"Good Dog, Better Man"
How your pet can improve your morals. By Jon Katz
Reprinted with Author's Permission


For nearly four years, I've been learning to herd
sheep with my demented border collie Orson. We've
herded with trainers and at trials. Now, we herd daily
at my own farm in upstate New York, where I have 20
sheep and a couple of donkeys.
For most of that time, our encounters with sheep have
begun the same way. Orson ignores me and the sheep,
and races over to gobble down a mouthful of sheep poop
or donkey dung while I yell at him to stop,
alternately pleading or screaming. "No," I bellow. Or
sometimes, "Leave it!" Or "Drop it!" Or my favorite
(you often hear this accusation at dog trials):
"You're not listening to me!"
In theory, I understand that the proper training
response to Orson's poop-eating is to ignore it. It's
perfectly natural for a dog, especially a working
breed with predatory instincts, to eat animal feces.
To a dog, feces are aromatic and tasty and often
stuffed with nutrients. Anyway, the more I yell, the
more I reinforce the behavior, so the longer it
continues. Dogs don't really differentiate between
good attention and bad attention; they just like
attention, perhaps more than anything except food. So
I know again in theory that if I ignore Orson and
move onto something else like actually herding
sheep he will eventually lose interest and find some
other way to annoy me and draw my notice. Yet I
continued to yell.
When I took Orson to our first shepherding trainer,
she watched with growing disapproval as I yelled at
the dog to come, lie down, get back. When she'd
finally heard enough, she interrupted the training
session and confronted me outside the sheep pen. "If
you want to have a better dog," she announced with
some contempt, "you will just have to be a better
human." It was a surprising but obvious truth, and it
began to change almost everything about the way I
perceived and treated my dogs. Still, it has taken me
an awfully long time to put the theory into practice.
In the years since Orson entered my life, a rescue of
sorts, we've had hundreds of encounters with sheep and
their droppings. But a cold day this past March which
will live in my dog centric memory forever marked the
first time I was actually able to say nothing and
simply look away when he began his foul eating. I
managed silence the next day, too, and it got easier
after that. Now, three months later, Orson rarely
shows any interest in sheep or donkey leavings.
I've heard a similar tale from Sarah, a Web designer
in Truro, Mass., who lives with her yellow Lab, Lucy,
near busy Route 6, which splits Cape Cod. Because of
the traffic, Lucy's very life may depend on a reliable
"recall" coming when summoned. So, for more years than
Sarah can remember, she screamed at Lucy to come. She
tried a choke chain and an electronic shock collar.
She tried "Come!" and "Come here!" and built up to
"You better come right here now!" Her neighbors, she
jokes, probably thought the dog's name was Lucy Come
Here.
Last year, after Sarah read a book on
positive-reinforcement training, she bought a sack of
frozen meatballs at the supermarket. Whenever Lucy
turned to her or came, she littered the ground with
meatballs and also showered Lucy with praise. The dog
turns on a dime now, she reports, and never even
glances at Route 6.
"It was so simple," Sarah says. "It was all about me,
not her. It was about my not stopping to think, about
my frustration." The yelling was also, she eventually
realized, the way her mother had tried to teach her
things. It hadn't worked then, either.
Why is it so hard for us to see that our dogs are not
responsible for what they do, that we are? Why did it
take me nearly four years to realize that Orson's
poop-snacking had little to do with his supposed
rebelliousness and stubbornness, everything to do with
my impatience?
Even though I knew the best way to get him to stop a
behavior I found revolting, I couldn't manage to use
it. The dog never was the problem, as Sarah
discovered. The problem was me. On the day I was
finally able to turn away from Orson's eating, I
realized that this dog had indeed made me a better
human being, more patient, more levelheaded, less
angry.
If you listen, you'll hear people complain about their
dogs all the time. Woody is stubborn. Belle is
devious. Dane is jealous and spiteful. But the truth
is our dogs are mirrors of our own strengths and
shortcomings. They're devoid of most of the traits
with which we credit them. They are complex but
largely instinctive animals. They desperately need to
be shown what we expect of them. Understanding this is
critical, the foundation on which we build our lives
with our dogs.
Donald, a San Francisco marketing executive, has been
warring with his cairn terrier for five years over the
damage the dog does to their immaculate home whenever
she's left alone. Madonna peed on the furniture,
chewed carpets, shredded towels.
Like many people with neurotic dogs, Donald always
believed that confining pets in crates was cruel, so
he never used one for Madonna. Instead, he endured
thousands of dollars in damage "and endless screaming,
punishment, tension, and yelling" until a trainer
showed him how to acclimate the dog to a cozy plastic
crate when he went out, ending the suffering of both.
"I will never really be able to say why it took me so

long to see this," he told me. "She was just being a
dog. I, on the other hand, was being an a------. Now
that I get that, I hope I am less of one." Almost
surely, he is.
Having a good dog doesn't mean you are a good human.
But working to have a better dog can make you a better
human. Training them more positively can make us less
angry. Understanding their ritualistic, sometimes
limited ways of learning, can make us more patient.
Helping them work through their problems can ease our
frustration. They can help us understand the true
meaning of responsibility that it's easy to acquire to
acquire a pet, but sometimes tough to do right by it.
And they can show us how to step out of our lives, and
really love something else.
For years, I deluded myself into thinking I had
rescued Orson from a cruel fate and given him the
opportunity to fulfill his border collie destiny. Only
recently more calm, more patient have I come to
understand just who has rescued whom.


Jon Katz's next book, The Dogs of Bedlam Farm: An
adventure with three dogs, sixteen sheep, two donkeys
and me will be published in October. He can be
e-mailed at jdkat3@aol.com.