Dog eat dog.

Following up on yesterday's dog post, I have another canine question that Dr. Temple Grandin sparked in me with her book Animals Make Us Human. It also touches on the grief I get from some other dog owners.

The thing is, my wife and I got our dogs from breeders. Not from puppy mills or the like; these were AKC-approved home-based dog breeders whose homes were open to inspection, who provided us veterinary records and encouraged us to contact the vets if there were questions. In short, every human baby should have care this good.

There are plenty of people I'm friendly with who would smite me for that anyway. Many are quite reasonable in their objections, but others shout "Adopt, don't shop!" like angry political protesters, substituting emotion for reason. And I know it's important to save lives of animals in shelters if you can. But let me explain.

Long before we landed our first dog (senior varsity dog Tralfaz), I wanted to rescue a dog and bring it up. But a friend of mine who is a retired veterinarian told me that, in our area of suburbia, most of the dogs that are sitting in shelters are pit bulls or other dogs with a reputation for aggressiveness. Now, before anyone defends any breeds, I mention it because he said that these dogs had been rescued from creeps who were training the dogs to be aggressive, either for protection, for fighting, or just for general badassery. So while you may say that a pit bull is as gentle as a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, I don't want to try my luck with any dog that's been raised to be mean. Remember, Tralfaz was our very first dog, and we didn't know what we were doing, and so we wanted a breed known for gentleness, one that was an untraumatized puppy -- and even then we hit the vertical learning curve.

We probably all have known people with adopted dogs that cannot behave. I've seen some insane dogs in the local dog parks who either want to kill everything or hump everything (or kill half and hump the rest). I have friends who rescued a dog; when I suggested I bring up mine for a canine kaffee klatsch, they told me, "Oh... no. Pookie can't stand to be with any other dog." In other words, Pookie would try to rip Tralfaz's neck open.

Some great trainers, like the famous Cesar Millan, have been successful working with the mentality of the enforced pack, as I mentioned yesterday. Millan says as long as he is the alpha, the dogs won't fight each other to become an alpha. But Millan has been around working farm dogs (not in-home pet dogs) since he was a child. He knows what he's doing. We didn't. But we learned.

My dogs behave well, and that's mostly a credit to my wife and the training classes we took them to. But it was a lot of work, and I mean a lot of work. And these are breeds known for being friendly people-oriented dogs! Some breeds are better at this stuff than others. But any of them can become problem dogs with poor upbringing.

In the Grandin book I mentioned yesterday, she described the life of her local neighborhood dogs in her childhood in the early fifties, before leash laws and fences were everywhere. "The dogs slept and were fed in their respective homes but ran loose during the day," she writes. "They never got into fights, and they never chewed up the house because they weren't inside the house during the day. They were outside, where they had things to do."

Nowadays dogs, much like children, have trouble dealing with frustration, which makes it escalate straight to rage. (This explains our current political culture, actually. But that's another topic.) Grandin notes that "dogs aren't free anymore. I don't think anyone knows what the effect has been.... I can't tell whether there's definitely more human-directed aggression, although dog bites did increase by 36 percent between 1986 and 1994.... My question is: Are we seeing an unintended consequence of leash laws? By passing laws to make life safer for dogs, did we make it more dangerous for people?"

While dog-bites-man news is proverbially so common it never made the papers, remember that Grandin's past was an era of free-range dogs and people with very little aggregate feelings of kindness toward animals -- it's amazing that dog bites didn't happen in every town eighteen times a day. Would it happen now if we let the dogs all run free again?

This made me wonder about the dog shelters themselves. Back in Grandin's childhood (she was born in 1947), dogs did not stay long in the custody of the dogcatcher before they were euthanized. Nowadays they can spend their entire lives in no-kill shelters. This makes us feel better about the dogs. But note that even PETA finds that there are "deadly consequences to no-kill policies." And they are talking about bad care in some of these facilities; I'm talking about the behavioral effects of dogs being kept for years in a non-family situation. In other words, have no-kill shelters led to generations of bad dogs? Is this another way our attempt at kindness has caused an unintended opposite consequence?

I really don't know. I'm not being coy. I would like to know the answer.

I have great admiration for people who stick it out with tough dogs, more than I can say. I mentioned how hard it was with our very young, very friendly puppies. An older dog that had lived hard at the hands of bad people? I can't imagine I could cope with that.

Tom Shelby, dog trainer to the stars, wrote an interesting book called Dog Training Diaries. This guy has trained hundreds of animals and knows all the tricks -- and even he's given up on some dogs. Here is the ending of one sad tale from the book:

It was this second attack that prompted me to say, “Eunice, I don’t want anyone to be able to say that I was taking money training a dog that should have been put down. Therefore, I’ll work with you for no charge. I’ll take on the challenge for free under the following condition.”
      Eunice crossed her arms across her chest and said, “What condition?”
     “Eunice,” I said. “This is America, land of litigation. I read somewhere that there are more lawyers in this country than in the whole world put together. I want you to sign a memo of understanding acknowledging my stipulation that in order to keep the public safe, Daniel will always be muzzled when in the presence of anyone other than you. No matter how careful anyone is,” I explained. “There’s always human error, be it walking a dog or the Indian Point nuclear facility. By protecting the public, you will also protect yourself, me, and Daniel.”
    To my great astonishment she said, “I won’t sign something like that.” Actually, I was more than astonished. I was shocked at her refusal. “Well, that’s the best I can do, Eunice. Think about it and get back to me if you change your mind.” ....
     No call ever came.

He had been working with dog Daniel for a number of sessions before he had this chat with Eunice. Eunice was socially isolated because Daniel would attack anyone or anything. Shelby had done everything he knew to promote nonviolent behavior and Daniel still went for him. This may be an outstandingly tough case, and Shelby clearly doesn't give up, but A) most people with a dangerous dog can't get a Tom Shelby to help, and B) most people with a dangerous dog will either suffer terribly for it, or abuse the dog, or turn the dog back in, or kill it, or abandon it on the road. There are no good answers.

Probably the best thing we could do for more and better and happier dogs are real, no-nonsense, no-sentiment lessons in school about animal care. Seriously, even kids who grow up in houses with dogs have no idea how hard it is to train a dog for things like not reacting with fury to the doorbell, either because they weren't involved in the training or that it just wasn't done. Unless we've raised a dog, we have a lot of erroneous impressions that need correction. Everybody needs to know from a young age that pets require care and commitment -- even when we don't feel like it.

I think half the trouble we have with homeless dogs comes from people with unrealistic ideas about what they should want from or expect from Man's Best Friend. And that's a pity.