WHAT DOG TRAINING HAS TAUGHT ME ABOUT EDUCATION; OR, WHY MY DOG MAKES ME THINK OF CHARLOTTE MASON, PART THE FIRST

 

Meet Dora. Now that my two youngest children are off at college, I like to tell people that she's my new homeschooling project, and actually . . . that's not far wrong. 

Dora is about eighteen months old. We are her third home in her short life, and there's a lot we don't know about her, including what kind, or kinds, of dog she actually is. My husband gave me one of those dog DNA tests for Christmas, and I anxiously await the results, but in the meantime, I amuse myself by making deductive guesses based on patterns in her behavior as well as her physical appearance. My guesses include some kind of terrier –– she was billed as a rat terrier/fox terrier mix, although for a start she weighs forty pounds –– plus greyhound or whippet, plus maybe a herding breed, plus it's probably not reasonable to rule out pit bull because that's basically every shelter dog in America. But we shall see. 

Here you can maybe see from her body shape why I think greyhound or whippet, though there's obviously something heavier mixed in: 

The vet took one look at her hindquarters and said, "Got some greyhound in you? I bet you're fast." 

Reader, she totally is. 

The one thing I have learned for certain about Dora, which could be a genetic trait –– herding breeds are high on the list of dogs like this –– is that she has a certain level of reactivity. She doesn't like strangers. She warmed right up to us, which in hindsight seems really anomalous and I begin to wonder if the guy we got her from had drugged her or something, but in the main: new people are, at first sight, a big nope. She does get over it, mind you. She came to love all my offspring when they were home for Christmas, though it helped that they were here for a long time, and all of them are dog people and not necessarily put off by a dog's barking at them. But that is her first response to any new person who approaches: a lot of high-stress barking and growling. Her demeanor does not say Welcome To Our Home. It says, actually, a lot of unprintable things to anybody with the audacity to knock on our front door. 

She's also just generally anxious. Loud noises scare her. Cars going by on the street if we're out walking make her nervous. Her emotional threshold is low. The first squirrel sighting of the day leaves her jangling, so that whatever else we encounter subsequently, whether it's a dog barking at her from a backyard, a cat crossing the street, or a person who won't take my dog's not friendly for an answer, is bound to set her off. Life with her is very much like life with a toddler with sensory issues (which is a life I have lived, incidentally), or a kindergartener with ADHD (also a life I have lived, both as the kindergartener and as the parent). Walking her on a leash, especially at first, was like trying to walk a small but not-un-powerful tornado that wanted to have me as the center point of its vortex. Everything in her entire environment was calling to her –– Hey! Dora! Over here! –– and she was trying to go every direction at once. And then she was noticing all the aforementioned triggers and reacting to them, so that was lots of fun, especially with a leash wound several times around my legs. 

Suffice it to say that we have a lot to work on. If this isn't exactly like homeschooling, it's –– honestly a lot like homeschooling, as projects go. Obviously the disanalogy suggests itself at once: dogs aren't children. They are not born persons. I would never suggest that they were. My children have dogs, but I do not call them my granddogs. Dogs are distinctly bad at things like narration. They do not care about fairy tales. Moreover, unlike humans, dogs are amoral. Things they do aren't right or wrong, good or bad. Contra all those internet videos purporting to show dogs expressing guilt, they aren't really capable of shame. The most you can say is that your dog does things that are either desirable or undesirable to you. The dog is thinking entirely of his own comfort and satisfaction. What really animates him to do anything is the prospect of food –– as at least one dog trainer has pointed out, being food-driven is why any animal species survives at all. Secondarily, he does want to please a loved person and is unhappy and stressed out when that person expresses displeasure. His loved person's displeasure is a threat to his sense of overall wellbeing, though he doesn't necessarily connect the displeasure with anything he's done. He just feels that the world around him isn't right and is more destabilized emotionally as a result. Lacking the capacity for reflection, he can't really learn anything from that destabilization, except that maybe you aren't as trustworthy and safe as he had thought. I lay this out because that's the fundamental difference between education and training. Education presumes a moral imagination, a character, a soul that is part of the human being's likeness to God. Training deals exclusively with behaviors. 

Even so, I think a lot about Charlotte Mason while I'm working with Dora. The online training program we're using, which I highly recommend to anyone with a dog, employs a lot of ideas that intersect with foundational ideas of Charlotte Mason's. 

For a start, training sessions are always short and within the dog's current boundaries. Like your child, your dog isn't learning anything once fatigue or boredom set in. It's better to touch, say, loose-leash walking for ten minutes every day than to leave it for the weekend, then try to spend an hour walking your dog on a loose leash. Currently I can successfully walk Dora up and down our driveway for maybe fifteen minutes without her pulling. If I go beyond that –– especially if I move out into the street, where there are more distractions and the wide world opens itself before her –– that's when she fails. More precisely, that's when I've set her up to fail, by stretching her beyond what she can cope with at a given time. I do expect to be able to walk her anywhere on a loose leash, eventually. But I'm going to get there in ten-minute increments, first in the driveway, then gradually increasing our field. Eventually I'm going to be able to go more than fifty yards before I have to do a 180 to put her behind me again. But that's not going to happen if I refuse to accept our current limitations, and move her in that direction slowly, by tiny steps. I hope you can see the application to actual children here. 

TO BE CONTINUED