On the Nature of Understanding

A reminder that we live in the blurry spaces between domestication and chaos

I grew up on a small quarter horse ranch outside of Fort Worth. By early elementary school I was a reasonably competent handler of horses and hunting dogs. My stepfather taught me how to clean, trim, and care for the horses’ hooves and I have strong sensory memories of leaning into the warm flank of a thousand pound erstwhile racehorse with his leg lifted so that I was facing the bottom of the hoof. I was just tall enough to hear the heartbeat and gentle swooshing sounds that tell you that the horse’s gut is working properly as I squeezed the upturned hoof between my knees to scrape out the gunk and trim it with an enormous nipper.

Sadly, I have never owned or worn chaps. I was a little kid in the 70s, so probably I was wearing something along the lines of Garanimals

I stood with my fingers in my ears beside my stepfather while he trained our black labs to sit calmly as he fired a rifle. They would eventually learn to wait for his command to retrieve the stuffed canvas ducks he used for training. Good labs are valued for their “soft mouths,” their ability to retrieve the dead bird without biting it. They’ve been bred for the trait for generations just like they’ve been bred for webbed toes for swimming, but the fact that we humans ever manage to teach them to overcome their instinct to eat a downed bird strikes me as a minor miracle.

Sad-eyed pupper not biting duck. Photo by Cole Miller on Unsplash

I am a dog person, and by dog person, I also mean horse person, cat person, and probably miniature donkey- and alpaca person. I have Boston terriers, a breed I fell in love with when my middle sister was in college and rescued a particularly sassy one from her local shelter. I love all kinds of dogs, but don’t have a working-dog kinda life, so dogs that were bred for cuteness and companionship rather than herding or hunting work for me. I also appreciate the fact that they’re small, portable, and don’t shed too much.

We’ve had our two year-old females (from the wonderful Boston Terrier Rescue of North Texas) for about a year now. Pinky and Birdie came to us as litter mates with [cough] behavioral issues, but after lots of work, patience, and a series of visits from a professional trainer, they’re turning into nice little companions. Barking is still a growth opportunity.

Pinky and Birdie, descended of wolves

On Monday, the Texas winter weather was having a quiet moment in between the debilitating ice storm and approaching cold rains, so I decided to take the girls for a long morning walk. Bostons don’t have much in the way of necks, so they wear harnesses that look kind of like little vests. Birdie’s is purple and Pinky’s is, of course, pink. They love walks and were off at a brisk trot as soon as we got out the door. I had a podcast playing, a pocket full of poo bags, and had somehow managed to get my garment layering for warmth just right. Leaving our small subdivision, we turned left onto a gently curving sidewalk that runs between our neighborhood and the next one over. There are grassy areas with trees and plants on both sides of the walk and it makes for an easy couple of miles.

Like the beautifully landscaped walking area, the dogs that walk along it are perfect symbols of humans’ eternal and mostly doomed struggle to tame the natural world. Dogs and humans have evolved as partners because we’re both pack species, they’re very attentive, and we feed them. It is this attentiveness (combined with the food thing) that makes them so trainable and so valuable to us. They are famously able to smell, hear, and sense threats that we cannot—earthquakes, poisons, intruders, seizures, even cancer. Even with my inbred little city dogs, I occasionally catch glimpses of wilderness.

I’ve never had yappy dogs before and trying to get Pinky and Birdie to stop barking all the time is an ongoing challenge. It is complicated by Ruger, our neighbors’ elderly boxer. They allow him to roam freely and the world is his toilet. The girls sense his presence, crash through their doggie door to the back yard, and go shouty bonkers at the fence when they see him on his daily walkabouts. Ruger taunts them by approaching slowly before taking a dump in their yard, staring directly at them the whole time. The girls, however, have clearly concluded that their barking is effective because every day he eventually leaves and goes home.

We have yet to encounter Ruger at close range beyond the fence, but they bark at other dogs. In addition to the barking issue, Birdie has this move where she tries to stand on her hind legs and sort of slap larger dogs on the nose. Pinky likes other dogs but tries to hump them, usually their heads. When we see any dogs on leash other than Beau, our neighbor’s gentle giant Yeti of a dog who tolerates the Bostons’ attentions with great forbearance, I take them several yards away from the path and put them in a sit to wait until the invaders pass. I bribe them with treats not to bark.

On Monday morning, I saw the woman running with three large dogs at a good distance. The mastiff was hard to miss—so big he didn’t even look real, like a CGI Cerberus. I have a couple of friends with giant mastiffs, but this one was the single largest I’ve ever seen. He was a bluish gray with a head the approximate size of a VW Beetle. An Australian shepherd and a pudgy yellow lab mix trotted along beside him. As they got closer to where we were sitting, the shepherd and lab started barking and pulling in our direction, so of course my two joined in the racket and their moment of sitting in good-dog position was over. The woman was shouting and straining against her dogs’ leashes like she was trying to stop a runaway ox cart.

I had just decided that I was going to need to pick up and hold the Bostons when the lab was suddenly off of his leash and charging at us, silent, his head low and his ears tucked back. He was faster than he looked. He got Birdie by the neck and shook her. I yelled and tried to get Birdie, sliding in the mud, but Birdie somehow got out of her harness and away from the lab, who turned on Pinky. I looked up from the fray to see that the other two dogs had drug the woman from the sidewalk over to where we were and it was all she could do to keep them off of us. The mastiff’s jaws were streaming with drool.

The lab got Pinky by the neck. Tangled in leashes and yelling “no!” I wrestled her away from him. Pinky was frightened enough by her encounter to be willing to sit closely behind me while I tried to keep the lab off of Birdie, who was now running in circles around the scrum, barking her little brains out, and periodically lunging at the feet of the drooling mastiff.

The lab had grabbed Birdie for a second shake when I saw that he was wearing a prong collar. I dove and got my fingers through the links and gave him the hardest yank I could muster. I looked up at the woman, who had just managed to get back onto her feet from what had apparently been a pretty serious dragging. She was bleeding from her elbows and knees, covered with mud and blood. I carefully passed the lab back over to her and she got him back onto his leash, apologizing profusely. She had no idea how he’d escaped his leash, she said.

I finally managed to corral Birdie, all 16 lbs of crazy-eyed Viking raider. While Pinky was clearly sobered by the experience, Birdie, spattered with blood, was all but pounding her shield and yelling about what a great day it would be to enter Valhalla.

Lagertha, from the History Channel’s series Vikings, didn’t start this fight, but she is about to end it

As we started for home, dirty and disheveled but not seriously injured, I realized that my chest and throat burned, probably from the combination of screaming and far exceeding my athletic ability. My body hurt in strange places. I was vibrating from adrenaline, but grateful that my dogs’ wounds were superficial, grateful for the generations of breeding that might have prevented that lab from biting hard enough to kill them.

Cataloging and monitoring our minor injuries, I’ve spent some time on post-game analysis. What could I have done differently? When I considered suggestions that I carry pepper spray, I had to admit that in the sheer bedlam of the scene I’d have probably not been able to use it correctly and would have incapacitated myself. Instinct had overridden training for me as much as for the dogs.

My youngest sister, who lives in California, reminded me of the Coyote Vest, a kevlar dog vest covered with metal spikes. When I lived in San Diego, I’d lived on a canyon, where pets were frequently carried off by coyotes and bobcats. It would not have occurred to me that my dogs might need body armor here in Central Texas.

Also available in pink

While I’m probably not going to be buying two $100 vests to walk the dogs in, I might go for their spiked collar. The website copy is brilliant.

The most common way coyotes kill is by grabbing their prey around the neck and shaking. This violent action is intended to break the neck of their prey and end the struggle immediately. Similarly, when domestic dogs scuffle they try to gain control of their opponent by going for the neck. The CoyoteCollar has outrageous 1" battle ready spikes. If a predator tries to bite this collar -- it will bite back! The "neck bite/death shake" scenario is off the table.

They had me at that last line. I would like the neck bite/death shake scenario to be off the table. We live outside the city limits, at the uneasy intersection of nature and civilization. We might need armor.

Of all of my childhood memories of the horses—riding them, feeding them, shoveling manure out of stalls—caring for their hooves is uniquely vivid. Horses are prey animals. They have a strong survival instinct to keep predators away from their legs and hooves and the ability to deliver a lethal kick. The trick to keeping a horse calm while you handle its hooves with metal tools is to keep calm yourself.

Horses, in the words of my friend Sherry, a former champion equestrian and current owner of an equine therapy ranch, are thousand-pound biofeedback machines. I suspect that the reason I have such warm sensory memories of grooming horses is that I was myself simultaneously deeply relaxed and attentive. I don’t know if this was from training or instinct. The pine-tar smells of the barn, the sounds of hooves on the concrete deck, the warm pressure of the horse’s body.

Somewhere, in the boxes of stuff I moved out of my office when I left my full-time teaching gig, there is a copy of Kay Ryan’s poem “On the Nature of Understanding.”

Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it halfway.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it’s
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.