Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

coat on and then taking it off, giving the dog some more liver as he did. I felt my eyes starting to close, the way Freud’s had the minute he got up on the stage. I thought if I fell asleep, chances were I’d drool, too. But I didn’t fall asleep. I kept thinking of how sick this dog must have gotten eating all that desiccated liver.
    “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever have any happiness in my life,” Martyn was saying, his eyes appropriately downcast now.
    Rick’s guy was still going to the closet and sitting down, still giving treats but getting nowhere, certainly not out the door. I wondered why Rick didn’t suggest a little obedience training and a shitload of exercise. How could anyone expect a young, strong, large animal to sit and do nothing all day long when he had only been out to relieve himself of the end product of digestion and not the purpose of it, to produce the energy with which to work and play? But he never did.
    Rick had apparently finished with the Doberman. Now he was talking about a four-year-old pug who slept on the bed and growled at his owner whenever she rolled over during the night. I was waiting to hear him suggest the owner sleep with liver in her hands when I heard Cathy instead.
    “How tragic,” Cathy said. For a moment I was confused. I thought she must be talking about Rick’s consultation advice. But she wasn’t looking at the stage. It was apparently Martyn’s plight she found so tragic.
    Tragic? Maybe we were listening to different conversations. All I heard was a guy trying to get laid.
    It was working, too. You could have fried eggs on the look that passed between them.
    Cathy leaned close and whispered something I couldn’t hear.
    “Do you think so?” Martyn said, apparently astonished by whatever he’d heard.
    Where were the Oscars when they were so richly deserved?
    “I do,” she said.
    I leaned back. Sitting that close to them, I was in danger of getting diabetes.
    “We all so hate to punish our doggies,” Rick was saying.
    Talk about diabetes.
    “So what might you do about the dog who loves the sound of his own voice too much when he’s put out in the yard? Well, to be honest, you can help these behaviors disappear without giving a single correction. We behaviorists call this process extinction. When we simply ignore the behavior, its frequency diminishes, and eventually the unwanted behavior disappears altogether.” He smiled out at us. “And this way the dog will not think of you as a punisher.”
    I heard applause. Dashiell lifted his head, but Freud did not. Then Beryl was on the stage, and hands were up all over the room. Beryl pointed to the owner of one of them.
    “Why the great divide in dog training?” a young man in a green T-shirt asked. He must have been one of those rude New Yorkers you hear so much about, going right to the heart of the matter with no polite small talk to cushion the thrust of his question. “Why don’t the trainers who use food get along with—” Rick leaned toward one of the mikes, but he was too slow. “Because, dear man, some of us find it devastating to have the public taught that dogs are nothing but furry little garbage disposals rather than sentient, thinking beings.”
    Half the audience laughed. The other half started grumbling. “And much as I detest having to disagree with my esteemed colleague, it is imperative that I point out to you professionals that barking is self-reinforcing, even at those times when it hasn’t just chased the postal person away. You cannot extinguish it by not reinforcing it, because the act itself gives the dog immense pleasure. You, my dear friends, are beside the point. The same, of course, is true with chewing problems. You can extinguish some bad habits by doing nothing. But why not do something? Why not take an active role in your dog’s education? ‘No’ is not a four-letter word, people. It’s merely one of the ways you can communicate annoyance, displeasure, or impending danger to your companion animal.”
    Rick leaned toward his mike again, but clearly Beryl had no intention of relinquishing the floor.
    “Moreover, you cannot discuss these issues logically, though heaven knows, that’s what people think they are doing. Instead, they are working off unconscious emotional needs set in childhood, using the dog to rewrite history, so that the owner with the cold parent becomes the indulgent good parent to his pet—”
    Cathy got up. I slid down in my seat and