The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout (11 page)

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Authors: Jill Abramson

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Despite our exposure to Diane’s remarkable skills and her endless enthusiasm for clicker training, we hadn’t quite grasped the depth of zeal within what Henry came to call Clicker Culture. Its truest adherents regard the clicker method not only as an enlightened way to train dogs but also as a means to a better life. That’s a lot to claim for the average dog owner, who just wants to achieve a reliable Sit and Stay and, occasionally, an obedient Come. But having observed a pattern of interaction between Diane and dogs that seemed almost magical, we were eager to know more.
 
 
The ClickerExpo took place at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Newport Beach, usually a place to play golf and sit in the sun, not train dogs. Over four hundred people attended, almost all of them pet professionals of one kind or another. Surprisingly, women outnumbered men by a ratio of about 20 to 1, which was consistent with a dramatic demographic shift in the animal-training world since the 1980s.
In California, you can tell a lot about a crowd by the cars in the parking lot. Henry noted that a sturdy
gray SUV with personalized plates claiming DOG WIZ stood just a few spaces down from RUFF FUN. Next to LABRADOR was PAWWFCT, while GOODDOGU was parked not far from a stray equestrian, HOSNRDR.
The training sessions and workshops were due to be held in a number of plush conference rooms inside the hotel. A good number of the participants, Henry discovered, had attended a ClickerExpo before. At any given moment, between twenty and forty dogs were present, most of them from midsized breeds and all of them alert and well behaved. A few tiny dogs were rolled about in canine strollers, which were just catching on in Tribeca and rare in Connecticut.
Whether human or canine, all of the attendees were there because of Karen Pryor. A petite woman with sandy hair and an open, kindly face, Pryor had been a scientist and dolphin trainer in Hawaii earlier in life. She developed her theories about the use of positive reinforcement while working with dolphins; as she explained to those attending the expo, a dolphin can’t be leashed, whacked, yelled at, or threatened. Since such behavior would cause a dolphin simply to swim away, a trainer has to use rewards to persuade it to deliver a desired performance.
In the 1930s, the pioneering behaviorist B. F. Skinner demonstrated that what he called
operant conditioning
could train a rat to get a food pellet by pressing
a lever when a light came on in its cage, and to ignore the lever otherwise. Later, dolphin trainers discovered that captured dolphins were astonishingly quick to learn that certain actions earned a reward. So the underlying principles of clicker training had been established years before—in fact, they could be traced back to Pavlov’s use of dinner bells to prompt dogs to salivate even before food was presented to them.
Pryor first made waves in the pet-training world in the mid-1980s when she published
Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training
, a book that popularized positive reinforcement as an antidote to the coercive, aversion-based training. In the bad old days, training too often relied on yelling at dogs, yanking their leashes and collars, and whacking them with rolled-up newspaper—not to mention using a range of dubious housebreaking practices. Pryor’s approach was revolutionary, but for all its scientific underpinnings, her method appealed to many pet lovers because it was humane.
At the heart of Pryor’s method is the consistent use of a clicker, which she employs as a tool for communicating a positive response to a particular behavior by a dog. As Pryor explained in her books and at the expo, a clicker’s effectiveness goes well beyond the impact of spoken commands or praise. In her view, the technique—which she calls a technology—establishes
new neural pathways in a dog’s brain. She argues that clickers can prompt long chains of canine behavior that require split-second changes, such as those required in agility tests and other forms of competition.
During the expo’s opening session, Pryor decried the popularity of Cesar Millan, asserting that he “legitimized the use of heavy punishment.” But she also conceded that Millan’s approach had recently become less coercive, and she seemed reluctant to appear too critical of his controversial methods. Then, after providing brief outlines of the expo’s planned workshops, Pryor told the packed Hyatt ballroom, “We are changing civilization, starting in this room.”
If that claim seemed overly ambitious, the expo did demonstrate that the clicker method had come a long way over the past couple of decades. In one workshop, a trainer of world-class female gymnasts showed how clickers—or sounds known as TAGs, for Teaching with Acoustical Guidance—helped teach young gymnasts how to land their heels precisely on the balance beam after executing a back flip. In that same session, several special education teachers discussed the use of TAGs to help autistic kids learn to socialize. And clickers were also catching on in zoos, where trainers taught large animals to lie down at the sound of a click. One zookeeper even trained a rhinoceros to
recline for routine shots and nail trimming, thus avoiding the need for anesthetic darts.
Pryor’s featured speaker at the expo was Victoria Stilwell, the star of Animal Planet’s hit TV show
It’s Me or the Dog.
Like her program, Stilwell’s presentation was upbeat and amusing, and she incorporated a lot of entertaining video from the show. As well, she delivered her talk in an accent perfectly suited for the London stage, which is where she got her start.
As the name of her show suggests, Stilwell, like Millan, often parachutes into fairly desperate family situations. But unlike the pack leader, she never wrestles a dog in order to establish who’s boss. The look in her eye, the tone of her voice, and the consistent lessons she teaches families and their dogs are what make her so effective—along with clickers and an avalanche of treats, of course. Perhaps the most revealing moment of her presentation came when she said that 80 percent of dog training depends on the owners and only 20 percent on the dogs; a hundred heads nodded as one.
Scout pined for Henry while he was away in California, and I often found her lying in her bed with one of his socks. When he arrived home, she was overjoyed. Once she calmed down, Henry presented me with some gifts from his trip, including books by Pryor and Stilwell and a new plastic clicker. Over dinner, Henry
told me all about the trip, and it was immediately apparent that he had returned from California, as had many others before him, filled with the zeal of the newly converted. His eyes alight, his voice firm with conviction, he made a vow that very evening. “We are going back to Diane’s basics,” Henry said.
 
 
Soon after Henry’s trip, I had the good fortune to meet Temple Grandin, the subject of a biographical film produced by HBO. I had asked to interview her before a screening of the film in Manhattan, though I worried that conversing with her might prove difficult because of her autism. But within minutes, Grandin put me at ease, and I was soon telling her tales about Scout’s sudden transformation from gentle puppy to headstrong adolescent. For Grandin, whose autism gives her remarkable insights into how animals think and react, my story was familiar. But my talk with her meant something special to me in part because she had grown up with golden retrievers, including her beloved Andy, one of the dogs she wrote about in the book
Animals Make Us Human
.
Despite her flamboyant, bright blue satin shirt—which featured an embroidered image of cowboys riding horses—Grandin was understated, plainspoken,
and authoritative. Because I thought highly of her books, including her autobiography,
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism
, I was predisposed to believe her theories about canine behavior and dog training. She, too, rejects many of Cesar Millan’s methods as too punitive. But she does approve of some aspects of his approach to training, and she agrees with Millan that owners need to provide dogs with the equivalent of firm parenting, most especially by placing limits on their behavior.
When I told Grandin about my accident and the injury to my leg, she was quick to say that it was vital that we teach Scout to heel while walking on a leash. She also told me that even with the clicker and abundant treats, teaching a dog to walk on a loose leash is difficult. “What you have to understand is that walking on a leash is not their preferred state,” she said. “Dogs need time to roam unleashed, either with humans or, better yet, with other dogs they know.” I described our walks with Scout at the farm in Connecticut, which she thought sounded ideal. She told me she is not a fan of urban dog parks, although she conceded that taking a dog to a park is at least preferable to keeping it shut away by itself in an apartment all day.
I asked Grandin about the role that dogs played in her New England childhood, and she described how Andy would spend the day patrolling her neighborhood,
exploring the nearby fields and woods, and participating in all the goings-on in town with the many other dogs who lived in her neighborhood. “That’s not how we live anymore—dogs don’t roam around unleashed,” she said. “But the dogs preferred it that way.”
She didn’t view Scout’s rebellious behavior as a serious problem. “It sounds like she is getting lots of love and exercise, which are the most important things. I think you should relax and just enjoy her.” It was simple, commonsense advice, but because it came from Grandin I felt more resolved than ever to stick with Scout’s training. I also felt new hope, because talking with her about goldens and seeing her light up at the memory of Andy reminded me of how much fun, love, and happiness Scout had brought into my life.
 
 
With winter came snow, and in Connecticut great drifts of it now stood right outside our doorstep. Just as I hoped she would, Scout adored playing in the snow almost as much as she liked splashing about in the water. But when she bounded outside I sometimes worried that her whiteness would make it difficult for me to keep her in sight. Years ago, after a very deep
snowfall in Virginia, I became convinced that Buddy had become trapped under the snow. I called and called for him but saw no sign of his frisky little self. Soon I became frantic, certain that he would be smothered by the piles of snow. I ran to find Henry, who was taking a shower, and begged him to mount a search. Dutifully, Henry donned waterproof waders and boots and began trekking through the more than two feet of snow in our yard in search of Buddy—who, it turned out, had found a dry place in our greenhouse and was taking a peaceful nap. “You always think that Buddy is lost or in danger, and he never is,” Henry complained afterward, with some justification. My tendency to blow up ordinary anxieties into life-threatening, worstcase scenarios annoyed Henry, and he often cited the Buddy Smothered in the Snow story to remind me how ridiculous I could be.
By now, though, Scout was too big to become lost in the snow, so I had little reason to worry. On snowy weekends, Scout and I usually met my friend Barbara Pearce and her Lab, Xena, at the farm. Xena was two weeks younger than Scout and about the same size, but she was much wilder. (Barbara used to take Xena running with her, but she had stopped because Xena pulled too much.) While Barbara and I chatted, Scout would lead Xena down the paths into the woods
where we could no longer see them. Then, suddenly, they would dart back into our view, snow flying off their coats.
When they were small puppies, Xena was dominant; during their play, Xena would usually end up on top, sometimes with Scout’s throat, or at least an ear, in her teeth. But now Scout gave as good as she got, and sometimes she pinned Xena to the ground. The shy puppy of a few months earlier was gone.
Also gone was the omnivorous eater. One cold morning, we put Scout’s bowl of kibble and yogurt frosting down for her as usual. She wouldn’t take a single bite. At dinner, she repeated the performance.
“Don’t worry,” Henry reassured me, “she won’t starve.”
Once again I was reminded of my children. As a teenager, Will had become a fussy eater. He would reject whatever dinner I made and cook a hot dog for himself. I worried that he would get nitrate poisoning, but like many adolescents he seemed to remain healthy and fit no matter what went into his stomach.
Reflecting on Scout’s sudden disdain for the food she’d been eating all her life, I decided that she had become bored with the same bland diet. I could understand her reaction: being fed kibble with yogurt day in and day out might get a little tedious. I still yearned, of course, to return to my epicurean days of cooking a
plat du jour for Buddy. But Henry was still insisting that we refrain from giving Scout human food at mealtimes, using it only for high-value treats.
Unwilling to allow Scout to go without food, I went to our local pet shop with the notion of purchasing several “natural” brands of kibble to try out on her. They were far more expensive than the Pro Plan we usually bought at Petco, but I thought these so-called better brands might be worth a try. The store generously gave me several samples, so Henry and I decided to conduct a taste test. We put the samples in different bowls, labeled them, and then watched as Scout happily scarfed down all of them. To our discerning eyes, though, she seemed to favor one called California Natural, which claims to be grain-free and thus better for dogs with sensitivities to wheat or corn.
These “natural” kibbles had recently become all the rage, and even Petco planned to unveil a new premium line of “natural” kibble. At the very least, these brands make sense from a marketing point of view, since they can be priced more aggressively and appeal to upscale consumers who themselves prefer eating “natural” or “organic” foods. But some animal nutritionists I respected had expressed doubts about whether they offer real nutritional advantages.

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