“The idea that animals can be relied upon to act for their own survival and advantage does not make their behavior less challenging, graceful, or tragic,” Anna Heyward wrote, about caring for a difficult dog. “We still constantly misinterpret it.”
The first time Jack came to live with me was in July. He’d caused trouble at another foster home and been kicked out. A few days in, my boyfriend explained that I could choose to share my home with him or with a dog but not both, so the next day I walked Jack up the road and handed his leash over to a girl who lived in Gramercy. I became sour about it. I didn’t see why my boyfriend couldn’t tolerate living with a dog.
I noticed Jack’s unusual hackles. Many dogs, during piloerection, have a few raised tufts at the base of the neck and the tail. Jack’s ran the entire length of his spine, giving the impression of a full-body Mohawk three-quarters of an inch tall and held up with hair spray. As he watched the man walk out of sight, the Mohawk collapsed, follicle by follicle.
The term “alpha,” as my dad had used it, originated in the nineteen-forties with a Swiss researcher named Rudolph Schenkel. At the time, the predominant theory of the dog’s origin was that humans had domesticated canids, or wolves, by selectively and methodically hand-raising wolf pups. Schenkel designed a study using ten wolves that were kept in an enclosure of ten by twenty metres.
Some people believe that channelling a dog’s motivation—giving the dog a reward, for instance—can do only so much, and that the only way to eliminate unwanted behavior is by punishment. This is a misunderstanding. The way to eliminate any behavior is to replace it with different behavior. Barking at the doorbell is incompatible with sitting quietly when it rings. Biting is incompatible with growling and walking away.
The most challenging thing was that Jack didn’t growl, a tendency that has been linked in scientific literature to electric-shock collars. Growling is innate and its suppression is learned, usually by punishment; this is dangerous because growling is important social behavior. Dogs do not growl at their prey, but they do at peer animals—humans, sheep, other dogs—with whom they need to communicate. If growling doesn’t work, the dog might graduate to a less semantic method.
What we regard as bad behavior might be better described as unsuccessful, misunderstood, mismatched to the environment. Many people are annoyed by dogs’ barking, but, living alone in a building with a history of break-ins, I appreciated Jack’s vocal warnings when he heard the scrape and thud of heavy feet approaching our door, his looking at me to make sure I’d heard. When he was frightened, his affectionate tendencies were the first casualty.
Jack did make progress. One October morning, we were crossing the road to the park when my friend Christie pulled up in the bike lane and waved. She took one hand off the handlebar and reached down toward Jack. I gave her a warning, but his tail whizzed and he put both paws on her leg while she caressed his head and neck. I was so happy that I hugged her.
Days later, I was at the bakery next door, Jack in my arms. In the line in front of me were a woman and her two young daughters with backpacks on. The younger one tugged on her mother’s sleeve, pointed at Jack, and whispered in her mother’s ear.The mother looked surprised, her smile fading. There was another whispered conference.
On Monday, the day of our train to Hudson, I woke up terrified. By the time of his morning walk, I was in a state of dark anxiety. I picked up his harness and took two steps toward him. He hesitated, looked at the harness, the window, me. He took a step away. I set the harness down on the floor, where I often spread it out before lifting him and placing his feet in the holes. He looked inscrutable. I felt time running out.
I left for work, bought a bandage at CVS, and spent the day calling around for another foster to take him. By 4“Can you pick him up this afternoon?” I asked through tears. She could. When I got home a week later, I texted the new foster and asked to have Jack back, although I knew that I’d ceded my claim. She said no—she thought that she was making progress and wanted to keep him. I checked in every few days, asking for pictures. I heard that he and the cat in his new home wouldn’t go near each other. “Put him in a baby carrier on your chest,” I wrote. “Being held calms him down.”Within a week, another dog had arrived at my apartment.
Home from work, I called my dad. I told him that this was the wrong outcome, that I should have done more. This time, he got angry. My parents’ house, which was built to replace one that had burned down in the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983, is in Aireys Inlet, a town of eight hundred people, on heathlands where the coastal wind stunts the growth of the tea trees and ironbarks that grow in the red, claylike Kurosol soil off the sandstone cliffs. The house is a small cedar-wood structure surrounded by scrub. There are holes in the walls through which the chill coastal breeze comes in at night.
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