I’m often called in to consult for families who are having issues between their kids and their dogs. These can involve either miscommunication between children and their dog or actual aggressive behavior from the family dog.
I remember two little boys who loved their dog very much. I was called in to help with the dog’s jumping and general manners. It wasn’t until I started asking the boys what games they played with their dog that I found out the real reason I was there.
“We chase him in the yard, but then he chases us—”
Mom interjected, “Rex jumps on them.”
The boys apparently felt a bit more bold: “He jumps real hard, and he bites us.”
I asked the boys, “What do you do when he jumps on you?”
“We yell at him and push him off.”
Mom said, “He’s not really biting. He’s just grabbing their clothing, and I heard they should knee him in the chest, but he’s too quick, and they’re too small.”
“Is there anytime you guys have fun with him when he’s not jumping or mouthing you?”
The boys shook their head sadly, as if worried they were going to get into trouble, as Mom said, “No, but they really love him.”
“Is there any other time he jumps on you?” I asked. They really didn’t have to answer that one. I pretty much knew the answer, but I wanted them to feel part of the process.
“When we come home from school.”
The best approach in this situation was to establish a better communication system for the family to use with Rex, ask them to be sure they were rewarding only the wanted behaviors and managing or ignoring the unwanted while making Rex work for everything he wanted. Nothing, from attention to food, would be free for Rex anymore. We set up exercises and management strategies specifically for the boys that would allow them to spend positive time with their dog, empowering them and rebuilding their relationship with Rex. All the yelling and pushing created a dysfunctional relationship. The dog needed to play with them, and jumping and puppy mouthing was all he knew, so he put up with the things he didn’t like—the yelling and kneeing. The boys, meanwhile, wanted to play with the dog they had begged their mom for, so they kept trying to play the only game they knew how to play even though they didn’t like the jumping and occasional mouthing. Left unchecked, this could have resulted in an aggressive bite if the dog had gotten fed up.
(Consultations like this fall into a gray area where animal-assisted education and family behavioral consultations overlap. I often use the same strategies in each to allow the child to feel confident and empowered around the dog without using force or fear—leaving both dog and child at ease with each other while they are rebuilding a relationship that has been strained by a bite or a threat.)
The first exercise I did with the boys and Rex involved teaching him the go say hello command. This taught him to approach the boys with his head at their feet. For kids, this is great because the dog’s snout is not right in their face. For the dog, it’s great because there are yummy treats at the kids’ feet. For the parents, it’s great because this is one of the best remedies for jumping dogs. The boys and I then taught Rex the settle for reading command that we use on a reading visit, when children read books to dogs. Rex learned to just lie next to the boys for yummy snacks while they worked on their reading skills and rebuilt their trust in their dog.
“You’re great at this!” said the boys’ mother at one point during the consultation. “Do you have kids?”
My heart sank because I’d been asked this question on enough consultations to know what was coming after I said, “No, I don’t.”
“Oh, why not? You’re so good with them. You’d be such a great mom!”
I took a breath and deflected the question with the usual jokes: “Dogs don’t borrow the car keys, and you can’t put kids in a crate.”
Parents always laugh at those.
Those moments are always bitter, with a lingering pain that I’ve come to think of as emotional heartburn. Although letting go of the hope for children wasn’t an easy thing to do, I was usually okay with it—except at moments like these.
Inspired by these sorts of consultations and the wise words of my friend and mentor Suz Brooks, who once said to me, “There are many ways to be a mother to someone,” I started setting up school visits for Dante. They were a good opportunity to educate children about proper dog handling. One of our H.A.R.T. team leaders was Danielle Coletta, a third-grade teacher who was eager to bring visiting animals into her classroom. Incorporating the human–animal bond into education in the United States dates back to 1916, when the ASPCA first began formal humane education programs for school children in New York City. In 2002, eighty-six years later, this was still an uphill battle.
Danielle worked tirelessly to convince her principal and superintendent of schools that this program would not be a recipe for disaster. When the hurdle of permissions was cleared, Danielle and I put together a classroom-visiting plan that matched her curriculum. Our goal was to integrate humane education and just-for-fun learning, employing the dogs once a month throughout the year to support the various lessons she was teaching. When her class was working on volunteerism, we would talk about the dog’s volunteer visits. When she was teaching her class about careers, we would talk about all the different kinds of careers that dogs can have. Danielle is a patient and caring teacher who understands that kids, like dogs, need to have fun when learning and that positive reinforcement works just as well for children as it does for pets. This understanding allowed her to use the visits to shape behaviors in her classroom. By behaving well in class, for example, children could move to the top of the list to pet the furry visitors. We were also able to use the canine-interaction skills we were teaching the children to explore important concepts: empathy for others, how to care for another person, accepting differences and working with individuals’ strengths and weaknesses.
After all the work we did in preparation for Dante’s first classroom visit, I was nervous when it came time for the visit itself. Almost immediately, Dante proved I’d had nothing to worry about. Sweeping the kids off their feet, he bounded in, flapping his three-foot tail in a happy-dog circle that caused waves of giggles, to cascade around the classroom as he magically transformed all the students into Dante lovers with his patented tongue-bandito greeting. This first lesson was a general introductory lesson about dogs. Danielle had had the kids read doggie books before the visit and planned to have them write doggie stories or draw doggie pictures afterward. I talked about caring for dogs, feeding and grooming them, where they like to be petted and so on. “They don’t really like to be petted on the head,” I said. “They usually prefer the neck by their ears.” I then gave the kids the rules for the greeting process.
Then, we asked them to come up and pet Dante, who by now was trembling with excitement to see them. Each child had to go through three steps to greet the dog: First, ask the handler if you may pet a dog (dogs without handlers to be asked may not be petted). Second, if the handler says it is okay to pet the dog, hold out your hand gently so the dog can sniff it. Third, once the dog has had a sniff and shown gentle interest, you can pet him around the ears or the chin.
As the kids followed the steps, one by one, Dante sat politely, trying very hard to keep his jittering excitement under control, until each child had finished petting him. Then, with his pent-up exuberance, he uncoiled his overlong tongue and rewarded himself for being a good boy by licking each new buddy from chin to forehead. This elicited belly laughs from some, “Yuck!” from others and restrained smirks from the boys who wanted to look tough.
The first year, we didn’t have Boo help us with the second visit of the fall semester, but once we did, he became a fixture as the second-visit dog, accompanied by another visiting-dog team, usually one of the release guide-dog Labs. Like Boo, many of these dogs had opted for a different career than the one for which they originally studied. They had all been slated to be service guide dogs for a person with visual impairment. For many release guide dogs, the career shift to visiting work is a natural choice.
Sometimes Boo came with the lovely Miss Waverly, a gentle, friendly vanilla Lab, or her mother Leeann, another gentle vanilla soul. (I like to call yellow Labs vanilla because I feel it shouldn’t just be the brown ones who get to be associated with a yummy dessert treat.) Other times, Boo’s partner would be Miss Olympia, Dante’s favorite, easygoing black Lab, or Vesta, sweet and bouncier than some of the other girls. Boo was happy to be with any of these girly dogs, and they were all just lovely with him. Waverly and Leeann, who had both been breeding dogs and had several litters of puppies between them, seemed to take to Boo in a protective way, as if he were one of their pups. Vesta, who was closer to Boo’s age, was his bouncy buddy. Miss Olympia usually looked at Boo as if to say, “You seem nice, but where’s your big brother Dante?”
This second visit, the Boo visit, was really about two big lessons: illustrating clearly for the kids that we all have strengths and weaknesses as we learn and that if we persist, we can all achieve in spite of any limitations; and teaching them that individuals with disabilities are just like you and me. Danielle would prepare the kids by having them read books about dogs and/or people who had special needs or special skills.
We started the visit by asking the kids to identify any differences they saw between the visiting dogs.
“Boo is smaller,” they would ring out in cacophonous chorus—they typically started with the obvious size differences—or, “Waverly is yellow.” It was trickier with Olympia and Vesta, as they were black like Boo and closer to his weight, but a couple obviously detail-oriented kids would shout out, “Boo has white on his toes” or “Boo has white on his belly” or “Vesta has a longer tail.”
Once we had the kids connecting with the dogs, we started demonstrating training methods—verbal commands and hand signals to sit, down, stay and walk on a leash, as well as parlor tricks, if the dog knew them, like paw, crawl or bow—so the kids could see that dogs learned in much the same way they did. Just as teachers show children how to solve a math problem, for example, we show dogs what we need them to do by either luring or shaping. Then, just as children try doing something the teacher asks them to do, the dogs try a command. When they succeed, the kids get rewarded with a good grade or a gold star, while the dogs get a yummy treat. The kids gobbled up these demonstrations.
We had to describe the differences in how we lure and shape dogs because it’s somewhat different from how we teach kids. When we lure dogs, we usually take a snack or toy and have the dogs follow that with their nose until their body is in the desired position (sit, down, etc.), then we praise and reward. Soon afterward, we attach the verbal command, and we are on our way to training a verbal command. When shaping, we simply wait for the dog to do something we like and then praise and reward it. The dog will do it more frequently to earn more rewards, and soon after we can jam our command in just before the dog goes into the routine, again putting us on our way to building a verbal command. Both are valuable in many ways. I prefer luring for quick, simple things like sits and downs, but I like shaping for complex things like tricks, and occasionally I will use both together.
Switching the kids’ interest from training the behaviors to the dogs actually using those skills on visits, we would describe the types of visits the dogs make, the kinds of people they see and the things they need to know to do this work. When possible, we would bring some pictures of the dogs at work and at home living with their families (humans and animals). I had pictures of Boo as a baby wrestling with Dante, about ten times his size, and pictures of Boo snuggling on the couch with Merlin, the aloof gray cat, or doing some group begging with Atticus. The students gazed at the pictures, enchanted.
Once the kids finished devouring the pictures, we would ask them what they thought of these dogs. “We love them!” the kids always chorused.
The natural next question was, “What do you think the dogs’ families or the people they visit feel about them?”
Again the kids would sing out, “They love them!” And they were right. These kids understood clearly what many adults miss—that these animals were loved like family members.
These questions had a purpose. Just like shaping any behavior, we were incrementally shaping how the kids would approach the real topic of the discussion, which we reached when I asked very slowly, to be sure they all heard me clearly, “What would you think if I told you Boo had some disabilities?”
Danielle has reported to me that she always loves this moment in the visits more than any other. We could almost hear the kids blinking as they sat silently, pondering the question. Before they could answer, we showed them Boo’s disabilities by demonstrating the simple commands again, but this time asking the kids to watch carefully for the differences between the two dogs and their behaviors. When both dogs lay down at the same time, the kids could clearly see the difference between them. The Lab would pull herself downward to the floor effortlessly, fluidly, as if doing a long-practiced yoga exercise. Boo’s difficulty was obvious in comparison, as he would struggle just to get his front legs out, strain to flop his back end over and finally fall clumsily onto the floor. The kids were mesmerized, watching closely as if they were trying to see the sleight of hand in a magic trick.
We demonstrated another behavior that clearly showed Boo’s mobility difficulties: the paw parlor trick. Whichever Lab girl had come with us would gracefully lift a front paw and place it gently into her handler’s waiting palm. Boo, in the meantime, struggled to pick up one front foot without falling over, and once he had done that, the best he could manage was to thrust his wobbling leg out like somebody might thrust a crutch or a cane out to point at something. If he got lucky, his paw might hit my waiting hand, but it was always a rough movement, as if he were swatting away a bug. It was comical, sad and inspiring. Boo tried so hard to do the requested parlor trick and seemed so happy and proud that he got sort of close to it. It made me think of the high-wire clowns who always look like they’re about to fall when they’re really in complete control—except Boo really always was just about to fall.
The kids were now primed for the big question: “Does this change how you feel about Boo?”
They proclaimed without pause, “No!”
“Is he just as nice, fun and lovable as the other dog?”
“Yes!”
“What about people?” we asked. “Do you think a person with disabilities might be just as nice, fun and lovable as a person without disabilities?” The kids’ mental gears whirled as they pondered this, and we could discuss the idea that everyone has strengths and limitations just like Boo. This sparked a lively class discussion, and the third graders always concluded that we should all accept everyone’s differences, limitations or disabilities unconditionally, just as they had accepted Boo unconditionally. It was an incredible joy to see Boo help kids decide to accept others without prejudice.
The joy had a personal dimension as well because, while my disabilities are mild compared with other folks’, I know the sting of being stared at and judged. I could usually hide my dyslexia, but occasionally a job duty—composing an e-mail or drafting a press release—would expose my “condition,” as some people euphemistically liked to call it.
My physical disabilities were more difficult to conceal, and my inability to do so meant I often found myself in situations that were beyond humiliating. Two times before I started using a cane and stopped riding the subway, I fell in a crowded rush-hour train car. It was a new kind of shame for me to lay in the middle of an early-morning mob of bleary-eyed, impatient New Yorkers, everyone just staring at me because I’d inconvenienced them—with not one offer of help. It made me realize just how much people with a disability are often viewed as an annoyance or an intrusion by “normal” people. Now, with Boo, I could show these kids another way to respond to differences and disabilities: with affection and acceptance. Maybe one day one of those kids would grow up to be the person on that crowded train car in the future who doesn’t look with scorn on the fallen, humiliated woman and actually holds out a hand to help her get up and regain her dignity.
When we asked the kids to write stories and draw pictures of ways they planned to reach out to someone they knew who had special needs, we told them they could be a person or a dog who was offering help. Most of them chose to be a dog, and when they drew their pictures, they were often little black dogs with some white on their chests and paws. Although the effectiveness of dogs and other affiliative animals to help teach empathy, compassion, self-worth, nurturing and other positive human traits was obvious to us on these visits and has long been anecdotally accepted by individuals and families with pets, it’s only in the last two decades that solid research has shown us how right so many pet owners have been over the years. Elizabeth Omerod, veterinary surgeon and chair of the Society for Companion Animal Studies in London, noted, “For many years, the valuable role of pets in children’s development has been recognized. But recently, the positive health, educational and therapeutic benefits of having pets have been scientifically investigated and acknowledged…. Studies demonstrate that children who interact with animals have higher levels of self-esteem, greater empathy and better social skills.”
In addition to providing training and testing for visiting teams like Boo, Dante and me, Pet Partners has been at the forefront of getting the word out about the many advantages there are for children who interact with pets. For instance, one Swedish study suggested that pet exposure during the first year of life is associated with a lower prevalence of allergic rhinitis and asthma in children ages seven to thirteen years old. Other assorted studies linked family ownership of a pet with high self-esteem and greater cognitive development in young children. Kids with pets at home score significantly higher on empathy and prosocial scales than those without pets do. Scientists know that when adults and children are under pressure, a number of stress hormones circulate through their entire systems, and while these hormones immediately affect mood, they can ultimately cause inflammation in cells throughout the body. We have also learned that petting our dogs, cats or other domesticated affiliative animals creates other neurochemicals that generate calm, happiness and a sense of well-being. Some therapy animals have been called furry Prozac. Sometimes I feel that pets are like duct tape: is there anything they can’t do for us?
The fall I started the humane education program with Danielle’s third-grade class, Mom and Dad came up for a visit to see the leaves of the Northeast and spend some time with Lawrence and me for our early October birthdays. Our communication was more easygoing than it had ever been before. Mom and Dad enjoyed spending time with the dogs (and probably Lawrence and me, too). As Dad watched me working, I could tell he found my positive-reinforcement methods curious. He came from the old school of dog training, with heavy-handed punishment. At one point, Boo did something other than what I’d asked for, and Dad said, half jokingly, “In the old days, we’d just take a newspaper to that.”
When I started explaining that my training choices were based on the positive-reinforcement quadrant of operant conditioning and that I wanted to avoid the fallout of punishment, I could almost see the wheels spinning in Dad’s head. His degree in childhood education and psychology gave us a common ground of learning theories and the parallels between how all animals—two-footed and four-footed—learn and process information. He actually thought about what I had said, and I spied him later on praising Boo for leaving something on the floor alone instead of picking it up. Dad’s recovery had removed his harsh, judgmental streak. I was shocked that I had a welcome, strangely settled feeling about my relationship with him after so many years.
I couldn’t take Mom and Dad on one of the in-school visits, but luckily, their arrival coincided with the AATEA class, and I was able to bring them to one of our more lively sessions. This was the same class, with some tweaks, additions and subtractions, that I had been teaching since the early days with Dante—the class geared to prepare teams for their evaluation and teach them the skills they would need for the actual visiting.
Mom and Dad had no idea I would be putting them to work when they attended the class, but they got to play various roles as clients that the teams in training might meet on a visit. They were given faux limitations, such as a limp (since Dad had just had his knee replaced, he didn’t need to fake that one), an inability to reach out with their arms, bad hearing or any number of other possibilities we could come up with to prepare the teams to be on their toes when visiting. Buried within Mom and Dad was a sense of mischief that had begun to shine in their retirement, so they were good at this exercise and thoroughly enjoyed the managed chaos of silly toys dancing all over the floor, balls bouncing everywhere and teams trying to keep their dogs focused on their visits.
Mom and Dad had such a blast in the class and on their trip in general, taking pictures of all the lovely colors of the leaves we had that season, that they spoke of it for years afterward. Although Dad and I had not spoken about the abuse since his suggestion that I go to Al-Anon meetings, we had spoken about recovery in general terms, and we knew we were walking parallel paths and had made pretty good progress on our individual quests for contentment. Mom had long ago dropped any involvement in any kind of recovery, but she still benefited from Dad’s continuing work in AA. In spite of the fact that I was the world’s greatest pessimist, I could honestly say that their trip up—along with all the positive communication that went with it—showed me that Mom, Dad and I had reached a turning point, a place of quiet calm. We were all pretty happy with that.
Boo, too, was happy as he continued to enjoy his visits with the kids in Danielle’s classroom. The second time I brought him for the acceptance visit, none of the additional teams could make it. I had no idea how we were going to compare Boo with another dog, so instead I asked the kids to compare him with their recollection of Dante from the first visit of the semester. They remembered that Dante had lain at my side in a one-hip-over position (a hard-earned settle command), patiently waiting until he was cued to get up and greet, at which point he went from a casual, lounging dog to his more typical mister-happy-go-lucky tongue bandito, until I asked him to settle again for the wrap-up of the visit.
Boo, of course, was different. There were only a few places where he felt comfortable lying down for long durations, and the hard floor of the classroom wasn’t one of them. During the presentation portion of his visits, he would usually be up and moving around, sniffing various things while staring happily and invitingly at the kids, panting his happy goofy pant. When it became clear to him that the kids weren’t going to be saying hello right away, he would begin to sniff around my chair or behind me while I made boring “blah, blah, blah” human noises.
Boo’s habit of continually moving in the same pattern could be very distracting to some of the other teams on visits, so when we had another dog with us, I usually had to give Boo a truckload of treats to keep him in a sit or a down. Since there were no other dogs on this visit, however, I let him do what he liked. He spent the introduction portion of the class exploring desks, pencil trays and the overhead projector, all while on leash. He only had six feet to range, but he found many things in that space. As always, as he explored, he occasionally bumped into things, and the kids giggled as if he were clowning around on purpose.
When we got to the part where I asked the students if they could see any differences between Boo and what they remembered of Dante, they said many of the things I had expected.
“Dante is much bigger,” said a few of the kids.
“Dante is brown with black, and Boo is black and white,” said another handful of kids.
“Dante is lazy,” said one kid. Taken aback, I asked him why he thought that. “Because,” he said, “Dante just laid there last time, but Boo is really busy.”
I couldn’t explain to the kids that Dante’s “laziness” (that well-practiced settle command) was a huge achievement that had taken years of practicing and perfecting and that Boo would never be able to achieve these levels of cognitive success, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the kids loved both dogs and thought it was great fun that Boo was busy investigating, sniffing around and occasionally bumping into things for their amusement.
My Little Boy Boo was sweet, soft, clueless, poor-sighted and clumsy, but when it came to tackling major life lessons, he was a master of deftness and poise.