How to Raise a Jewish Dog (18 page)

The accompanying photograph shows how simple—but also how helpful—PICS can be for both dog and owner.

In chapter 3 we introduced you to our Basic “Training” Procedure. It consisted of a Five-Stage Cycle that included the following
steps:

Elderly dog, afflicted with failing eyesight, uses PICS system of object identification. Looking at photograph of window on
window, he confirms that window is window.

1. Unconditional Love:
You pampered and adored the dog without limit or preconditions.

2. The Great Betrayal:
When you issued a command to the dog, and she failed to obey, you reacted as though she were deliberately defying you and
displaying ingratitude for all you had done for her.

3. Conditional Unconditional Love:
You “guilted” the dog, openly wondering why you bothered to show her all this love if “this” was how she was going to repay
you. You collapsed, sobbing, openly moaned to strangers.

4. Comfort and Reconciliation:
The dog, thus guilted, displayed concern for you. Duly comforted, you realized that you knew better than to act like this,
that your feeling victimized was crazy, and so on. You apologized to the dog and to any remaining bystanders.

5. Enlightened Acceptance:
You withdrew the original command and, with the dog, you worked together to solve the problem.

This cycle will be relevant in training situations for most of the dog’s life. But by the time the dog is eight or nine (for
large dogs) or eleven or twelve (for medium-sized and smaller dogs), the Basic “Training” Procedure will have become moot,
and another procedure will take its place.

This diagram outlines the next five-step cycle.

1. Established Routine:
You and the dog go about your daily routine: walking, feeding, cuddling, talking. As part of this routine, you give some
command to the dog.

2. Automatic Disobedience:
The dog fails to obey the command because she always has (and always will). It’s part of the routine.

3. Exhausted Surrender:
You perceive that the dog has been disobedient. Rather than feel betrayed (as you used to), by now you just don’t care. You’re
“too tired to deal with this.” Or you’re “too old for this kind of thing.” In any case, you “give up.” You say, out loud,
“Look, never mind. I give up.”

Rabbi Alan, having just issued command for ten thousandth time, and elderly dog, having again disobeyed it, reach final stage
of cycle and no longer remember what they were talking about, what the issue was, or who the other is.

4. Habitual Concern:
The dog, after years of exposure to your giving up, knows that you are unhappy. By sheer force of habit, she comes to you,
or at least looks over at you. It might mean she is apologizing for being disobedient. It might mean she is waiting for you
to give the command again. Or it might mean that the dog is trying to remember who you are. Any of these establishes the conditions
for the final stage.

5. Complete Forgetting:
You no longer remember what the command was or why you gave it. And neither does the dog. The entire incident has been completely
forgotten and everyone starts over with a clean slate.

This, you will not be surprised to learn, marks the final stage in the “training.”

Just as the Basic “Training” Procedure has to be revised to take into account the characteristics of the older dog (and her
owner), so must the Basic Commands.

For most of the dog’s life, the commands “Sit!,” “Down!,” and “Stay!” are the most essential and are used the most frequently.

The older dog, however, requires a different vocabulary of commands.

And we do mean
different
. For one thing, these are not actually “commands.” We call them “requests.” And, while the Basic Commands are to be delivered
in one or more of the Five Modes with increasing emotional intensity and urgency (as explained in chapter 3), the Requests
are delivered with one of Three Moods of decreasing emotion.

Controlling the Older Dog: Three Basic Requests in Three Moods

The Request is first issued in the Mildly Annoyed Mood; when it is ignored, it is reissued in the Tired-of-Talking-About-It
Mood and, when that too doesn’t work, in the Acknowledgment-of-Futility Mood, in which the owner gives up.

Practice these Requests in all three of their Moods once your dog reaches his eighth (for large dogs) or eleventh (for smaller
dogs) birthday. It may seem tedious to do so at first, but rest assured, you won’t have to do it for that long. The older
the dog becomes, the less you will need to practice or even use these Requests, because the dog will increasingly ignore them
and because you will increasingly just give up ahead of time.

Like the prisoners in the old story, who cue each other about their favorite jokes just by shouting out a number, you and
the dog will, after many years, become so accustomed to each other’s needs, habits, commands, defiance of commands, and everything
else that you’ll be able to convey them in a series of shorthand references based on a small group of familiar words you will
have used literally thousands of times. Of course, unlike the prison jokes, these ideas can’t be presented via numbers. That
would be absurd; the dog doesn’t know numbers.

He does, however, know the four Useful Words we discussed in chapter 3: “So,” “Nu,” “What,” and “Okay?” After eight or more
years of living with the dog, you will have used these terms consistently and repeatedly in a limited and highly meaningful
series of contexts. With this in mind, we’ve been able to devise a fairly comprehensive list of comments, questions, rebukes,
and explanations using a “code” based on these four words alone.

The following table shows how to arrange the four words into a number of sentences that a typical owner might use in a common,
everyday scenario. Of course, this will be a one-way conversation, since the dog will not be able to reply in actual words.
But he’ll know what you’re saying and be able to respond accordingly.

Longtime Companions: The Four- Word Shorthand Code of Commands and Rebukes

Other coded sentences are available on our Web site.

W
hen I founded the Boca Raton Theological Seminary in 1988, I knew two things: one, that I wanted to provide a venue for the
training of rabbis within a particularly progressive branch of Judaism that for too long had remained ill served by our nation’s
established rabbinical colleges and, two, that I was allergic to dogs.

Both are still true today. In fact, they’re even truer than they were back then. My commitment to training religious leaders
in Reform-Progressive Trans-Diasporatic Neo-Revisionalist Judaism is, if anything, even stronger than when I began. And I’m
even more allergic to dogs than ever.

When we began the Seminary there were maybe one or two dogs around, and all I had to worry about was sneezing and itchy, tearing
eyes and a runny nose. I tried controlling that with antihistamines, but if you’ve ever taken one you know what happens: after
about two hours they knock you out so that you can’t keep your eyes open. One cannot exactly study (let alone teach) Torah
and Talmud if one is asleep at one’s desk.

From there I moved to the so-called nondrowsy allergy pills (Allegra, Zyrtec, Claritin), and things were more or less under
control. But then the dog training program really took off. Instead of one or two dogs here and there on this day or that,
suddenly there were six or seven, everywhere, all the time. I began to experience a certain inability to breathe. My lungs
felt slightly congested and produced a somewhat comical wheezing sound (not unlike that of a Balkan musical instrument built
around a goat’s bladder) if, God forbid, I tried to exhale completely.