5 June

How To Raise The Perfect Dog? (Don’t) Complicating Dogs.

by Jon Katz

Don't

I looked again this weekend  at Cesar Millan’s 300 page paperback “How To Raise The Perfect Dog,” (and for only $15 dollars) and I re-read his 20 page guide to housebreaking a puppy. Five or six pages are devoted to just getting the  dog out of the car and into the house, and then the really complicated stuff begins.

I respect Cesar Millan, despite what I consider unjust and irrational accusations that his training methods are cruel and abuse – they are not – the real problem is that like so many other trainers who sell books and videos, his training methods are truly complicated, worse even than the best-selling manuals for  housebreaking babies.

He drove me to the late author E.B. White’s “Man’s Meat,” a chronicle of his life on a Maine farm. White wrote a lot about dogs, and he has a great chapter on dog training in “Man’s Meat.”

The problem of caring for dog has been unnecessarily complicated White wrote, and this was in 1938. White would probably not believe Millan’s book or the complicated world of the dog in modern-day America.

Millan has a long chapter advising people to play like a dog if we want to help the dog learn how to play, a problem no dog of mine has ever had.  Tie a stuffed animal to a stick, move it slowly back and forth.  I am not going to play like a dog and wag and wiggle a stick like they like when I am with my dogs, let me be honest about that. I will be happy to buy a stuffed squeaky dog and toss it at Fate.

She takes it from there.

You want to love a dog but not love a dog, is my idea.

“Take the matter of housebreaking,” says White. “In the suburbia of those lovely post-Victorian days of which I write, the question of housebreaking a puppy was met with the simple bold courage characteristic of our forefathers. You simply kept the house away from the puppy. This was not only the simplest way, it was the only practical way, just as it is today.

“Our parents were in possession of a vital secret – a secret which has been all but lost to the world: the knowledge that a puppy will live and thrive without ever crossing the threshold of a dwelling house, at least until he’s big enough so he doesn’t wet the rug.”

Although his mother and father never permitted a puppy to come into the house to dump on the floor and chew the carpets, they made up for the indignity, he recalled, by always calling the puppy “Sir.” In those days, he said, dogs did not expect anything elaborate in the way of shelter, attention, food or medical care, but they did, he insists, expect to be addressed in a civil way.

Cesar Millan writes for a very different audience at a very different time, and very successfully. The dogs have crossed the threshold, some people would call the police if a puppy was left in the garage for a few days, and the police would actually come.

Why has dog training become so complicated? It’s pretty simple. We live in a capitalist culture, and one of the big ideas behind capitalism is to make almost everything in life seem so complicated  that only the chosen and anointed few can possibly grasp how to do it. And sell what they know to people conditioned to think they know nothing. Dogs are a $39 billion industry in America, and Cesar Millan has earned a good chunk of that.

If training a dog was made to look easy, nobody would buy expensive books and videos to try to figure out how to do it. They would do it themselves, it is not brain surgery, dog owners did it for thousands of years. They figured things out for themselves.

Any son or daughter of a farmer can  housebreak a dog in ten minutes, or tell anyone how to do it, and free of charge.

Millan’s training methods are sensible and successful, at least in his very wealthy and marketing-driven world.  Remember, this is an entertainer who appears on TV, he has a staff of a dozen or so people, he does not live the way you or I do.

White’s parents in 1930 didn’t need a book to figure out how to train their dog, they just used their own instincts and common sense, and it worked out. A lesson there for us.

White understood that there is no such thing as a perfect dog, and if there were, no rational dog lover would want one.  The perfect dog doesn’t come from a book, no one has ever trained a dog to be perfect. No one has raised a child to be perfect either, the idea is kind of creepy.

A truly companionable and indispensable and trustworthy dog is an accident of nature, a miracle in its own way. You can’t guarantee it with breeding, you can’t buy it with money, you can’t rescue it from a group or shelter.  It just happens, a combination of many things that are mysterious, including luck and good timing and genetics and the litter.

Red came to me from a breeder and minister in Virginia, a remarkable woman and wonderful border collie and sheep dog breeder named Karen Thompson.

Karen read a book of mine and knew  intuitively that Red belonged with me. She just knew it, and I was frightened and puzzled until I chose to trust her and she was right. Nobody could ever have told me I would get this companionable and indispensable dog in that way.

If there is a God, he was watching out for the two of us. If you ever get the idea to have a perfect dog, be very wary.  Someone is selling you the canine equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge.

I have my own advice for you: Don’t.

5 June

We Eventually All Fall Asleep. Quotes To Live By

by Jon Katz
We Eventually All Fall Asleep
We Eventually All Fall Asleep

I was listening to Paul Simon’s “Insomniac Lullaby,” a song on his new album “Stranger To Stranger,” and I was touched by the lyrics. As people get older, they tend to sleep less peacefully and for shorter periods of time. Simon’s lovely song begins with a plea to God not to let him spend another night alone with the moon.

I wake up every morning at 3 a.m., if not sooner, and I guess I still have the old bedwetter’s habit – bedwetters know insomnia well – of not moving until I see the first light, whether I am awake or not. I could get up and write – I sometimes do – I should read, I sometimes listen to music, I often think about what I will write on the blog.

I cherish lying next to Maria at night, it is a miracle to me, every night and I hate to get up and leave it.

I am usually up until midnight or sit up reading or watching strange shows on Netflix or Amazon or HBO. We don’t have a TV any more. I have a mild addiction to British mysteries and their loopy circular Agatha Christie plots and stalwart, no nonsense detectives. Like many restless and anxious people, I have long experienced insomnia. That’s how I became a Valium addict for 30 years, I always took pills to sleep.

When I stopped taking any kind of medication seven or eight years ago – I did not sleep for a long time after that – I entered the dreamy and unnerving world of the insomniac once more and perhaps for good.  I expect that is the nature of my nights now and looking head. Nightime is a  good time to think for a writer. I listen to the dogs snore.

I get also to look at my wife and think for hours about how much I love her. She is not an insomniac, an airplane could crash into the house and it would not wake her. Except sometimes she has bad dreams, and I want to be there for them. I had bad dreams, but I never remember them, and the ones I remember, I will never repeat.

There is a line in ‘Insomniac Lullaby” that struck a deep chord with me. Simon was suggesting that we insomniacs have some perspective, about sleep, about life. Simon is getting wiser as he gets older, like everyone else. The line was “We eventually all fall asleep.” And the more we think about that line, the deeper it gets.

I don’t mean this in a morbid way because I am not morbid about death, at least not yet, but Simon was reminding me to keep a perspective on life and its many ups and downs.  For the last two days, when I saw or heard something that upset me, I said to myself. “We eventually all fall asleep,” and I moved on or let the issue go. It is easy to worry about things, hard to remember that we are all one, and will end up in the same place. Acceptance is a good thing.

This morning, I woke up anxious about whether or not I would sell my next book, I’ve been waiting for an answer for a couple of months, and while I don’t generally do the boo-hoo of writers and their difficult lives, I would like to know about this new idea and what will become of it.  And sometimes, I get angry about waiting. It is nothing person, it is just the way it works.

Publishers don’t generally like writers much any more, they are an impediment to good marketing plans and generally make poor team players. I started to whine about this  in the dark and then told myself “we eventually all fall asleep.”  Will another month really matter?

And my mind moved on, it was remarkable.

I have another line in my head that I use, I suppose it is a kind of mantra for me when I need it. Two years ago, I was in Palo Alto, California,  giving a speech, listening to the director of a new $27 million animal shelter (each dog had his own private room with classical music piped in and sound-proofed walls so he or she would not be disturbed by the barking of other dogs.) The rooms were much nicer than my hotel.)

The director was getting grilled by some potential donors who wanted some guarantees that the shelter would be a “no-kill” shelter, that is, that no dog would ever be put to death there for any reason. The director, who had seemed to me to remain sane and grounded in this unusual environment, looked one of the questioners in the eye (very few shelters, even rich ones, can afford to keep all dogs alive forever, they either euthanize them or send them to other shelters to be euthanized and claim they are “no-kill”) and said evenly:

“We do the best we can for as long as we can.”

I thought this was a beautiful, authentic, even profoundly intelligent answer. It quieted the questioner, who had no more arguments to offer. It made me think about many things beyond dogs.

I have used this quote many times since then, it has helped me to let go of my mistakes, of the hurts of other people, of my frustrations, failures and worries, even of my creativity.

When I am challenged or doubt myself, I now say “I do the best I can for as long as I can.”

Really, there is not much more that any human being can do or say more than that. And it is a “letting go,” quote, when I feel used or discarded or like a failure, I tell myself that I do the best that I can for as long as I can. And I always feel better, I can move ahead. And I will always do the best that I can for as long as I can, that is my intention for my life.

So I have a new saying now to add to the mix, and in our complex lives. We need different ways to let go of frustration and anger and keep our feet on the ground. Our lives are challenging and sometimes stressful. It is easy to fail.

I am reminded not to take life too seriously, not to feel too much too deeply, not succumb to the anger, judgment and self-righteousness that appears to be epidemic in our world right now. I can only live the best life that I can and remember that eventually, we shall all sleep.

We eventually all fall asleep, there are no insomniacs in the great beyond, whatever  happens to us. No failures either.

Life is short and life is precious, full of glory, crisis and mystery. I endeavor to appreciate it every single day. Tonight, when I share so much of the night with the moon, I will tell myself that I will do the best that I can for as long as I can. And remind myself when I wake up in the night to drink in the darkness, love and quiet, crickets and birdsong in my room:

We eventually all will fall asleep.

 

5 June

Middle Ground: Finding My Truth In A Time Of Extremes

by Jon Katz
Finding Your Truth
Finding Your Truth

A student of mine told me yesterday that she was looking for homes in Germany, where she has relatives, and where she will move if Donald Trump is elected President. A man on Facebook said if Trump is not elected President, he will know the system is rigged by the “establishment” and that the process is unconstitutional. He will join the new resistance he said, and fight if necessary.

A neighbor, a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter, says Sanders should be President no matter how many votes he gets, he is the only candidate speaking the truth. The others are all dishonest and corrupt and he will never support them.

Last week, I watched in amazement while many thousands of people argued that the life of a gorilla in a zoo was more important than the life of a four-year-old human boy, and they argued as well that his mother ought to be jailed because he found a way to get under a zoo enclosure that no one had breached in 30 years.

In New York City, an animal rights activists wrote on her Facebook Page that the New York Carriage Horses would be better off sent to slaughter (and have nails driven through their heads) than hauling light carriages in New York’s Central Park. I write about animals often, and the animal world is riven by extremists, including many people who actually believe it is torture for ponies to give rides to children or draft horses to pull carriages.

For months, I watched presidential candidates say one outrageously stupid and false thing after another, they seemed to be competing over who was the most extreme, not who had any good and doable ideas.  The point was no longer how to find ways to help people and improve their lives, but to persecute, carpet-bomb or reject the neediest people at home or in the world.

Like Donald Trump or not, things come out of his mouth every single day that would have stunned and enraged the nation just a few years ago, and now bring great cheers and applause. Everyone competes to be the most extreme to appease the people who are the most angry.

I believe in the system, but it seems broken to me. I’m not smart enough to know if it can be fixed. But all this anger and fury is helping me to be grounded, to find my place on earth.

__

I am a creature of the Middle, Middle Earth I call it. For most of my life, there was a large group of Middle People, they used to dominate the country. Not now. It seems that almost everyone is being drawn to labeling themselves – the “left” or the “right” and seeing the world in narrower – and yes, more extreme – ways. Jefferson and Hamilton always worried about who would check the power of the mob when it turned big and angry, and perhaps this year we will find out.

Sometimes, I think there is nothing out there but one mob or another.

I blame the new technologies of social media and digital communications for much of this, it is possible now to talk all day about your beliefs and never encounter a soul who disagrees with you or challenges you. If fact, disagreement is considered treasonous.

I browsed one Facebook Page after the Cincinnati Zoo tragedy and a woman there posted a statement to the effect that the zoo officials should be prosecuted for murder for killing Harambe the gorilla, they should have let the little boy take his chances in Harambe’s enclosure, since the boy chose to go into his living area, and the mother ought to go to jail as well for not keeping a closer watch on him.

The mother was to blame, the righteous juries decided on Facebook and Twitter, safe sitting on their butts behind their computer screens. Judging others is the coward’s new sport.

Perhaps because I live on a farm in upstate New York and spend most of my day writing and taking photographs, I was shocked by this woman’s statement. I should not have been surprised by now, but I was disappointed to read that not a single one of the scores of people who posted replies disagreed with her or challenged her outrageous, ignorant and irrational position.

There was a time when such hateful and unbalanced thinking would have been widely condemned, people would have been appalled by it, but it was just another crazy page on Facebook, the land of the new Outrage Addicts, and one of many million such pages.

It is frankly hard for me to see such hurtful,  ignorant and irrational positions all over the Internet and on the news every day, even before the presidential campaigns.  Our news has become a public health issue, everyone who is sane tries to avoid it. Nobody really seems to notice the extreme statements any longer, they are just part of the background of our lives.

I dislike extremes. I dislike labels. I do not see my life as an argument with strangers. I am not a slave to the left or right ways of looking at the world, no matter how quick people are to try to label me. I don’t label myself, which is the point.

There are no longer any Walter Cronkite’s out there to challenge us to take a different or alternative look at things, and Cronkite (I knew him a bit from my days at CBS News) was hardly a deep thinker or a radical. He was very much a man of the Middle, and that, I believe, is why he was considered the most trusted man in America.

How is anyone to earn such trust in the age of social media, where we only have to talk to ourselves, and have our own ideas reflected back to us, no matter how dumb or unraveled we are? If you disagree, then you become the hated other, the rigged and brainwashed tool of one establishment or another – and there are plenty to choose from. To disagree is to be dismissed and condemned, like one of the Salem witches.

If you have a different point of view, you are guilty and condemned, it doesn’t matter for what.

I am coming to see my life in the Middle as a faith, a spiritual calling, not a political position. Many of my readers do trust me, and I am so grateful for that, an I often wonder why, since I am resistant to join in the hateful screaming that passes for dialogue in our time.

Those of us who live in the Middle, who try to think and listen, also have to struggle to stand in our truth and keep our footing when so many people are abandoning reason and joining these new kinds of mobs. No one wants to be swept away in the fury if they want to remain independent.

One reader named Irene tried to explain it to me yesterday. “You are unpredictable,” she said, “you seem to actually think about the things you write about before you write about them. Of course, I often disagree with you,” she said, “but because you don’t label yourself, I am more open to considering what it is you say.”

Not exactly rhapsodic praise, but important to me, and meaningful. That is precisely what I try to do, perhaps one reason my blog has so many people reading it. I hope so. That gives me hope.

This kind of message is encouraging and affirming to me.

For most of our history, no one needed to have to say they followed someone even though they disagreed with him or her. That was the idea. What was the point of only reading people you agreed with?

But in our time, more and more people are only reading people they agree with, and the American Mind is shrinking and angry as a result. Facebook can do a lot of things, but it will almost never teach people how to think and compromise or negotiate – the principle tools of a democratic culture.

If you live in the Middle and write in the Middle, you might be a bit lonely sometimes especially this year. The Middle is not the medium for social media, neither is rational thinking, that is the new forum for extreme and unchallenged thinking.

But I have never been prouder of being a citizen of Middle Earth than I am now, it has, to me, become the most moral position there is, and that is surely a new way to look at it. It amazes me that I fell into the right way without quite realizing it.  I think my motto often is “I Don’t Know,” and I do not ever see the world in black-and-white, there are just too many other colors.

I am not moving anywhere whether Trump gets elected or not, this is my home, my country. It has survived worse than him.

But this year is both empowering me and inspiring me to remain in my Middle Earth, I think it is the place for people who really believe in democracy to be. No one who puts a label on me is a friend of mine, and I am loath to listen to anyone who defines themselves in narrow and extreme ways.

That is where I have landed, how I will survive in a world of extremes – by not succumbing to that call. It feels like a good place to be, even in a time of extremes.

5 June

Yelling At Dogs: “Fate, I’ll Be Honest With You.”

by Jon Katz
Yelling At Dogs
Yelling At Dogs

A reporter asked me recently if I believed in Positive Reinforcement Training. Of course, I said (did he think me stupid?), who on this earth is against being positive with your dog? The animal trolls online would call the mob together and charge.

Then (he wasn’t stupid either) he asked me if I was always positive. I am a former journalist and I have a rule about never lying to journalists. Too close to home. I answered truthfully. I am as positive as I can be for as long as I can be.

The fact is, I yell at my dogs often and heartily. I enjoy it, they don’t seem to mind, and in fact, they rarely much attention to me, unless I get really loud and angry. Then they pay close attention to me. I like yelling at my dogs, it makes me feel good and keeps me from wanting to strangle them.

People who claim they never, ever, yell at their dogs make me a little nervous, they are a bit too saccharine for me, a little creepy. Not real, I guess, would be the way to put it. I grew up in a family of screamers. My family fought about whether the sun came up in the morning, we screamed right through meals and rides in the car.

I didn’t realize until I was older that some people talked to each other in a normal voice.

I love Fate dearly, as is obvious, but Fate is a dog who calls out to be yelled at. Even Maria yells at Fate, and Maria re-homes spiders and inch-worms caught in the house. She cried the other day because she inadvertently killed a tomato plant.

I yell at Fate when she chases after the chickens. Or scarfs up chicken droppings. Or jumps up to look out the window and knocks things over.  I yell at her when she rushes out the door to the pasture without permission, or when she forgets to wait at the gate and plows into me. Or tries to open a bag with Thai take-out.

I yell at her when she climbs up onto the bed in the middle of the night and gnaws at my face or lies down to sleep on my stomach. I yell at her when she tries to jump into a stroller to kiss a baby.

I used to yell at her to be more assertive with the sheep, but I gave that up. I do yell at  her when she lies down in front of Chloe when the pony is eating. I rarely yell at Red, but once in awhile he gets excited while working or barks when he hears a video. I don’t need to yell at Red, if he were any calmer or more obedient he would be dead.

We live in an increasingly puritanical and intrusive world.  Everyone has a label and and an ideology, usually of victimization or outrage, and demands that everyone else bow to it.

The positive reinforcement police are just like the other animal police who patrol the vast boundaries of social media looking for people to judge and harass. Nuts to them all. I belong to the Church Of Minding Your Own Business, you perhaps have never heard of it, it is a small and unobtrusive sect.

We live on the fringes of social media, where minding the business of other people has been elevated to a constitutional right. I love positive reinforcement training, but I also love honesty and realism. We are human beings, none of us are inherently positive all of the time.

Our dogs, who love us and are smarter than we often think, love us for who we are, not for who other people tell us to be. They can handle getting yelled at once in awhile, as long as it is framed by love and good care. I can’t fake it with them, I am just not always positive.

I yelled at Fate the other day when she tried climb into my lap with her muddy paws. “I’ll be honest with you, Fate,” I said, “that is not going to happen. Get off!” It was actually a growl more than a shout. She backed off. I couldn’t believe I was actually telling her I was going to be honest with her, I am perhaps losing my mind.

But I think she appreciated it.

The point of this is this: don’t feel badly if you yell at  your dogs once in awhile. Dogs are not made of crystal.  It just means you are a human being, not a bad human being.

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