It was all over the papers
recently that a border collie named Rico recognized 200 human
words. That prompted owners of other breeds to write letters to the
editor in defense of their breeds.
One trainer said
motivation is critical. Another observed that border collies are
“acutely sensitive to motion.” I think they all got it wrong.
If you read closely, everybody was pointing out that
humans are the benchmark. Even the researcher who made Rico famous
concluded that the dog acquired words the way we do, through a
process he called fast mapping, implying, I suppose, that we should
think more of Rico and his canine buddies because they learn like
our children.
But dogs aren’t human, and what dogs
have to teach us is dogness, and, in the larger context, what
animalness is all about. It’s different, for one thing. Dogs
smell better than we do, they hear better than we do, they act on
their instincts a whole lot better than we do. They have no sense
of time, and they adapt cheerfully to their current lot in life
without angst.
Why not compare us to them? Find the one
or two humans who can sniff out a bowl of dry kibble and
voila! we have a human with some of the
important attributes of dog.
Like humans, when it comes
to this or that special characteristic, this or that breed of dog
has it over others. Golden retrievers, which were originally bred
to retrieve waterfowl, will bring you anything from a soggy
pinecone to your neighbor’s tennis ball.
Border
collies will neatnick up any messy situation. My 13-year-old
old-timer knows that my 2-year-old granddaughter should not wander
too far from me. So the dog selects a certain distance that both of
them feel comfortable with, then shortens it when he decides the
child is traveling too far.
Another thing that’s
different about border collies — and here I am in danger of
joining the my-dog’s-better-than-your-dog crowd — is
that their instinct lies so close to the surface. A trainer once
advised me that border collies come out of the womb herding,
convinced their owners need training.
The trainer called
“sheepdog-trialing” a sport, and that’s the way I went at it.
Who cared what the dogs did moving sheep around on a huge open
range in Meeker, Colo., my job was to get them through an obstacle
course in an arena. The second or third time I tried it, it was six
o’clock on a cold fall evening, in a dark arena, the darkness
dotted here and with halos from pole-mounted spotlights.
I sent the dog after the sheep and immediately lost her in the
dark. I couldn’t see to help, but she didn’t need it.
She brought the stock back to me evenly out of the darkness, and I
struggled to remember what came next. Back up, give the dog space
to move the sheep through the first gate, give her a command to
slow down. She came to the conclusion about cutting her speed about
the same time I did, and we sailed through the first gate like a
tightly trimmed skiff under full sail.
When we got to the
second gate, I felt her rhythm and stepped back to watch her drive
them through. We were a team: My part was knowing enough to let the
dog do what she knew how to do, hers not to unsettle the sheep and
cause me to fly off the handle. When we reached the pen, I almost
ruined it when I got so excited I forgot to open the gate; the
sheep scattered. But the dog turned and sprinted in a wide arc
around the arena and brought them back again.
I used to
tell people that what happened in the dark arena was my first
experience with the highfalutin’ notion we humans call
cross-species communication. It felt like the dog and I were tied
together with a string running between us. It was my first
experience with animalness: The dog drew me into her world, and I
cheerfully waved mine good-bye.
What does it boil down
to? I like what my veterinarian told me: “You gotta let a dog be a
dog.”
Penelope Grenoble O’Malley is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). She lives in Southern California;
her new book is Malibu Diary: Notes from an Urban
Refugee, published by the University of Nevada
Press.
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