For the Love of a Dog (15 page)

Thus began my personal weightlifting routine at Redstart Farm. Two sessions a day, ten to twenty times each, I picked up Bo Peep and carried her away from the sheep. First five feet, then ten, then twenty. Once she
began to rock forward, I lifted up her hindquarters to get her started, and then cheered as she took first one step, then two, on her new leg. After a few shaky steps she’d collapse, and I’d pick her up again and lug her back to where she started. She accepted all this as she did everything in life, cheerfully and sweetly, licking my face as I carried her across the grass. As the months went on, the distance increased. Regrettably, so did her weight. I gave up somewhere around sixty-five pounds, having developed an impressive set of muscles and a tired back
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We did the surgery on her other leg four or five months later. This time, things didn’t go so well. She seemed to be in more pain than after the first surgery, and it was harder to keep her immobile during recovery. A large metal pin didn’t stay in place; I found her one morning with it thrust out of her skin like a dagger. Subsequent X-rays found that not only had her kneecap been out of place, but her thigh bone was curved like a bow, and couldn’t support her leg even with a repaired knee. She would have needed a minimum of two more major surgeries to attempt a repair, with only a microscopic chance of success. As it was, her deformed leg was dragging underneath her “good” one, and impeding her progress. Appalled at the choices, I finally accepted the inevitable and had the problem leg amputated
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This was Bo Peep’s third major surgery in nine months, and it took its toll. She looked pathetic for days after her surgery, her eyes filled with pain and a kind of weariness rarely seen in young animals. But I was buoyed by the knowledge that three-legged dogs usually thrive once they’ve healed. Someone showed me a video of a working cattle dog who’d had a similar surgery. It wasn’t until he got a few feet from the camera that I realized he wasn’t running on three legs, he was running on two—a foreleg on the left side, and a hind leg on the right. Amazing. I kept that image close to me while Bo Peep recovered. She was young and otherwise healthy, and once we had gotten her useless leg out of her way, she had every chance of being a happy and fully mobile teenager
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That’s not what happened. She recovered from the amputation, but she never walked more than a few steps on her remaining surgically repaired hind leg. The vets couldn’t explain it, because the leg looked sound in the X-ray films. The University of Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital even used the X-rays to illustrate the ideal surgical resolution to her problem. Everything was in the right place—bones, tendons, and cartilage
all lined up perfectly for a fully functioning leg. But Bo Peep never used her leg for more than ten or twelve steps. She’d stand up and walk forward a few steps, then flop her hips sideways down to the ground and drag them like a seal. Finally, I figured out that it wasn’t her leg that was the problem: it was her brain
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It seemed reasonable to focus on Bo Peep’s leg as the source of the problem. After all, that was the part of her that didn’t seem to be working. But as John Ratey has said in no uncertain terms, “Separating the body and the brain is rapidly coming to be seen as ridiculous.” What the brain becomes, and how it functions to control your emotions, turns out to be influenced as much by the body and its early experience as the body is influenced by the brain. This is true for both people and dogs, and is one of the many things that make doggy brains much like ours. In spite of a perfect surgery, Bo Peep’s leg could never function normally because the connections between her brain and that part of her body weren’t made when they were needed—when her brain was developing into its final form. She managed well enough, having learned to drag her hindquarters with her strong shoulders and front legs, but she never fully recovered from growing up without the right connections between her back legs and her brain.

This interplay between body and brain is as important for emotions as it was for Bo Peep’s legs. Our emotional life, and that of our dogs, is profoundly affected by how the brain develops early in life, and thus how it functions once we’re mature. Our emotional experiences are not only centered in
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the brain and the body, they are a vital link between the two. Because the brain’s role is so important in the regulation and experience of emotion, it’s impossible to understand how our emotions compare with those of our dogs unless we get to know the brain a little bit better.

One of the most amazing aspects of the brain is its development. Far from being fully formed at birth, brains are like software programs designed to be customized once they’ve been taken home from the store.
What happens after birth literally creates who you and your dog become as adults, because the way a brain functions once it matures is dependent upon the information it receives as it develops. If parts of the body aren’t used during early development, the brain discards the connections that control them, either eliminating them entirely or assigning them to other duties. “Use it or lose it” turns out to be a prophetic phrase. When we’re young, our brains are busy creating travel routes for the signals that link them with our bodies. These connections aren’t just direct routes from the brain to a limb or an organ; they also include complex pathways among interconnected nerve cells within the brain.

If nothing travels on them, these pathways become like unused trails in the woods, filling up with scrubby weeds and bushes, eventually unusable by even the most intrepid of travelers. That’s what happened to Bo Peep. Not having received enough signals from her hind legs when it should have, her brain moved on, and instead created more internal wiring to direct her massive shoulders and front legs. At birth, the brains of both people and dogs are a little like tropical jungles, in which plants struggle against one another to fight for sunlight. In the brain, the limiting resource isn’t sunlight, it’s connections to other cells, and neurons that don’t use connections early on are overwhelmed, and ultimately eliminated, by those that do.

The brains of human children provide innumerable examples. We know that the neurological circuits managing their muscles are completed at age two; if, for some tragic reason, a child isn’t able to move her arms or legs by then, she’ll never be able to. Babies born with cataracts will never be able to see if the corrective surgery is done after six months of age, because that’s when the wiring system for vision is completed. It’s as if the workmen for that project picked up their tools and went home, and once they’re gone, it’s too late to call them back.

The importance of this early wiring project goes far beyond the functioning of body parts. The tangle of trails between your brain cells is as essential to your emotional life as it is to the movement of your body, and is equally affected by what happens during development. For example, the psychiatrist Dan Stern has found evidence for critical periods in the development of emotion, just as there seem to be critical periods for the development of eyes and limbs. Stern found that babies whose parents responded to them with expressions of delight formed
more connections within the circuits that generate positive emotions. On the other hand, a baby whose parents react to him or her with horror becomes hard-wired to experience negative emotions more easily than positive ones. It’s not just that the baby learns a particular behavior early on; he or she actually ends up with a completely different brain, depending on that early experience. This interplay between emotions, brain circuitry, and experience occurs only in children between the ages of ten months and eighteen months, which suggests that there is a “critical period” for an individual’s emotional software.

The implications of this knowledge are vital to the development of healthy people and dogs. We learned this lesson the hard way, from watching baby after baby die in orphanages in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Concerns about germs were rampant, so caretakers were told to avoid touching the babies and to keep the rooms as empty and as clean as possible. Babies lay alone in their cribs, with nothing to look at but an unchanging ceiling, for months or years on end. They may have been protected from diseases, but many of them died anyway, because babies need physical affection and environmental stimulation to thrive. Those who died might have been the lucky ones; the survivors were so damaged they had no chance of a normal life, even if they eventually found their way into loving homes. We should have known better: as early as the thirteenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II isolated babies to see whether they’d start talking without ever having heard the spoken word. Nurses could feed the babies but were forced to avoid all other contact with them. Frederick never was able to answer his question: the poor things all died before they would have been able to speak.

In recent decades, through experiments on the hardworking laboratory rat, we have begun to understand what happened to those children in orphanages and in Frederick’s experiment. The brain simply
can’t develop normally without a great range of stimulation—from different types of touch to a variety of noises and things to look at. Touch is just one sense that must be stimulated early on for normal development, but as we saw, it’s a critical one. Brain scans of touch-deprived babies show that normally busy areas of their brains are alarmingly quiet. It took a few years for hospitals to realize that’s why premature babies in incubators weren’t thriving. Their brains were being starved of the input necessary for them to grow and function. Touch is so important that if massaged three times a day, babies born prematurely gain 47 percent more weight than if not. Touch does more than help the brain manage the body; it is critical to the development of a healthy emotional system later in life.

That early development has important effects on the emotional lives of adults appears to be true across the board in all mammals, from mice, to mastiffs, to the man next door. The more baby rats are gently handled by their keepers, the more serotonin they produce and the less aggressive they are as adults.
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The same correlation is found in human societies: cultures in which people avoid cuddling their children are also cultures in which people are relatively aggressive as adults, while members of societies who receive a lot of gentle touch when young tend to be less violent when they grow up. As anyone who has considered throwing their computer out the window knows, aggressive behavior is highly correlated with strong emotion, so these are important findings for us all. The story that follows is a tragic example of the interplay between aggression, emotions, and the development of the brain.

Frisco, a five-week-old Pit Bull mix, was in the middle of a full-blown seizure when detectives found him during a drug bust in Madison, Wisconsin. His owners thought it would be fun to give him cocaine and see how he liked it. He didn’t. His young fragile brain went into overdrive, and the electrical storms within it almost killed him. He teetered on the edge of death for five days, pulled through, and was rescued by Karen, a
kindhearted woman who fell in love with his sweet face and his sad history. I met him a year later, when she brought him in for possession-related aggression
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Eager for me to see what he did, Karen dumped an entire bag of toys on the floor and said, “Now watch.” I couldn’t do anything but, because Frisco’s response was so dramatic. He became stiff as a board, shot his head up to look directly into my eyes, and began snarling and growling like a revved-up motorcycle. Although his behavior was extreme in its intensity, stiffening and growling are typical of dogs who are possessive about their toys. But while staring directly into my eyes, Frisco squatted and emptied his bladder, his hindquarters shaking like a frightened puppy’s. Saliva drooled out of his mouth and pooled on the carpet at his feet. Frisco was a cauldron of conflicting emotions, from extreme rage to extreme fear. Even though I’ve seen thousands of dogs in my office, I’ll never forget Frisco’s face at that moment. His eyes were bulging almost out of his head, and they looked, well…crazy. I’ve always found eye expressions the hardest thing about dogs to describe objectively, and all I can say about Frisco’s eyes is that they looked purely and simply insane. I remember thinking that this had to be one of the most dangerous dogs I’d ever met
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Every time either Karen or I moved, even to turn our heads, Frisco lunged forward and his growls got louder. Needless to say, for a while we stayed still, concentrating on breathing normally and keeping our own bodies as relaxed as we could. I finally found I could slowly edge my way to the door, as long as I moved in tiny increments. Feeling guilty about leaving Karen in the room with him, but knowing that movement was what set Frisco off, I elected to be the one to edge out the door. I made it out in one piece, and gathered more toys with which to lure him into another room. It worked. Once away from his own treasures, he calmed down in a matter of minutes and went back to being the cheerful, handsome boy he had been before
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After Frisco had settled down, Karen and I spoke at length about how much damage the early weeks of his life had done to his brain, and my concerns about his prognosis. It seemed likely that Frisco’s extreme reaction was related to the abuse his brain had endured early in life. That meant it was impossible to know how much the usual treatment techniques would help, but she was willing to try and I was committed to doing all I could to help her. I sent her home with some techniques that help most resource-guarding
dogs, and with the obvious instruction to put away anything that even vaguely resembled a toy. Even so, I was so worried about her and Frisco that I gave her my home phone number and told her to call me night or day if she needed help. She did, at eleven o’clock that Friday night. I picked up the phone to hear Karen, panicked, whispering like a kidnap victim who has sneaked away from her abductors to call 911. “Please come help me. Frisco’s gone crazy and is stalking me. I’ve hidden upstairs, but he’s trying to get through the door and I don’t know how long it will hold up. I can’t get out the windows and I’m terrified he’s going to kill me.”