
embrace into my life, I begin a journey with no
clear map of where to go and what to say but nonetheless

excited by the possibilities that lay
ahead. Although it is said that every journey begins with a
single step, reaching outward to another being is not so much
a step as a leap of faith. Agnes de Mille
noted that "living is a form of not being sure, not knowing
what next or how. . . . We guess. We may
be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."
To a certain degree, communication is a lifelong
series of guesses. After all, one never really can
know another's precise thoughts or experience their
exact feelings. But we want to try, and we hope
desperately that others will care enough to try to understand us.
On the purest level, communication is our
attempt to leap across the chasm that divides us from
other minds, other ways of thinking and feeling, other
ways of knowing and seeing and understanding the world we share.
From the very moment we can conceive of Other, we begin a
lifelong process of reaching out, past the boundary of
our own skin, searching for the connections that in many ways
help define who we are. We communicate because the
world within us is not enough; without others, we are
incomplete. Only through what we learn in our most
profound relationships can we find the completeness in
ourselves.
To the extent that we're trapped in our bodies and
cannot even begin to communicate more than a tiny
fraction of the internal, lightning-fast torrent of our
thoughts and feelings, it could be said that all of us
constitute "a pig in a poke." Those looking on from
outside the "poke" (sack) can only guess based
on the gyrations and squeals precisely what might
be happening to the "pig" inside. Quiet, for
example, could be ominous. The
pig might be dead, or merely sleeping, or
waiting in silent frustration. Squealing could be pain,
anger, or even a particularly loud dream. How
then could we possibly know what was going on in that
poke? We guess.
How well we guess will depend on a number of
factors. One is simply this-are we truly
curious about the pig in the poke? If we don't
really care one way or another about what might or
might not be happening with that pig in the poke, we will not
devote the energy required to satisfy our
curiosity. Another factor is experience-have we
ever dealt with a pig in a poke before? Obviously, a
first time Poker is going to have a different set of
guesses than someone who deals with pigs in pokes

all the time. Most important, though, is
this: How much empathy do we bring to the situation?
We can see the pig in a poke in a number of
ways. One view is the purely mechanical: the
pig is contained, thus we can do what we like with him,
though we do wish he'd stop squealing. Another option is the
pragmatic approach: We feel badly that the
pig is contained, but we can't waste time dreaming up
better ways to transport a pig from point A
to point . We treat him fairly, expect he'll
get over it, and we do wish he'd stop squealing.
There is also the empathetic approach: We try
to imagine how it might be inside that poke, how we
might make this easier on the pig, wonder about
possibly better ways to transport pigs- and
we do wish he'd stop squealing.
The empathetic approach is, without question, sometimes very
time- consuming. It requires that we work in slow,
careful ways, going past merely treating an
animal fairly as we achieve our goals and
moving into working with that animal as a partner. It also
requires a willingness to see the world from the
animal's point of view, followed by a thoughtful
contemplation of that perspective. Empathy
shapes our view so that the other's perspective is
included as part of our consideration; deeply felt, this
may shift our own perspective and our goals
considerably. The empathetic approach is the only
one that allows dynamic quality of connection; without
empathy, we are merely driving toward our own
goals no matter how that may affect the other.
Intimacy is not possible on such a one-way
street. Although it requires more from us, in the end I
think the results and the relationships possible when we
work from an empathetic point of view far outweigh
any drawbacks.

Trying to step into another's point of view, however,
is sometimes more easily said than done. As a
Cuban proverb sagely observes, "Listening
looks easy, but it's not simple. Every head is a
world." No matter how empathetic we may be, a
lot of bobbles and mistakes can be made as we
fumble around, trying to understand, trying to guess, trying

to walk a few miles in the other's paws.
this little piggy
When we acquired our first Gloucestershire Old
Spots pig, a rare breed considered endangered in
the United States, we decided that this pig needed
to learn some basic life skills so that he could
enjoy to the fullest possible degree the freedoms
and delights life on our farm might be able to offer.
After spending two weeks getting to know the little boar
whom we named Connor (a grand Irish name for an
intensely English breed; we are nothing if not
perverse), we were satisfied that the lack of handling in
his first few months of life had been largely
overcome. The Old Spots legendary gentle
temperament was shining through, and it was time to begin working with
Connor in earnest.
Time is always of the essence when dealing with species whose
lives are, as Irving Townsend put it, "even more
temporary than our own." What it takes a
human being fourteen years to accomplish between birth
and the deranging onset of hormones, a dog
accomplishes in less than one light-speed year.
Miss a few stops along the way on that track and
you've missed a lot; it's quite safe to say that the first
six months of a dog's life can make or break the
dog that puppy will eventually become.
Canine developmental timetables make humans
appear to be moving on a very slow, leisurely
schedule. Pigs are also on the fast track
developmentally, but they bring another dimension altogether
to the challenges created by rapid development-the
dimension of weight. It is not impossible for a young
growing pig to add as much as two pounds a day, and that
translates on an explosive and exponential
scale to sheer power. With each passing day, Connor was
more mature-you may read that as more fixed in his ways;
it can be difficult to keep a pig's mind flexible
and accommodating. He also weighed more. A lot more.
Now was
the time if I was going to train my new pal so that he
could enjoy walks in the fields and woods, and so that
he'd be safe to handle, a desirable goal in an
animal that may weigh close to a thousand pounds at
maturity!
In the end, Connor's leash training began with several
short sessions a day of having a soft cotton
horse lead draped in a figure eight around his
neck and behind his front legs. Once accustomed
to that, I tried to steer him out of his pen and into the barn
aisle, where we could stroll and practice this new

life skill. Curious about the world
outside his pen, Connor took a few steps forward,
snout upward sniffing then furiously skimming along
the concrete of the barn floor. He was having fun
exploring and didn't seem to mind the leash and harness
at all. This is easier than I thought, I told
myself smugly as I followed the porcine explorer.
You would think by now I'd be a wise enough trainer to know
that when anything-anything at all-is done with even a
hint of smugness in the presence of an animal, the
Dog God begins to chuckle just before all hell
breaks loose.
I tugged every so gently on Connor's rope harness,
thinking to encourage him to take another few steps, and
then the squealing began. It was as if suddenly he
realized that he was restrained in any way.
Apparently, being steered or restrained is something
pigs as a rule see as unreasonable; these guys
are the Patrick Henrys of the farm animal set:
"Give me liberty or give me . . . No,
wait-give me liberty or else!"
It is said that a squealing pig can generate sounds that
exceed the decibel level of the Concorde Jet at
takeoff. Whoever was man enough to discover this fact has
my sympathy for what he faced every day on the job.
I'm sure he also has a hearing aid
by now. (seriously, in a report of injuries
sustained on the job, swine veterinarians reported
hearing loss as one of the long-term effects of spending
their days in the company of pigs.) Ever alert to the
fine nuances of animal behavior, I could not help
but notice the escalation of squeals from rather cute
porcine mumbles of annoyance to full-blooded
stop-everycowonthefarminthe-tracks screams. I think
that if I were a predator, such squeals would either
scare the hunt right out of me or spur me on to new
heights of savagery. Of course, if I were a
piglet about Connor's size and some evil wolf
crept up and put a rope harness on me and tried
to get me to stroll
up and down the barn aisle, my screams would have
another purpose: the piglet's version of 911.
Response is not by police or ambulance, but
by Momma Hog, a fast-moving mountain of
protection on little trotters. My estimates are
that in fair weather under reasonable conditions, Connor's
screams could easily have been heard at least a
quarter mile away. Thankfully, Connor's
sizeable mother was nearly a hundred miles away.

It's an old barn, and sound likes
to stick around and ricochet from the concrete floor to the
stone wall on one side to the soft, rotting wood
of the haymow floor; I don't think too many
decibels escaped. (one of the roosters may now be
deaf, though we can't really tell. He didn't
respond to his name in the first place.)
A believer in the value of an empathetic
approach to animals, I tried to understand how this
seemed from Connor's point of view. (trust
me-empathetic thinking is not easily done under these
conditions; my eardrums were vibrating in time with Mother
Nature's spokes-pig, a vibration that does not
loan itself to thoughtful meditation.) I could understand that being
restrained from moving freely might be frustrating.
So, abandoning even gentle tugs, treating him like a
puppy being leash trained, I simply followed him,
letting him set the direction. Up and down the barn
aisle we walked, Connor squealing no matter
what I did. Even when he was free to set the
course, he was quite verbal about the whole experience,
mollified only slightly by the occasional
jellybean I offered when he stood mumbling to himself.
I tried everything I had learned over years of leash
training puppies and even full-grown dogs,
halter training cattle and horses. And still
the pig squealed, though it varied from full-blown
"You'll never take me alive!" squeals to more
moderate "Damn you all" mutters. Why, I
wondered, was this so difficult for him? It dawned on
me that what was missing was the exact ingredient I'd
reminded countless students of in training their dogs:
relevance. From Connor's point of view, this was not
relevant to his life. There was simply no point
in this senseless walking up and down the barn aisle.
He'd already been there more than twice, and
jellybeans weren't very convincing reasons to continue.
(our other pig, Charlotte, has a more typically
porcine view of food as possibly worth selling
her soul for, and will work on silly tasks like sitting
or waving just to get a gumdrop.) It's very easy
to forget that while we think
something is fascinating or important, our
animals may not. If we can appreciate that some
of their complaints may be about how boring or pointless
something is, we'll go further in being able to understand what
they have to tell us. Of course, accepting someone's
comment that your plan is boring or pointless requires