For the Love of a Dog (18 page)

The basic structure of your brain is also similar to the structure of your dog’s. Both humans and dogs have brains that come in three main sections: (1) the hindbrain, comprising the brainstem and cerebellum, which keeps our lungs breathing and our bodies aligned in space; (2) the midbrain, which regulates our emotions and memory formation; and (3) the forebrain, made up of two cerebral hemispheres covered with a thin film of cells called the cortex. It’s this area of the brain that we think of as the center of thought and decision making, and, not surprisingly, it’s this area that is most different in people and dogs. Of course, things are much more complicated than that, but it’s still helpful to start with the basics, and the basics are something we all share with our dogs.

No matter what you and your dog are doing right now, the brain-stems sitting atop your spinal cords are efficiently sending out signals to the lungs and the heart. Breathe! Beat faster! Pretty important stuff, that. Imagine if you had to stay up at night to tell your lungs to breathe. “I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached” is true for many of us. Good thing our heads
are
attached, or we’d get too busy to remember to breathe. If we could misplace our brainstems as we do our keys, natural selection would have gotten rid of us a long time ago.

We tend to forget these basic functions, instead thinking of the brain only as the center of thought and problem solving. We don’t call someone brainy because his heart and lungs work so well, but without these ancient areas of the brain, you and your dog wouldn’t make it through the night. Ever wonder why dogs who like to hunt small animals grab them by the back of the neck and shake them? That’s where the brainstem is, and serious damage to this part of the brain is fatal, pure and simple. It’s the reason my blood ran cold when a couple told me that their dog had grabbed a child by the back of the neck and wouldn’t let go. At the time, they were relieved that the dog hadn’t harmed the child’s face. I was sick with the knowledge that this could have been a killing bite, or could have paralyzed the child for life if the spinal cord had been severed. In seventeen years, I’ve had only two other cases where a dog bit a child at the back of the head and shook the neck. In one case, the child made it through with minor injuries. In the other, the child was killed.
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Besides regulating vital body processes, the ancient part of the brain also contains an area that coordinates movement: the cerebellum. When you reach down to pet your dog, your cerebellum is the stage manager that keeps things running smoothly. When you stop petting, and your dog nudges you for more, his cerebellum coordinates the movement. It’s not surprising that this primitive part of the brain is integrally involved in movement, because it’s movement that created the need for brains in the first place. Animals wouldn’t need a brain if all they have to do is “just react” (as claimed by the neurosurgeon mentioned in Chapter 1). Plants “just react” all the time. For example, acacia trees release airborne chemicals that signal danger if a browsing antelope chomps on their leaves. The surrounding trees of the same species receive the message and quickly change their internal chemistry so that their leaves become less tasty.

It’s movement from one place to another that requires a brain. If an animal is going to move, it has to make choices that immobile animals don’t. What is it about to move into? Should it move this way, or that way? The proof is in an animal called a sea squirt, which has a brain and nerve cord while it’s swimming around in the ocean. When it matures and permanently anchors itself to a rock, its brain is absorbed and
digested by the rest of its body. No movement; no brain necessary. Surely those of us who have spent just a little too long lying on the couch in front of some tawdry television show can relate to a lack of motion leading to brain absorption.

It’s a good thing that these ancient areas of the brain coordinate many of your movements, for it ensures that much of what your body is doing is controlled outside the realm of conscious thought. Your brain knows exactly where your toes and elbows are every instant of your life, but you’re not consciously aware of this information unless you go out of your way to be. A circuit of signals runs between your muscles, your inner ear, and your cerebellum to keep you aligned in space, including being in the position you’re in right now, without the need to think about it.
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Imagine being conscious of the location of every part of your body every moment of every day. Just thinking about it is tiring, and for good reason. Decision making and conscious thought take place primarily in the “newer” part of your brain, the cortex, which is famous for being an energy hog that requires a disproportionate amount of fuel to run. Better, then, to save the cortex for things that can’t be relegated to the cerebellum, and not bother our pretty little heads unnecessarily. The cerebellum acts like the autopilot system in a plane, enabling us to “fly” without consciously monitoring every little movement, every single second.

It’s this phenomenon that explains why teaching your dog new tricks can do almost as much to tire her out as taking her on a walk. When she’s learning something new, she can’t run on autopilot out of her energy-conserving cerebellum. She has to use her brain’s energy-guzzling cortex, so a little bit of something new can tire her out as much as a long walk around the neighborhood. If that’s the only thing you learn from this book, it still might be worthwhile, because so many of our dogs have excess energy that gets them into trouble. We all
know that dogs need exercise, but it’s easy to forget that they need mental as well as “physical” exercise. (I put “physical” in quotes, because, as I mentioned earlier, mental processes are just as physical as those that take place in our muscles, even though we don’t tend to think of them that way.)

Chris and Custer were a great pair, both young, healthy males who reveled in playing ball, running hard, and relaxing together on their old, musty couch. I met Custer first, all eighty pounds of him, lunging his way toward me, dragging his human behind him. “Isn’t he great?” Chris beamed. And he was—Custer greeted me with a full-body wag, squinty eyes, and the open, relaxed mouth of a dog who loves people. After Custer and I had a love fest on the living room floor, I asked Chris why he’d requested an appointment
.

“Well, he’s a great dog but he’s not very good at listening to me. I’ve taken him to obedience class, but he still won’t sit or stay when I ask him to, and he’s too big to get too much older without some manners.” I agreed, since Custer was only eight months old and already capable of flattening anyone smaller than a Green Bay Packer defensive end without even trying. “Why don’t you ask him to sit and stay for me,” I asked, “so I can get an idea of how things are going?” Chris asked Custer to sit, and sit he did—at least for about half a second, until Chris said “stay.” As soon as he did, Custer leaped up, kissed Chris’s face, and joyfully danced around his owner. They repeated this exercise three times, and each time, Custer sat for an instant, and then jumped to his feet as soon as Chris said “stay.” However, when I tried it, Custer not only sat as directed, he stayed in place for a solid three to four seconds before I released him. A stay that short might not seem impressive, but given Custer’s propensity to hurtle into the air as soon as he heard the word “stay,” it seemed like a significant improvement
.

Certainly, Chris thought so. “I’ve been trying for five months to get him to do that. How the heck did you get him to stay still?” It would’ve been great fun to answer that I’ve always had a special way with dogs (not true), and that even as a child my friends called me the “dog whisperer” (even less true), but the answer was far more mundane. The only difference between Chris and me was the movement of our bodies when we said “stay.” Like most people, Chris hadn’t learned to pay attention to the movements of his body when he was saying “stay.” When he did, he unconsciously moved
backward a few inches and ever so slightly bowed forward with his torso. That was exactly the same set of movements I’d seem him perform earlier when he called Custer to come. Custer was doing what he was “told,” but was paying attention to Chris’s body, not his voice. Once Chris learned to match his movements to his voice, Custer was able to sort out “stay” from “come” in a couple of days
.

The efficiency of the cerebellum, which allows many of our actions to be unconscious, has a price, and our dogs are often the ones who pay it. The fact that we can be oblivious to the position and movements of our body makes life difficult for our dogs. Living with aliens who speak another language, our dogs are desperately watching our bodies to get information about what we expect of them. Because we usually aren’t paying conscious attention to how all our body parts are moving, we send confusing and inconsistent signals out on a daily basis, while our dogs have smoke coming out of their ears trying to figure us out. As I wrote in
The Other End of the Leash
, the biggest difference between dog lovers and professional dog trainers is that the pros know exactly what their bodies are doing when they’re working with a dog, so they don’t confuse their dogs with random and inconsistent movements. That’s why I think of dog training as a science, a sport, and an art—and it’s the
sport
part that everyone can learn if they are willing to practice a little bit.

If you want to be less confusing to your dog (and have a better-behaved dog as a result), put your cerebellum on hold for a while and use your cortex to monitor your movements. Focus your attention for a few weeks on how you move in space when you’re working with your dog. You could even have someone videotape you, as suggested in the first chapter. The reason it’s so shocking to see ourselves on video for the first time is that so much of how we move is out of the realm of conscious thought. Your friends might know that you put your hand over your mouth or play with your hair while you talk, but you probably don’t.
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Be assured, though, that your dog does, because she’s been watching you like a hawk for years. When you think about it, why
should we
know what we look like from the outside in? How could our brains record what we look like from ten feet away? That would be like asking a camera to take a picture of itself.

There’s tremendous variation in people’s awareness of their own body movements. If you don’t believe me, just go to a beginning family dog training class. Some people can quickly switch their attention to how they are moving and, with little effort, start giving their dogs clear and consistent visual signals. Others have no awareness of how they’re moving their body, no matter how hard they try to focus on it. Lesson after lesson you can coach them, and lesson after lesson they can’t stop a hand or a leg from moving forward at the wrong time. It can be frustrating to coach someone like this, although surely not as frustrating as being the person whose body seems to have a mind of its own. But everyone can learn to increase their awareness of how their body moves. It just takes some people longer than others—a good example of the fact that all brains have the same general structure and function, but every one of them works a bit differently. Don’t despair if you’re slower than others to increase your body awareness. You may well be more adept at some other aspect of dog training.

Whether you need a little coaching or a lot, don’t feel too bad about your initial lack of awareness of your body’s movements—your dog has the same problem. He, too, has an inner ear and cerebellum that work together to tell the primitive part of his brain where his body parts are in space. Just like you, he isn’t always aware of where his body parts are. Perhaps that’s why it’s so much easier to teach a dog an action than a position. Say, “Sit,” and most dogs will behave as though it means: “Go to your owner, face her, and move part of your body down toward the ground.” Those are actions controlled by the cortex, not postures controlled by the unconscious cerebellum. Say, “Sit,” to a sitting dog, and there’s a good chance he’ll lie down—which suggests that the signal relates to an action he makes consciously, rather than a posture he’s in that he’s not really thinking about.

There are other examples of both dogs and people being unaware of
their bodies’ positions in space. Many dogs behave as though they have no idea of the location of their back feet. Of course, they couldn’t function if part of their brain didn’t know, but put a novice dog on a narrow wooden beam in an agility course and he’s likely to carefully place his front paws in the center of the beam, and then let his back paws go helter-skelter, sometimes straight off the beam and into thin air.
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Most of the time, dogs don’t have to think about where to put their back feet—following in the general direction of the front feet is usually all that’s necessary, so that’s a reasonable thing to delegate to the inner ear and cerebellum.

It might be good for your dog to become aware of her body in new ways. We know that one way to keep human brains healthy is to exercise them, by asking the brain and the body to learn new things. Although most of the connections between your brain cells are formed early in life, we’ve recently learned that you can form new links among neurons by engaging in activities that are new to you. We’re advised, as we age, to do novel things like use our nondominant hand more often than usual, learn to dance, or learn to play the piano—all actions that engage both our thinking cortex and our cerebellum. There’s no biological reason to believe that learning’s not equally beneficial to your dog. If your dog is older, you probably won’t want to introduce her to the athletic rigors of agility, but dogs of almost any age can learn new tricks. At fifteen, my oldest dog, Pip, loves learning new tricks. She may be hard of hearing and a bit wobbly on the stairs, but she just learned to lay her head down on the ground between her front paws when I say “Bummer,” and I swear she gets as much of a kick out of it as I do.