It always comes down to this for me. Would I live with that dog? You see, I don’t endorse dogs for adoption lightly; that’s bad business for dog trainers. If I’m going to put my name behind a dog, he or she has to be a dog I’d honestly and freely welcome into my own home. I’m also not the kind of dog trainer who adopts rehab cases. I want to live with a just-plain typical dog, magical yes, but in the way ordinary dogs find magic by settling deep into your heart.
My dogs are those kind of dogs. They are mutts, as we used to call such gifts, mixed breeds of questionable origin. But, this isn’t really about them. It’s not about my adopting a dog either; our house and our hearts are full. This is about other ordinary dogs, magical dogs with no home, mutts whose origins and looks draw their worth into question. They are dogs who’ve touched my heart and even now risk breaking it.
Tara
When I posted pictures of Tara and Oreo on my facebook page, my brother posted only one question about them. “Are they pit bull mixes?” The question made me angry, and at first I wasn’t exactly sure why. My answer to him was staid. Breed identification based on visual observation is only about 30% accurate. He didn’t reply.
I met Tara and Oreo more than two months ago. They were scrappy adolescent dogs pulled from the streets of the Corridor of Cruelty in Houston and placed directly into a boarding facility. Oreo was literally a mangy mutt, black and white, slightly squared at the jaw. Tara was and is brown and muscular with a blocky head and slanted amber eyes. My job was to assess them and a third dog, a shepherd mix named Skipper, for a program called Project HEEL. The program places homeless dogs from Corridor Rescue Inc. with teenage boys in the custody of The Harris County Juvenile Probation Department. When I first met them, the three dogs ran amok and were definitely untrained. Nevertheless, they got along well and within a week they were sent off to a juvenile probation home in the rural reaches of a Houston Suburb.
Oreo
It’s hard to ignore the parallels – tough-looking dogs with tough-looking teenage boys, all behind the double locked doors and barbed wire of the county. For the dogs and the boys both, the trouble is more about how they look, than what they’ve done or ever will do. The boys at least know what they’re up against when they get out. The dogs have no idea. Block headed, bully bodied, banned in some places. They are totally, if not blissfully, unaware of how hard it will be for them to find a place in this world, a home, a family.
Someone claimed Skipper, the shepherd mix, weeks before Project HEEL ended. Skipper’s leash will be handed to his new guardians at a graduation ceremony. No one will take Tara’s leash, or Oreo’s leash, the ones my brother summarily asked about. They will return to their crates, and if time runs out they will go back to the boarding facility to wait. I don’t know for how long. I also don’t know if they are pit mixes. It doesn’t matter. They look the part and that’s enough of a mark against them. And here’s the irony , bitter as it may be.
I’d live with either of these dogs, Tara, Oreo. I would if it weren’t for the dogs who’ve already claimed me. Tara, tough as she may look, with her muscled body and serious eyes, would have a place beside me – curled and pressed against my chest please. Oreo would learn tricks and accompany me on TV, the eager learner, the clown. I’ve looked at each of them squarely and asked myself soberly, would I live with that dog. The answer is yes. I’d put my name behind either of theirs, and let them settle into my heart to find the magic life of an ordinary dog.
I don’t endorse dogs lightly, but these are dogs with whom I’d live. Wouldn’t you? Won’t you? Please.
The place is about 25 minutes north of where anyone ever really goes. It’s out past where the road narrows to one lane in each direction. It’s where the houses are more spread out, too far out to be the suburbs, not quite far enough to be out-in-the-country. It’s an easy drive, and easy to find too. Just head north and hang a hard left outside my comfort zone.
When I was 5 or 6 years old I asked my dad when I’d have to go to jail. My older sister was dating a drug dealer at the time and he’d been sent off. I figured that everyone went to jail sometime because that’s what happened to Ricky, “the pusher” my parents called him. My dad assured me I didn’t have to go to jail, and that no one in our family had ever been there either. Ricky was different, not like us. Maybe so, I don’t’ know. I never did go to jail as it turns out. I didn’t even have to go to a public school.
I could lie and say the place looks like a high school. Sure enough there were teenage boys playing basket ball out back, lanky and laughing. But the court was in a big yard surrounded by a big fence with wire on top. This was jail, jail for kids. It has a nicer name than just that, and the good people who work here are focused on helping the kids make things right. Still, the boys can’t just leave at the end of the day. They’re locked in. There’s some hard truth to that fact and it’s not easy to forget.
The doors buzz open, and lock, and echo hollow despair just like real jail doors. I sign in and they run a magnetic wand over me just to be sure I’m not brining in anything metal, anything that could be a weapon. I’m not. It’s just a car key, and my driver’s license. They walk me down a wide hall, government sparse and clean, to a room near the end on the left side, another left just a bit further than I’d ever gone before.
This is my dog training class for the next 8 weeks. There are 6 boys whose names I’m not allowed to share. They are 17 and younger, brown skinned every one, polite, engaging, relaxed. We’re in a large space that could be the common room in any university dorm building. On the left wall are three large dog crates. I met the dogs a week before I met the boys and I can share their names: Oreo, Skipper, and Tara. They are all under a year, black or brown coated, friendly, and fast asleep.
The dogs, every one, came from a part of town called The Corridor of Cruelty. It’s the kind of place you don’t ever go to if you grew up in North Dallas and were afraid even of public school. It’s like where my mom confronted the pusher’s parents, where the police came to get Ricky, to take him to jail. Police come to these places a lot. And guys who fight dogs on the weekends for fun, even if not for money, dump their old stock here, rejects and bait dogs. The dogs wander and starve. They have their puppies and whither in the heat or shiver in the cold. The place has bones bleached white, carcasses of dogs gone dead before anyone cared or could even think of caring. This is where my three students came from, the dogs. I don’t know where the boys came from. I couldn’t say even if I did know.
Women save the dogs. That’s the way it is mostly. It started with just one who gathered the others and formed a group to help the dogs in the Corridor. They named themselves after the place long after they started feeding dogs, luring them into cars and putting them in foster homes. The dogs are just dogs mostly, mixes of this and that, genetics unknown. Some look like pit bulls, but very few are fighters. That’s probably why they ended up here. Fighting dogs don’t get dumped.
There are two boys for every dog in the dorm on the left side of the long hall. Adolescent dogs with adolescent boys, I don’t know if it’s love but they’re attached to each other already. How does that happen so fast?
From Left: Skipper, Tara, and Oreo
Team Oreo are two black 16 year old kids. One of them plays basketball. When I was explaining how we make learning easy for the dogs and increase difficulty gradually, he told me he could play four quarters of a game straight through now but when he was first starting he could only play one or two. That’s exactly the way it is, I said. His training partner doesn’t talk much, if at all. Oreo is a black and white pit mix, 7 or 8 months old. He play bites. Attention slips away from him quickly, but he’s sharp and fast. He’s the first to nail a left finish with his own added style. He comes when called but struggles with stay. He’s perfectly matched to his boys in those regards.
Team Tara is lead by a fiercely intelligent 17 year old African American boy with freckles and reddish hair. He likes math, loves numbers he says. He makes eye contact and shakes hands and asks more questions than the others. Why are you here? I want to ask, but I decided going into this that I wouldn’t ask, not any of them. Like in team Oreo, the other boy is younger and quieter. Tara herself is the only female, brown and blocky. She’s the one who looks most like a pit bull, but not all the way. She and Oreo have bonded and play with abandon. Still, when she is working she’s intense and serious. Just like her boys.
Team Skipper are two Latin boys who appear to be good friends, more so than the other teams. They share responsibilities equally and sometimes laugh and joke. But other times the shorter one wanders off without ever taking a step, staring down at the grass, leaving us while he stands there, traveling far beyond the fence and down the road and into the city. Then, just as suddenly as that, he returns. Skipper is the youngest dog. He still has some of his juvenile teeth. When it’s time to line up and take the dogs outside, he’s brought out of his crate last because he can’ t hold his bladder. Skipper is a quiet cooperative dog. He’s the only one to walk on a regular leash and collar (the others use Gentle Leader Head Collars).
In so many ways this class is like all the others. The boys are learning the mechanical and timing skills of dog training. They’re learning not to repeat cues, and how to be patient with their impulsive young dogs. But, this class is different too. The stakes are high, higher for these boys than it is even for the dogs in their care. They are focused and responsive and engaged at a level much greater than any of my other clients. Raising and training these dogs matters to them. I won’t presume to know why. It may be that everything matters here, every skill, every lesson, every bond. If something goes wrong again they won’t come back here. It won’t be jail for kids. It will just be jail. The stakes are high.
I saw a picture on facebook today. It showed a big hand draw circle with the label “where the magic happens.” Then there was a smaller separate circle off to the right: “Your comfort zone.” I wonder. Am I where the magic happens? More dogs die in the Corridor of cruelty every year than come out. Oreo, Tara and Skipper are the exceptions. And what about these boys? What about all these boys, in the other dorms, or on the outside in the city trapped in their own private prisons? What about the ones who go quiet, who stare down at the grass and wander away in their minds to who-knows-where, escaping who-knows-what?
I always push on the door just before the buzzer unlocks it. I’ve always been awkward like that, a bit too anxious to leave, a bit nervous about being locked in. When do I go to jail, Dad? When do I get out? I settle into my car, tired from teaching and dirty from jumping dogs. I stare up at the deep blue winter sky and then at the high school that’s really not. This has to be where the magic happens. I believe in magic, and it has to be here.
Seriously, most of my days are good days. My best days are Tad days.
It takes me a little more than an hour to get to the clinic where Tiffany and Tad work. On the way I think about Tad, how much he’s improved, and the work we still need to do. I also sing along (a bit too loudly) to some of my favorite music, but that’s off the subject.
The truth is Tad is improving – a lot. I walked into the treatment area of the clinic unannounced and he didn’t make as much as a peep. Tiffany says he’s not barking very much at all when he’s in that area looking out into the lobby. He doesn’t bark at all anymore when the front door chime rings; and he greets people nicely in the lobby.
We focused this visit on teaching Tad some manners in the treatment area (go to your spot and stay). We also addressed his habit of biting for attention during play. Play biting isn’t the same as emotionally driven fear biting or so-called aggressive biting. Still, it hurts just the same. I was pleased when Tad and I played a bit and he didn’t bite me. I was equally chagrined when he gave Tiffany a few good chomps.
For dogs, the function of bites that are rooted in fear or aggression are all about making something stop or go away. The function of play bites is to get something going. The motivation is totally different. How do we stop it? First, we teach Tad how to control his play. Good dog play includes pauses, short breaks. Watch dogs at play and you’ll see them stop and start often. That’s the polite way to play. So we’re teaching Tad how to start play with humans (when we prompt it) and how to “settle,” which means sit and take a short break. The idea is to keep these training sessions short so Tad doesn’t get excited enough to bite. If he bites and ignores the “settle” cue, he gets a “too bad” and a time out. For a social animal like Tad, nothing could be worse than losing a round of play for a trip to the penalty box. That’s how he’s going to learn to watch his mouth.
Tad uses his teeth a lot playing with dogs too. That got me wondering about the great mystery of his past. A lot of play biters were single puppies, or puppies removed from the litter too early (prior to 7 weeks of age). Was Tad an only child? Did he loose his siblings too early? Puppies are good about teaching their littermates to mind their mouthy manners. I get the sense Tad missed out on this learning.
Dogs can’t tell their own stories. We’re left to wonder, what was Tad’s life like before Tiffany found him, skinny and sick, lost and forgotten? So much of his behavior tells us he lived with people. Who were they? Did they send him away or just let him wander off? Was it because of the biting? Do they think about him? Do they miss him?
I think about that on my way home, south on I-45 toward Houston, almost 6 months to the day from when Tiffany found Tad. I don’t know, but I believe dogs draw from a deep well of forgiveness. I like to think Tad’s moved on and doesn’t dwell on the hurt of past offenses the way we humans do. There’s lots to learn from all this. The thing is it’s hard to tell sometimes who’s doing the learning and who’s doing the teaching.
It’s a hot Fall day in southeast Texas and there are plump promising rain clouds on the horizon. Tad’s improving, and it’s already better than a good day. Time to turn up the music and sing.
