The most important aspect of raising a Jewish dog is the relationship between the owner and the dog. We cannot stress this enough. Everything else—commands, obedience, rewards, and punishments—follows from this.
It is up to you, of course, to create and sustain that relationship. The dog, because it will want to please you unless it is one of those selfish good-for-nothings, will willingly collaborate with you. How, then, should you proceed?
Every dog, like every human being, has a stream of consciousness running in his head during his every waking moment. We’re not saying the dog is aware of it. But it’s there nonetheless. It provides a sort of ongoing commentary on the animal’s experience. We call it the Inner Monologue, and it changes as the dog’s level of training changes.
By observing countless dogs, both in informal settings (at play, while eating, and in other situations when they do not know they are being studied) and in formal sessions (when they are asked an evolving series of weighted questions), we have been able to construct representative scripts of the Inner Monologues of various trained and untrained animals.
The first script represents the Inner Monologue of the untrained dog. We call this the Baseline Inner Monologue because it represents the mental life of every dog, regardless of breed. For the feral animal in the wild, it is the mental voice he will hear throughout his entire life. The more domesticated and trained a dog becomes, the more this baseline monologue will serve as a foundation upon which more elaborate monologues will be built.
BASELINE INNER MONOLOGUE: UNTRAINED DOG
FOOD! FOOD! PLAY PLAY PLAY. MUST GET SQUIRREL. SMELL. SMELL. SMELL. SMELL. SMELL. SMELL. DEAD THING! YIPPEEE! DEAD! MUST ROLL IN IT! ROLLING ROLLING ROLLING . . . AH. OTHER DOG!! SNIFF . . . SNIFF . . . SNIFFSNIFFSNIFFSNIFF OUCH! OKAY! SORRY! WAIT . . . PEE? PEE! WHOSE? SNIFFSNIFFSNIFF . . . OH YEAH? TAKE THIS! AND THIS! . . . SMELL SMELL SMELL SMELL . . . RUNNING! RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING! STOP! WAIT. WHAT IS THAT? WHATISTHAT?? GET IT! GET IT GET IT GET IT GE—— OH. TAIL. OKAY. FINE . . . SLEEP.
As you can see, the mental life of the untrained dog doesn’t exactly provide much to “write home about.” It is crude, impulsive, and unreflective. It displays only the most rudimentary sense of self and is concerned almost entirely with the most basic bodily functions and, sometimes, rolling around in dead things. This, then, is the given. It’s the basic internal noise that must be disrupted—in a nice way, of course—if training is to be successful.
Typical behavior of untrained dog. Owner understandably becomes anxious about where guests will sit, among other things.
Of course, each owner has his or her own Inner Monologue, too. The Inner Monologue of a typical (i.e., non-Jewish-raising) dog owner goes something like this:
BASIC INNER MONOLOGUE: CONVENTIONAL DOG OWNER
THIS ANIMAL IS CUTE/BEAUTIFUL/NOBLE/HANDSOME, BUT HIS INSTINCTS AND DESIRES ARE THOSE OF A “WILD ANIMAL,” WHICH ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH LIFE WITHIN A HUMAN HOUSEHOLD. THEREFORE I MUST—FOR THE DOG’S OWN GOOD AS WELL AS MY QUALITY OF LIFE—TEACH HIM WHICH BEHAVIORS ARE ACCEPTABLE AND WHICH ARE UNACCEPTABLE.
This is the mind-set of most owners when contemplating their new dog, more or less. Notice how its great sophistication and highly abstract quality differs sharply from the simple emotional directness of the untrained dog’s Inner Monologue.
And that’s the problem. Raising a Jewish dog (i.e., making use of our Program) requires creating a relationship between the owner and the dog in which the owner and the dog learn to need each other so much that their Internal Monologues complement and reinforce each other.
Of course, no one is talking about trying to get the mental life of the dog to be exactly like that of a human, or that the owner should try and turn into a dog. We simply mean that their two Internal Monologues should form an organic whole.
And, really, this is not such a strange idea, since the goal of even conventional dog training is the altering of the dog’s Inner Monologue. Unfortunately, with conventional training, we end up with a blandly obedient robotlike creature without any snap or vim or verve. We get something like this:
Conventionally trained dog. Note complete absence of personality.
INNER MONOLOGUE: CONVENTIONALLY TRAINED DOG
I WILL SIT AND STAY AND COME AND HEEL AND DO EVERYTHING MY OWNER HAS TAUGHT ME BECAUSE I AM A GOOD DOG.
Frankly, about this kind of “training,” the less said, the better.
So much for how we don’t want the dog—or the owner—to be. What do we propose instead?
As previously mentioned, our system focuses on raising dogs the way we ourselves were raised as Jewish children and on the ways in which we reacted to that. First, then, the goal is to instill in the dog the assumptions and values our parents instilled in us. They include the following:
• The knowledge that we have to be perfect, or we’ll be very disappointing to those who love us.
• The knowledge that we must be very careful whenever we leave home because the world is full of lunatics.
• The knowledge that most people are out to take advantage of us, so the only people we can really trust are our family.
• The knowledge that, no matter how smart we think we are, we are wrong about certain things, and the sooner we accept that fact, the better.
• The knowledge that we can be really very selfish and hurtful, so thank goodness there are people who are willing to put up with us, although God knows why.
• The knowledge that our hair will always look bad.
Obviously, some of these principles are too sophisticated to be adequately grasped by the dog. That’s why we devoted several years to boiling them down into a small number of essential principles that can be efficiently conveyed to, and understood by, the canine mind. We call them the Four Essential Messages.
For our training program to be successful, the dog must learn, and integrate into his view of you, himself, and the whole universe, the Four Essential Messages. They are:
Teaching the dog the Four Essential Messages. Note how Jax’s expression shows his dawning comprehension.
Dog pondering the contradictions of the Four Essential Messages. You can practically watch the transformation of consciousness take place.
1. You are beautiful, intelligent, talented, and wonderful.
2. You are naive, unrealistic, and a fool.
3. No one will love you as much as I do.
4. When you die, they’re going to have to bury me with you.
These four principles, like all basic axioms, are simple and powerful. Once the dog has absorbed them into his view of himself and of you, he will (whether he is conscious of it or not) begin to ask himself a series of important questions.
Your dog will wonder:
• If I’m so intelligent, why am I so naive?
• If I’m such a fool, how can I be so smart?
• If I’m such a fool, why does the owner love me so much?
• If the owner loves me so much, is it possible that she’s telling me that I’m smart but I’m really not?
• What does the owner mean by “beautiful”? What does he mean by “talented”?
• If the owner loves me so much, why does she tell me I’m a fool?
• If the owner doesn’t love me all that much, why is he telling me I’m so intelligent and talented and wonderful?
• If it will kill the owner if I die, does this mean I’m responsible for her?
These questions are important because once they start circulating in your dog’s consciousness they will replace the more primitive thoughts with which the typical untrained (or poorly trained) dog is usually preoccupied.
However, in order to impart the Four Essential Messages to your dog, you will have to change your own Inner Monologue to that of an Owner Raising a Jewish Dog. It should be something like this:
INNER MONOLOGUE: OWNER RAISING JEWISH DOG
YOU ARE SO CUTE I CAN’T STAND IT. DO YOU KNOW HOW CUTE YOU ARE? DO YOU? I JUST HAVE TO GIVE YOU THIS COOKIE. I JUST HAVE TO GIVE YOU THIS COOKIE BECAUSE YOU’RE SO CUTE. WAIT, COME BACK. WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THAT COOKIE??? DO NOT BURY THAT COOKIE IN THE SOFA! DO NOT B—— OH MY GOD, HE’S BURYING THE COOKIE IN THE SOFA. OH MY GOD, IS HE CUTE. DO YOU KNOW HOW CUTE YOU ARE??? NOW WHAT? YOU WANT ANOTHER COOKIE??? COME ON, LET’S GET YOU ANOTHER COOKIE. BUT YOU HAVE TO EAT IT. OKAY? PROMISE? HERE. WHAT’S THE MATTER? YOU DON’T LIKE IT? ARE YOU SICK? WAIT, I’LL GET YOU SOME ROAST BEEF. WILL YOU EAT THE ROAST BEEF? OKAY, GOOD. BUT YOUR NOSE ISN’T WET. SHOULD WE GO TO THE VET? LOOK AT ME. WHY AREN’T YOU WAGGING YOUR TAIL? WHERE ARE YOU GOING? COME BACK. WAIT. DO YOU STILL LOVE ME?
You can see that this Inner Monologue has several things in common with the Baseline Inner Monologue of the dog: It’s primarily emotional. There are very few abstractions and a lot of urgency and joy and insecurity and pride and worrying about food and hysteria about health. Also note how it is directed not to the owner himself or to some hypothetical listener (like the Inner Monologue of the conventional owner), but to the dog.
“I love you so much, how am I supposed to go to work? ” By the end of our Program, some owners are so bonded with their dogs that they have difficulty leaving the house.
Dog typically responds to overwhelming love by thinking, I love you, too, but go already. The mailman’s coming and I have to get ready.
An owner whose Inner Monologue resembles this one has learned, as we say at the Seminary, to “meet the dog halfway.”
Assuming your own Inner Monologue resembles that of the conventional owner more than that of the owner raising a Jewish dog, how are you to alter yours to suit our system?
Again, we must stress: You don’t have to be Jewish, in either the religious or the cultural sense. You don’t have to convert to Judaism, or study Jewish texts, or take any kind of formal Jewish instruction.
In fact, altering your Inner Monologue from whatever it now is to one more like the sample we’ve given you is fairly easy. All it takes is a few minutes every day, in the presence of your dog. The basic technique is as follows:
1. Stand or sit near the dog, at a distance of no more than two feet. The dog can be sleeping, eating, looking out the window, or engaged in any other activity in which he remains relatively stationary.
2. While staring fondly at the dog, say silently—to yourself, but verbatim, these explicit words—the following series of propositions, which we call the Ten-Point Cycle of Incipient Hysteria.
The Ten-Point Cycle of Incipient Hysteria
1. A dog is a miracle and having one is a blessing.
2. I can’t believe how happy this dog makes me.
3. This is too good to last.
4. In fact, who am I kidding? It won’t last.
5. It won’t last because either something will happen to me or to the dog.
6. Either a disaster will take place or some crazy son of a bitch will come and do something horrible.
7. And even if the dog lives a long life, he’ll probably get cancer. Would I do the chemo or just the radiation? Then there’s the prednisone issue. And what if something happens to me? Who will take care of the dog? No one will love the dog as much as I do. The dog will die of a broken heart, just as I would if the dog himself died.
8. Why does it have to be this way? I’ll tell you why. Because that’s the way the world is.
9. And don’t talk to me about a heavenly reward afterward. There is no Heaven. This is it. This life is it.
10. That’s why you have to value and embrace every possible source of happiness that comes your way. Like, for example, a dog.
Studying the Ten-Point Cycle of Incipient Hysteria. Dog (right) is perplexed by owner’s behavior and wonders why brushing her teeth has become such an ordeal.
Intone these propositions silently, in order, over and over, maybe while washing the dishes or brushing your teeth. You will notice that the last one leads smoothly back to the first. Make a photocopy of the Ten Points and keep it with you for ready reference. After a couple of days you won’t even need it anymore; you’ll have committed the propositions to memory.
After about a week you will notice that your feelings about the dog will have changed. Before this process, you may have regarded the dog with a combination of many different emotions such as affection, exasperation, amazement, annoyance, and love. Some you may have felt strongly, and some not so strongly. Now, however, you will notice that your feelings have grown fewer in number but greater in intensity.
And, as your feelings change, so will your thoughts. Your Inner Monologue will start to resemble the one of the owner raising a Jewish dog. Because, of course, that’s what you’ll be!
You will then be ready to master the techniques discussed in chapter 3, such as “Situational Martyrdom,” “The It’s-All-About-Me Spotlight Grab,” and “Prolonged Being-Very-Disappointed-in-the-Dog.”
Case History: Roxy
BY RABBI MARY-MARGARET
Roxy was a twenty-five-pound beagle-terrier mix that Lily saw running around the street in Simi Valley, California. Being an animal lover, Lily had stopped to help move the dog out of harm’s way when another Good Samaritan gave her the dog’s name and address. Lily was told that the dog was always escaping and that the owners either didn’t care about the dog or were going through a rough time in their lives and were too overwhelmed to bother. Lily took the dog back to the house and rang the bell. “Is this your dog?” she asked. The man said “no” and slammed the door in her face. Lily had no choice but to take the dog home with her.
But Roxy, an alpha, was not particularly nice or friendly to the other dogs in Lily’s world. So Lily decided to find Roxy another home. She searched, in vain, for three weeks. Finally, one day at work, Lily realized she was looking forward to going home and seeing Roxy. That was when she accepted the fact that Roxy was now her dog. Lily stopped off on her way home from work to get the dog an ID tag from the pet store. But when she arrived home she discovered, to her horror, that Roxy had escaped. It took hours of frantic phone calling and walking to track her down.
Thus began one of the most endearing Jewish dog-owner relationships in the history of the BRTS, and the one that most completely embodied the Seminary’s principle of Ultimate Ownership Martyrdom: “As soon as you commit to loving them completely, they leave.”
Once you have transformed yourself (via your Inner Monologue), you will be ready to transform your dog from a wild animal into a Jewish dog, outwardly obedient, inwardly self-conscious and intelligent, and emotionally inseparable from its owner (you!). By the end of our training program, your dog’s Inner Monologue will go something like this:
INNER MONOLOGUE: JEWISH DOG
WHAT’S WITH ALL THE SQUEALING? JUST TO GIVE ME A LOUSY COOKIE? ALWAYS WITH THE SQUEALING AND THE YELLING BEFORE GIVING ME A COOKIE. I NEED THIS? OKAY, I HAVE TO TAKE COOKIES WHEN THEY’RE OFFERED BECAUSE (A) THEY’RE FOOD, AND (B) SHE’LL STOP SQUEALING. EVEN IF I’M NOT HUNGRY I TAKE IT AND PUT IT IN THE SOFA FOR LATER. BECAUSE, LET’S FACE IT, I HAVE TO. FOOD. THIS MAKES HER SQUEAL AND YELL MORE (ABOUT THE SOFA) AND THEN—THIS IS SO TYPICAL—WHAT DOES SHE DO? SHE TRIES TO GIVE ME ANOTHER COOKIE. BUT I’M NOT HUNGRY! IS THAT SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND? SOMETIMES A DOG IS NOT HUNGRY (ALTHOUGH I HAVE TO TAKE THE COOKIE ANYWAY BECAUSE IT’S FOOD). AND SO I HAVE TO BURY THAT ONE IN THE SOFA, TOO (MORE SQUEALING AND YELLING), AND SUDDENLY IT’S THE VET! OR SHE BREAKS OUT THE ROAST BEEF (EXCELLENT FOOD), WHICH, EVEN IF I’M NOT HUNGRY, HOW CAN YOU TURN IT DOWN? YOU CAN’T. YOU CAN’T SAY NO! TO ROAST BEEF. SO NOW I’M EVEN LESS HUNGRY THAN NOT HUNGRY AND I HAVE TO LIE DOWN. MORE SQUEALING. MORE “VET.” MORE TOUCHING ON THE NOSE AND YELLING AND SQUEALING. I’M NOT SICK, I’M FULL. BUT THAT MAKES HER INSANE. I EAT, I DON’T EAT, IT DOESN’T MATTER. THERE’S NO PLEASING HER. EVER.
Thus, the relationship between the Jewish dog and his owner is entirely unlike the relationship (if you can even call it that) between conventional dog and owner. In a conventional relationship, the owner imposes his needs and desires upon the dog, and the dog, within certain limits, alters his behavior in compliance with the owner’s desires. In the relationship between a Jewish dog and his owner, the owner adores and badgers and torments the dog. Then the dog adores and badgers and torments the owner.
Is there a name for this kind of relationship? There certainly is. It’s called love.