Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
only momentarily. At the mall across the street from our home, where new construction ma-
terials—including pallets and concrete blocks and pipes—created a scaled-up version of our
early foundation work. Check here, check here, check here.
Solo created new problems for me to think through. He was a wild dog. My training notes
were littered with issues: He needed a better alert. He was distracted. We'd transferred to a
down-and-whine alert, but he wouldn't whine. Then he wouldn't down. When we transferred
to a rubber Kong toy for a reward, he didn't want to give it back. He didn't want to search
next to the dog lot if Whiskey were there and the two of them could fence-fight instead. He
would stare at the cows and wonder: What merriment could he pursue? Nancy reminded me
to keep my voice low and forceful.
Solo's puppyhood issue of being a singleton kept raising its ugly head. One day during
training, an obsequious stray—a female yellow Labrador—came running and wagging and
crawling across the field while we were training. Solo flashed his teeth, rolling her repeatedly.
Then he attacked Wolfie, the German shepherd search dog he should have been collaborating
with. Except for Megan and two or three neighborhood exceptions, he hated dogs his own
size. And small dogs. They were a pain. Nancy rescued Boston terriers, and I had to rescue
one from Solo. Solo lunged, the grass was wet, my foot slipped, my voice skyrocketed into
high soprano. These were the things that made me cry and made Nancy shrug. Solo hadn't
killed Yankee; he'd just considered it.
“Blast, blast, blast,” Joan wrote me after I described yet another incident of unfortunate
behavior. “Aggression and the canine mind are so very interesting . . . and sad, when it is your
dog. he one thing I can say is that if he wanted to do harm, he could and would have. So,
as nasty as these incidents are, he doesn't appear to be hurting dogs physically.”
She was right. He was all teeth and hackles and growls. He never drew blood. Nonetheless,
David and I made a difficult decision and neutered him, hoping a touch less testosterone
would move the needle on his tachometer down a few points. Afterward, I threw him back
into obedience classes. I learned to time interventions, to break his stare-down with anoth-
er dog by blocking with my body, to de-escalate, to communicate a clear message: Obey no
matter what, you little shit.
We survived the Night of the Snapping Terrier without even a growl on Solo's part. We got
through the happy-pit-bull-adolescent-on-top-of-the-shepherd incident without tooth hit-
ting skin. We realized that Solo would never be normal with other dogs. Yet he was becoming
more and more responsive with us. He was no less energetic, but he was becoming our friend.
He would look at us steadily with his dark chestnut eyes and occasionally even lay his heavy
tadpole head on our laps and fall asleep without demanding instant game gratification. He
loved humans, including babies and children.
