|
My journey with Babe By Cathy Toft
|
 When my last rescue collie died, I had to fill the void that Trouper left. I got on the internet and emailed all of my friends in collie rescue. I explained, send me the worst of your worst. I don’t want a dog, I want a project. Don’t waste a normal dog on me, one that you can get someone else to foster and then adopt out to a normal home I want a dog so abused, no one can deal with him, everyone has given up on him. I want a dog that would be euthanized if a person like me were not available to adopt him. I added, don’t hurry! Take your time. Wait for just the right dog.
Immediately, my friend Lisa King who runs Colorado Collie Rescue emailed me back. She said she had just such a dog in her kennel right now. The dog had been with Lisa for 8 months and was one of the most abused collies Lisa had ever encountered, and that was saying something because a couple of years earlier, Lisa busted a big collie puppy mill. In these months, this dog had recovered from her physical abuse, but her mental condition was unreachable. She’d made little progress in all this time. After about 6 months, she’d finally played with a toy. Soon thereafter, she found her voice and for the first time barked, at the neighbor’s running horses. She would take food from Lisa’s hand from inside her kennel, but she would not allow Lisa to approach her, much less come up to Lisa for any reason. Lisa could not even stand by the kennel door when she gathered the dogs back up from their exercise time. This dog could not walk on a leash. To manage her, Lisa explained it was necessary to corner the dog and pick her up and carry her wherever you needed to take her. Lisa sent me a picture, a small jpeg, of the dog. I opened the file and saw an image of a slight, rough-coated sable collie, looking fearful in her kennel. I told Lisa that she was just what I wanted, and after many plans, Babe arrived on a flight from Denver in December of 1998.
Without a doubt, Babe was one of the most difficult challenges that I have ever had in my life. The first month with her was unbelievably difficult for us both. I tell the story in more detail elsewhere (http://r-plusdogtraining.info/Babe/index.htm). I joke that training and rehabilitating her was harder than getting my Ph.D. That first month was anything but a joke, however. I often wondered whether we’d made an enormous mistake not to euthanize her. She was miserable. She was indeed completely unreachable, trapped in a prison of fear. When I realized what she was like, I started to research autism. I was amused by what I found out. Apparently, one major breakthrough in treating autistic children is to use operant conditioning and positive reinforcement, with principles and methods borrowed heavily from the same tool bag as we use in dog training. That I could do. Still, the news wasn’t much comfort to me at the time; what I wanted was a short cut or magic bullet. I was faced with doing my project the hard way.
The process of releasing Babe from her prison of fear was an experience that changed me in far-reaching ways. It has permeated my relationships with other people, my profession of teaching, and my outlook on life, to say nothing of my dog training. Her coming to me was like one of those parables. A hopeful disciple goes up to the top of a mountain to ask the shaman “What is the meaning of life?” The shaman then sends the discipline off on some apparent fool’s errand in reply, and after a long tortuous path meeting many adversaries, the disciple realizes that he knew the meaning of life all along but could never see it in front of his face.
When Babe arrived, she spent 98% of the day coiled tightly into a fetal position. She found a corner in the house and pressed herself into it, trying to disappear through the floor. Just the daily routine of feeding her and making sure she got outside 3 times to relieve herself was a major undertaking. You might be tempted to call Babe essentially a wild animal, but normal wild animals at least have self-esteem. Babe obviously had been stripped of that. She had no idea who she was. She acted as if she wished she were dead. How could I reach an animal like this?
I decided to feed Babe by hand. The first night I opened a can of dog food and rolled it into little balls. Fortunately, Lisa had taught Babe to take food from her hand in the 8 months she’d had Babe. With each little ball that I gave her, I clucked softly with my tongue against the roof of my mouth as she ate it. My plan was to use operant conditioning and positive reinforcement to communicate with her. There seemed to be no other way, and I took my clue from the study on autistic children. Clearly, ordinary taming—using a laissez faire approach—had got Lisa only a tiny distance with Babe. I had to do something much more aggressive and directed and premeditated.
The second night I began to “train” Babe, communicate with her, really. We call this “clicker training” but it is really a powerful way to communicate with another individual. My plan was to shape and reinforce any behaviors that Babe offered me toward the goal of giving Babe her life back. She didn’t offer me much. She had pulled her head out of the tight coil of her body because she was expecting to eat. I got very close, forcing her to confront me. She reacted by swinging her head back and forth in an arc to try to avoid frontal contact with me. During this arc, however, she faced me directly for a brief instant. When that happened, just the instant that her head faced me, I clicked. Right after a click, I gave her a little ball of food.
Then I watched a miracle unfold. After only 4 clicks, Babe’s head had stopped swinging. Instead, she faced me. I continued to reinforce that posture with clicks followed by food. That was too easy; I decided to get greedy. I pressed on. Once her head stopped swinging, her eyes took over. They flicked back and forth in their sockets, once again trying to avoid me. I clicked that brief instant that her eyes were aligned with her nose, looking straight at me. Her eyes stopped swinging in only a few more clicks. She was still looking downward, probably seeing only my crossed legs as I sat in front of her. I went for more. No one was more astonished than I when I had her staring me straight in the eye within the first 15 minutes.
Anyone who knows anything about animal behavior appreciates how incredibly difficult staring me in the eye would be for Babe. In dog language, as it is for most mammals, direct eye contact can be a threat, especially between strangers as Babe and I were. In addition, Babe had had only the most aversive interactions with humans, including the well-meaning people who were trying to help her. Babe had no idea why they were forcing her to do things and trying to catch her and move her around. When Lisa carried Babe out of the animal shelter for the first time, Babe emptied her bladder and bowels as Lisa walked to her van. But this evening, when Babe’s eyes locked with mine, they were tentative, yes, but they had an expression of curiosity, maybe even trust, but not fear.
Those were the first steps on my long journey with Babe. Perhaps it sounds melodramatic to say that Babe changed my life. Had Babe been easy to tame, I probably would have learned very little. Like the parable, the task that I had been given relentlessly kept me on a straight and narrow path. I wanted to take short cuts along the way, but Babe would not tolerate it. My saga with her sounds superficially like a manual on dog training. It was far, far more. Despite many tries on my part to avoid the obvious lessons that Babe was trying to teach me, Babe’s intractable behavior forced me to keep on looking for her lost soul. I didn’t even believe in what I was doing, once I got into it. The unfathomable number of deaths of perfectly normal dogs every day, month, year in animal shelters around the country and world speak strongly for triage. Yet here I was spending years of my life trying to reach only one of those dogs.
Babe taught me two lessons. The first lesson was to take a positive approach to life and all of my activities and relationships in it. Our language is replete with such homey expressions as “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” or “the power of positive thinking” but it is difficult to achieve the goals that they embody. It is not about bribing others to get along with them or get what you want; it is not about being a misguided Pollyanna, candy coating life’s misfortunes in order not to deal with them; it is not about being a weenie to avoid coming into conflict with others. It is about a philosophy of living. Karen Pryor relates a poignant story in her classic “Don’t Shoot the Dog,” her treatise on operant conditioning. She tells us how she “trained” her ailing, elderly, widowed mother to embrace life more positively. In her long phone conversations with her mother, Pryor reinforced the optimistic things her mother offered with an animated, interested reply. When her mother complained about the many, all-too-real hardships she was facing, Pryor reacted with silence. Slowly, the conversations with her mother were filled with an increasingly larger part of optimism than pessimism. Once I explained to a colleague the principle of using positive reinforcement with dogs. His reaction was “So! You f*** with their minds.” Whatever you want to call it! All I know is that soon enough, life becomes full of riches.
The other lesson that Babe taught me was a deep understanding of unconditional love. We all bandy that word about in relation to our pets. Surely we all have a universal need for unconditional love, but so few of us are able to offer it. I suppose that is why we turn to animals for it. After I had Babe about a year, I noticed something strange. People who claimed to have a special understanding of animals expressed an outright dislike for Babe. One person who often told me how she got along better with animals than with people met Babe and later confessed that she didn’t know “what I saw” in Babe. Eventually I figured out what was happening. Babe was so robbed of her soul that she had absolutely nothing to offer anyone. She was running on empty. On the other hand, she did not try to fill this void by demanding love and attention—that would have been something to offer someone. She instead gathered up what little will she had to live and ferociously guarded it from everyone. When she looked at anyone who threatened her, her eyes were completely vacuous. She had an uncanny, unsettling stare-right-through-you gaze. Needy people could not tolerate being confronted with this vacuum. I myself had to overcome my own personal needs in order to reach Babe and give her a reason for living. This requirement that I accept Babe unconditionally with no expectation of return was one of the greatest challenges that I faced in my relationship with Babe.
Five years later, Babe is much better and so am I. She will never be a normal dog, but now she can function to resemble a normal dog. She expresses joy in life each and every day. For the past couple of years, she has even been able to offer affection. She is an inspiration to all who met her in her early days, so she has touched more lives than mine. She lives the active life of a working dog, in partnership with me, and she is a valued member of her pack, human and canine, which is the only thing she ever wanted.
© Catherine Toft 2007
|
