Born to Bark (37 page)

Flint eventually learned all of the obedience exercises, and he came to truly love the jumps and the retrieves. He expressed his
pleasure the way that terriers express everything—with a bark. When I would send him out to retrieve a dumbbell, he would give an enthusiastic bark as he launched himself toward it, then the moment before he picked it up, he would look at me and give another bark. He would do that for the basic retrieve, where the dumbbell is simply brought back after it is tossed across the room, and also for the retrieve that sent him out and back over the high jump. In addition, he gave a launching announcement bark as he started his run to leap over the broad jump. Those barks, along with
the wagging of his carrot-shaped tail, let me know that he was working happily and enjoying the competition and the training. It reassured me that he was not an automation doing my bidding without thinking, but rather a happy member of a team doing what he liked.

Unfortunately, not everyone recognized the joyous nature of my dog’s performance. In one trial the judge came up to me as I was getting ready to leave the ring with Flint. I was feeling quite good and confident about his performance this day.

“You know that your dog was barely in control today,” the judge said, looking down at my dog with some disdain.

“I’m sorry,” I replied, feeling quite confused. “I thought that he was performing reasonably well.”

“How can you say that, given all of that barking?” He looked at the sheet on his clipboard, and then continued, “By my count there were five barks. Any more and I probably would have dismissed you from the ring because your dog was not under control.”

I was astonished and tried to explain, “He gives those short barks to tell me that he is enjoying himself and that he likes the exercise. He was never out of control.”

“Your dog’s emotional state is irrelevant. Each time he barks, a judge should deduct one point. That means that if you don’t correct that behavior, you will start each competition effectively with five points already lost.”

“He barks when he is happy. Should I make the work unpleasant for him in order to earn a few more points in trials?” I asked.

“He is here to do a job—not to have fun! With an attitude like yours, your dog will never amount to much as a competitor.”

Looking at the unpleasant scowl on his face, I decided that I would never again enter a trial in which this person was judging. Although I was sure that it would make no difference, I felt that it was necessary to say something. So, as calmly as I could I told him, “Dog obedience is a sport—an entertainment. The day that it stops being fun for me or my dog, I will start looking for a different sport.”

Flint and I then turned and walked out of the ring without waiting for a response.

Because God sometimes has a strange sense of humor, it was only a few days after this encounter in the obedience ring that I received a large envelope in the mail. It was a certificate from
Dogs in Canada
, the official publication of the Canadian Kennel Club, that announced that Flint was nationally ranked as the second highest-scoring Cairn terrier in obedience competition that year. I felt a surge of pride and wished I could roll back time to be able to wave this piece of paper in front of that judge, accompanied of course by some witty and cutting remarks about how fine a
competitor Flint was turning out to be.

It was then that I looked at the certificate more closely and started to giggle. In the line where it lists Flint’s official or kennel name, it should have read “Remasia’s Our Man Flint.” Instead, this handsome certificate had a misprint which designated him Remasia’s Our Man Fling. I was laughing out loud when I held the certificate up to my dog to show him.

Flint was dancing around, as he always did when I laughed, and replied,
“You are always telling me that the elevator to my brain stops one floor short of the penthouse, so why shouldn’t
the Kennel Club spell my name one letter less than correctly?”

Although Joan suggested that I return the certificate and have a properly spelled one drawn up so that I could have an accurate document indicating what we had achieved that year, I never did. Flint would never be perfect in competition, and I would never put pressure on him to be perfect, so this certificate was at least as perfect as Flint would ever be. For the next week or so, however, I found myself calling him Fling every now and then.

Having two dogs as different in their personalities as Flint and Wiz was fascinating to me professionally and personally. Flint was a classic terrier: active, bold, and inquisitive. He was the eternal warrior and hunter and looked at life as a challenge that he would live on his own terms regardless of the consequences.

Wiz was a gentle soul. His idea of a perfect day was to snuggle up to me or Joan when we were sitting on the sofa and to rest quietly. In obedience competition he exerted no more effort than was required. If he had to jump a 13-inch barrier, he would launch himself over it so that he cleared it by at most a quarter of an inch, as opposed to Flint, who would hurl himself far above it as if to inform anybody watching that he also could have jumped 24 inches just as easily.

A great deal of my psychological research involves trying to understand what makes one human different from another in his behavior. For that reason I have often studied groups of people who had different characteristics, such as left-handed people versus right-handers, people who sleep a lot versus those who sleep little, individuals whose births had complications,
and people whose vision or hearing is different from the norm. These and other apparently minor differences often have significant effects on the way that people behave, their personalities, learning abilities, and even how long they might live.

Dogs’ different temperaments also affect how they learn. Teaching Wizard to retrieve was no easier than teaching Flint. While cocker, springer, Brittany or field spaniels all have a hunting and retrieving instinct, toy spaniels like the Cavalier King Charles do not. The term
spaniel
does not relate to hunting. The
span
in
spaniel
comes from the word Spain; the dogs were identified as Spanish dogs even though none of the breeds originated in that country. The term was applied to them because, at the time, people believed that the most romantic people in the world came from Spai
n and so, because most spaniels are so gentle and kissy, they were equated with Spanish lovers. I often would hear the soft voice that I had given to Wizard explain to me why he was resting while Flint was frantically scrambling around the house on some mission,
“I suppose that someone has to be on guard; however, I am a lover, not a hunter or a fighter. It’s a tough job being sweet all of the time, but I’m willing to work at it.”

Flint’s true nature was probably best displayed when I decided to try to teach him to track, with some faint hope that he might earn a tracking title. As a dog sport, tracking involves the dog leading his handler over a scent trail that can be a quarter mile long or longer, and can have several turns with several places where it is crossed by distracting false scents. A highly recommended tracking instructor named Gary lived about a half hour’s drive south of the city, so I decided to enroll Flint in one of his classes, held early on Sunday mornings. I took with me a borrowed harness from B
arbara Baker and a new 20-foot long tracking leash, as well as a plastic bag containing a few hot dogs thinly sliced into penny-sized disks. Flint had watched me slicing them and so was hopeful when I took them with us in the car.

To begin the training I had to walk a track across a grassy field while Flint waited in the car. The trail was marked with flags so that we nasally weak humans would know where it was. As I walked, I dropped small slices of wiener every few feet along the track. The dog was to start by following its owner’s scent, and could pick up these treats if he stayed on course.

Flint caught on quickly. A happy voice announced,
“Ahh … You dropped some hot dog slices. Now all I have to do is to follow your scent and I’ll find them all! Watch me sniff. Here’s another bit. Hey, this is fun!”

“Stan, did you say something?” Gary asked. “After you tell him to ‘Find it!’ you should just let him do the tracking. Talking to him might just distract him.”

I was not sure that Gary would understand why I was talking to myself in my dog’s voice, so I stopped.

The following Sunday morning the class assembled at another field. This one was overgrown with very long grass and weeds. Once again we tramped out a trail, each with two right-angle turns marked by flags. Again we seeded the path with wiener slices, set a bit more widely apart this time.

I hooked the leash to Flint’s harness, and he was giving his little excitement dance with his front paws.
“It’s the hot dog game. I follow your scent and find all of the treats that you dropped again!”

This session started well enough. I gave Flint my scent by pointing down to a patch of ground that I had tramped down well, and waiting until he sniffed it. Then, at the command of “Find it!” he dashed off down my trail, scooping up the wiener slices that were spaced roughly five or six feet apart down the track. We couldn’t have been on the trail for more than three or four minutes when a field rat appeared on the track right in front of Flint, apparently attracted to the bits of hot dog. Flint’s brain went immediately into vermin hunter mode, and he charged at the gray-brown r
odent, which dashed into the high
grass with Flint after him. It was only a short chase. I felt the leash go slack, then jerk a couple of times, and when I finally reached my dog he was standing over a large, fat, and very dead rat. Flint’s tail was wagging excitedly.
“All applaud the great hunter!”
announced a silly voice.

This incident really ended any hopes that I might have had of seeing Flint earn a tracking degree. The hunter instinct had been awakened in him, and now his mind was dominated by the idea that the tall grass might contain prey for him to stalk and kill. When I brought him back to the trail that we were supposed to be training on, he completely ignored my scent and was casting back from side to side in an attempt to spring anything else that might be alive in the dense cover. If he happened to cross the track in a place
where there was a bit of wiener, he would snatch it off the ground and eat it but he would not return to the trail. Unfortunately, after 10 minutes of frustration while I tried to get him focused on tracking again, he once more plunged into the underbrush and again ran after something. I never knew what it was, since Flint hit the end of the leash before he could catch it, but this second chase confirmed in his mind that his task here was to hunt, not to track, and that ample numbers of vermin were present that could serve as his quarry.

Any chance of progress that day was lost, so I reeled Flint in, explained the situation to Gary, and suggested that it would be best for me to stop training for this session. I hoped that, given a week’s time, Flint would return to the promising tracking behavior that he had shown the first day. It was not to be. The following week Flint again completely ignored my scent and all instructions pertaining to tracking. Instead, like a true hunting terrier, he began to cast from side to side through the high grass and suddenly froze in position and pushed his nose toward the groun
d. He clearly had picked up a scent, but not from my trail. He dashed some 15 feet forward following some kind of scent, and then began to dig frantically. A moment later
he raised his head, gave a sideways snap, and showed me he’d caught a mole—now quite dead. This was the end of any hope of controlled tracking behavior for Flint. He was already dashing about looking for something new to hunt when I dragged him back to my side and explained to Gary that I doubted that it was worth our while to continue. Gary suggested that if I wanted to try again I was welcome, but Flint was convinced that any high grass was a hunting range, so I knew that this was a lost cause.

Perhaps one of the most telling differences between Flint and Wiz was their relationship to toys. Flint really did not play with toys except as part of interacting socially or stimulating his hunter instincts. If a toy was tossed to him he would chase it and when he caught it he would try to kill it (especially if it made a noise when it bounced or he bit into it), first by shaking it vigorously then by ripping it apart if he could. Toys that had appendages, like dolls with heads, arms, and legs, he simply dismembered.