04.11.07
Dogs Learning New Tricks
This is a sad but encouraging doggy tale with at least one happy ending…
Excerpted from New Tricks, New York Times Magazine, April 8, 2007. www.nytimes.comby Charles Siebert, a contributing writer who has reported frequently on animals, is at work on Humanzee, a book about humans and chimpanzees.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Diane Mollaghan called out as I rummaged one recent winter afternoon through the costumes and props she had stored in the back room of a run-down house trailer on the grounds of the Town Lake Animal Center in Austin. Mollaghan, a 34-year-old animal-behavior researcher and graduate student in the University of Texas’s psychology department, was waiting in the trailer’s main room beside a tan-and-brown mutt that had recently been left in the shelter’s night drop-off box with no ID tags or background-information form. Estimated by the shelter’s staff members to be a “Manchester terrier mix,” it looked like a pointy-faced Chihuahua on stilts, a creature of indeterminate origin and yet-to-be-determined disposition. That, literally, was where I was to come in. All afternoon I had been helping Mollaghan conduct various trait-assessment tests on shelter recent arrivals.
[About two MILLION homeless, abandoned dogs are euthanized in this country yearly, half of the four million taken in by animal shelters. That is about 5,000 dogs daily, or one very 16 seconds. (The numbers are even higher for cats.) As many as 25 percent of these dogs are purebreds; often the reasons for their abandonment are frivolous.]
Dog mania being at an all-time peak in this country, it is difficult to say whether such profligacy with our pooches is a logical phenomenon or a wholly paradoxical one. A recent survey of the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association estimates that Americans house some 74 million dogs. And with the often factorylike production of ever more new puppies to satisfy growing consumer demand, the 5 percent of owned dogs that wind up disowned each year could be thought of as the inevitable spillage that attends all forms of mass consumption. Except, of course, for the simple, discomforting fact that the “product” in question is not only a living being but also our proverbial best friend, our most loyal and longtime animal companion.
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The animal shelter, a place long consigned to being a lost pet’s last, is fast becoming among the most likely places to find a lasting pet. A number of shelters… have broadened their scope [to include efforts to re-socialize abandoned dogs, and] have reported… improvements [in spite of the usual underfunding and sparce resources.]
At the Humane Society in Minneapolis, puppies that graduated from socialization classes were found to be far less likely to be returned after adoption. At the Town of North Hempstead Animal Shelter on Long Island, a volunteer shelter-dog training program initiated in 1999 cut the euthanasia rate by 50 percent in just six months. According to a 2006 survey of shelters in Ohio conducted by Ohio State University”s College of Veterinary Medicine, the outlook for dogs in shelters has greatly improved in the past 10 years, thanks partly to spay/neutering programs and also to a big increase in the number of shelters that have an established partnership with a veterinary practice. There has been a 16 percent decrease statewide in the number of dogs taken in each year and a 39 percent decrease in the number of dogs euthanized.
Dogs still are animals, our endless manipulations and misperceptions of them notwithstanding, and it has now become the added and somehow logical role of animal shelters, in concert with local veterinarians, pet stores and dog breeders, and an ever-growing network of applied animal behaviorists and trainers, to remind us of this simple truth. To help us step back and readdress our best friends again. Mollaghan speaks of her approach as a three-part puzzle: Try to get a handle on the dogs. Try to read a potential adopter”s personality and expectations. And, finally, develop the relationship element itself ” try to get a sense of how people are choosing their dogs, what criteria they’re using.
The first part can be particularly daunting. Any abandoned dog is the living embodiment of a broken bond of some sort, an intriguing if maddeningly inarticulate emissary of some prior human entanglement. The challenge for shelter workers trying to re-home that animal, of course, is to get a firm enough idea of its disposition, which naturally deteriorates with every passing second the dog spends among its equally miserable fellow captives, to feel fairly confident that they’re not dispatching a ticking time bomb into someone’s life.
“The timing of these tests is pretty sensitive,” Mollaghan said as we made our way to the kennel of our next test subject, “because of the stress response of these animals.” The very act of our passing by them, Mollaghan explained, contributes to their decline, setting dogs off into a frenzy of barking and jumping because, invariably, some other visitor stopped once before and spoke to them and took them out on a lead. It’s a syndrome known as “conditioned frustration.”
“They were rewarded once,” Mollaghan went on to say, “so they behave that way whenever anyone passes. Why do people continue to gamble in the face of constant losing? Because they won once.”
…
“They pick up on [other cues] too,” Mollaghan told me. “A lot of them start to vomit or soil themselves the minute they enter the euthanasia room.”
On the way to retrieving our day’s last subject, fate delivered me a far more intimate look at the other two parts of Mollaghan’s puzzle and the larger dramas of modern-day dog adoption than I had ever anticipated getting. It happened at Stray 3, Kennel No. 252. Two names were listed on her data sheet: Cricket and Olive. A twice-abandoned “border terrier mix.” Tiny. Just over 12 pounds. A breathing bundle of gray-and-white carpet lint with long pipe-cleaner-like legs, a slight underbite and the proverbial button eyes. I’d have guessed the first-ever mating of a Maltese and a spider monkey. But whatever unknowable admixture of cockeyed progeny, behavioral flaws and human perversions had led to this creature’s double exile, it made no difference to me. I had lost not only my journalistic objectivity, my so-called reporterly remove, but also all remnants of reason and rationality. I was, in a word, sunk.
Mollaghan was on to me before I’d uttered a word: to the fact that I was both instantly becoming one of her human test subjects and already committing the classic shelter-shopper faux pas. I was going on first impression, mere appearance. I’d fallen for one of the “cutesy” dogs, one whose very presence there among the dime-a-dozen midsize mixes that I should, in good conscience, have been considering, only further bewitched me, the way she calmly and mutely came right up to greet me amid a maelstrom of barking and jumping kennel mates.
Back at Mollaghan’s office, we learned the following about Cricket/Olive: a spayed female, approximately 2 years old, found three days before, roaming the grounds of the Anderson Oaks town-home community. This was, we soon verified, her second stint at Town Lake. There was no information on her original owner, but as for her second, a guy named Forbes, records showed that he adopted her from Town Lake seven weeks earlier. An immediate message had been left on Forbes’s answering machine and an e-mail sent, quoting the usual reclaim fee of $50 and giving him a three-day deadline to reclaim his dog.
“That’s today,” I said.
“Yep,” Mollaghan said, staring up at the office clock, which read 6:40 p.m. “He’s got until closing. Twenty minutes.” And then we learned this: I didn’t have a prayer. Even if Forbes didn’t show, three others before me had dibs on Cricket/Olive. “So much for that,” I said, my sudden scheme of returning to Brooklyn and surprising my wife, Bex, and our own shelter-adopted terrier mix, Roz, evaporating as quickly as it had coalesced.
“Not necessarily,” said Mollaghan, who, I soon learned, was hatching a scheme of her own, one that would pivot around her intimate knowledge of the fickleness of dog adopters and certain nuances in the dog-adoption process itself. No. 2 on the waiting list turned out to be a rescue group. If, Mollaghan explained, she could get the rescue group to defer to me as its ideal adopter, that would legitimately leapfrog me to the slot just behind the first C.I. (customer interest) on the list, a man named Welch. He had happened upon Kennel No. 252 the day Cricket/Olive arrived. Welch’s deadline clock of 36 hours would commence ticking the day after the one expired on Forbes.
Seven p.m. would come and go that evening with no sign of the mercurial Mr. Forbes. Beneath the once daunting list of the three other prior C.I.’s for the dog, Mollaghan now typed the following: “Charles Siebert (visiting journalist from nytimes mag) also has strong interest in Cricket a k a Olive. I will advise him to contact rescue if the other app. falls through.”
…
Kennel No. 227 in Stray 3, one of the kennels for larger dogs, held a light tan, somewhat undernourished-looking pit bull named Lana. She hugged to the back corner of her kennel and, upon being greeted, began to tremble uncontrollably. Mollaghan opened the gate, went in and crouched down, very low, so as to be less threatening. A petite woman with a round-eyed, elfish face, she seemed utterly fearless and under control at all times. She waited a bit longer in silence. Called out again. More trembling.
“If I were to go any closer,” Mollaghan said to me in a hushed voice, “this dog would definitely bite me.”
She stepped gingerly back outside and locked the gate. She pulled out the stat sheet from the plastic pouch on the front of Lana’s kennel, telling me that they get dogs like her all the time. They usually have names like Nitro or Cocaine or Killer, dogs that spend their lives chained in yards, having no contact with other dogs or humans.
It had been, up until then, a fairly positive afternoon as shelter-dog days go. We had tested a young but extremely well-balanced Labrador-cattle dog mix that responded to the taffeta-doll dance and my rain-coated flasher-man get-up with what seemed like a perfectly appropriate mix of curiosity and concern. He was followed by a 7-year-old husky-malamute, a dog that countenanced the entire battery of assessments with such a world-weary calm that he somehow rendered us, the testers, the species under examination. We didn’t rate too well when it came to Lana. She would be put down the following afternoon.
[Sparky was much luckier.] Sparky’s new owners, Elizabeth and Dennis Cole, had previously had a bad experience with an adopted shelter dog orphaned by Hurricane Katrina. Elizabeth Cole came to Town Lake and had a pre-adoption consultation with Mollaghan to discuss what she was looking for in a dog. Sparky, Mollaghan told me, was not the match she would have made, but after their consult, Cole went off by herself among Town Lake’s kennels and immediately fell for Sparky.
“I like recycled men,” Cole told me as we sat sipping coffee in her backyard. “My husband’s first marriage ended in divorce.” After Cole chose Sparky, Mollaghan immediately went to work on the dog, taking him out of his kennel and keeping him beside her in her office each day. She gradually conditioned him to human company and was able to temper his aggression. Now, in the Coles’ backyard, she was instructing their 11-year-old son, Criss, on how to manage an extremely contented-looking, mild-mannered Sparky on the lead. He had been with the Coles now for four months. A real-life canine rags-to-riches story.
“We basically got him for our son,” Elizabeth Cole told me, smiling broadly. “But now I’m totally in love.”
I asked if there were any lingering problems with Sparky, who was now at my feet, gleefully absorbing a back rub. Cole said the only thing was that he refuses to go up stairs. It all only further fueled my fervor for Olive, convincing me that whatever it was that got her twice tossed by her previous owners, it could be overcome.
As things turned out, however, I needn’t have worried. About any of it. The following day, another deadline on Olive came and went. Mollaghan phoned me at my hotel at 1 p.m. sharp to say that the little girl was mine. Three months have passed. Olive and Roz play and nap together all day long, sleep at night intertwined. No sign whatsoever to date of that inner devil. It’s hard for me to imagine now why she was never reclaimed, or why her next suitor never showed. I’ve often thought of picking up the phone to try to find out, but somehow it’s better not knowing. Sometimes, Mollaghan told me, a dog’s behavior just hews to and mirrors the environment that it’s living in, and there is something deeply reaffirming, heartening in that. Just as there is in watching the daily loosening of Olive’s abandonment anxiety: from the early days of her following everywhere at my heels, even when I got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night, to now seeing her dare solo, field-long dashes during our walks in the park, nearly out of sight, just because she feels that she can.
