“I’m not stroking,” Harry said. “I didn’t say she’d set the show ring on fire, I said she’s pretty, and she is. Now, the male — all you’d need is a few judges with really liberal attitudes about the importance of eye color. Showing him only at indoor shows might have helped. Eyes can look darker inside, out of the sun. Where’s he from?”
Harry listened to Robo’s story intently, and to my surprise when I told him about my current total lack of success in getting Robo to do anything but eat and sleep, he didn’t offer any advice on training methods.
“Give it time,” he said. “Maybe he’ll never bounce back, but at least he’s safe with you.”
The scenery flew by on the way home unnoticed as I mulled over what I’d learned from the Jamesons and tried to fit it in with Carl Warmstead’s and Dorrie Stander’s views of Jack. Carl had emphasized Jack’s greed and manipulation at the end of their relationship, but the two men had lived together for years. There must have been some respect and affection for much of that time. Dorrie was justifiably bitter that Jack had lied and shunted his own liability for letting Maida loose on her, but they had done business together for years before that dreadful night.
Sighing, I recognized the weakness in my own interviews — I had let both Carl and Dorrie tell me only about the ugly ends to their relationships, not about the beginnings or years in the middle.
Did Susan and Harry, who had never known Jack well, actually give me a more realistic portrait of him? Maybe so, but Harry had admitted Jack was highly competitive, and of all the things I’d learned about Jack so far, it seemed most logical that his desire to have an edge on anyone he was dealing with or competing against was what had gotten him killed.
I wondered if Jack ever realized how much remarks such as his would hurt and anger an overweight woman. Add to that the fact that he had used that pain and anger to win over a dog she undoubtedly thought the world of.... If Jack Sheffield had gone through life behaving like that, it wasn’t hard to accept that he’d finally driven someone to murder.
But Lieutenant Forrester was satisfied that Carl Warmstead was out of town the morning of Jack’s murder. And much as seeing Lee Stander hauled off in handcuffs would please me, I couldn’t accept that his fury would suddenly turn murderous a year after he and Dorrie lost the lawsuit.
Harry Jameson’s initial behavior toward me had been calculating enough that I could envision him planning a successful murder, but now that I knew Harry and his family a little, I liked them, and if Harry had a reason for killing Jack, he’d hidden it from me successfully.
Thickening traffic made me stop daydreaming and pay attention the rest of the way home.
The next day was a
Saturday, and not one of the people still on my interview list was available. Several had not yet returned my calls. They were probably all on a mass trek to a dog show in some remote part of the state. If the fates were giving me any breaks at all, the murderer was also firmly committed to a weekend far away.
After restlessly moving around the house picking things up and putting them down again in the same place, I gave up the pretense of housework. The calendar had turned to October, but the summer-like weather was holding, and the day was too lovely to spend inside. Much to Sophie’s disgust, I took Millie outside to further her education.
Millie loved attention, any attention. She didn’t merely wag her nub of a tail with joy, but her whole body. The way I trained was the way I had learned years ago in the course from which Butch had finally graduated. So when Millie pulled straight ahead on her leash, I did an about face and walked briskly in the opposite direction, which gave her a pretty hard leash correction and left her to catch up. To teach her the command to sit, I positioned her beside me, pulled up on her collar and pushed down on her fanny while telling her, “sit.”
After many sessions, Millie walked on a leash most of the time without pulling and sat on command. She could sit and hold a stay for up to half a minute now, but I was having much less luck teaching her the down command using the method I had used with Butch.
First I had Millie sit at my left side. Then I reached down and put my left hand on her left shoulder. Next I picked up her right front leg with my right hand and used my left hand to push her toward her now theoretically unsupported right side, while saying, “Down,” in my best trainer’s voice.
Instead of collapsing into a down position, Millie twisted and squirmed and took advantage of how close my face was to kiss me thoroughly. I was the one who ended up on the ground in the down position, with Millie bouncing around me, diving in to wash my face again and again.
When I hid my face in my arms, she started on the back of my neck. Finally, fighting giggles, I conceded defeat and climbed to my feet.
“This time I’m ready for you,” I told Millie trying to suppress the laughter and sound stern. “I’ve brushed up on this, and we’re moving on to Plan B.”
Once again I put Millie in a sit at my side. This time I stayed upright but put my left foot on the leash and began to pull up using my foot and the leash as a pulley system. Millie resisted the pressure valiantly but in the end had to give in. Of course, she only gave in with the front half of her body; her back end stuck up in the air in a pitiable imitation of a dog’s play bow until I gently pushed her hips sideways and forced her all the way down. At that point she rolled on her back, spreading her hind legs in the universal canine plea for mercy.
Ignoring the fact that I now felt about an inch high, I repeated the exercise another dozen times until Millie was going down with very little resistance, although she ended up on her back each time. Calling it quits for the day, I took her face in my hands and told her, “I’m not just pushing you around for no reason. We want the people who adopt you to know you’re the best dog they’ve ever met, don’t we?”
Millie gave me a subdued version of her previous exuberant face washing, her long pink tongue licking the air but not reaching my face. She wasn’t the first rescue to react this way to my training efforts. Most untrained dogs dislike lying down on command and have to be forced down in the beginning.
Why was this typical bump in the training road with Millie bothering me so much? I was teaching Millie things she needed to know, not abusing her. An image of Robo’s face flashed through my mind. I pushed it right out again and concentrated on Millie.
Back in the house, I poured myself a glass of iced tea and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. Sophie sat inches from me, eager to go outside next and practice anything at all.
“You don’t feel abused when we train, do you, girl?” I asked her.
I took the twitching of her stubby tail as her agreement that training was a delight and she was more than ready to get at it.
My attention, however, was focused on Robo, who sprawled on a rug in the corner, secure in the knowledge he was safe from any attempts at training. I still brushed and massaged him regularly, but his total lack of response had made me give up trying to teach him anything.
Now I looked at him with renewed interest. The instructor I’d learned dog training basics from had disdained using food lures. Dogs should not be bribed he had declared. They should work because they wanted to. They should work because they knew they had to. Susan had recommended that trainer, and his methods were her own.
Yet because Susan had also recommended that I join several email lists devoted to the Rottweiler, I had been reading messages from owners who referred to my kind of training as “J&P.” Depending on how outspoken or perhaps how zealous the email advocate of other methods was, J&P translated as anything from “jerk and praise” to “jerk and puke.”
Some of the discussions grew hot enough to send out cybersmoke. Rottweilers needed a firm hand and had to respect their owners cried the J&P advocates. Human beings don’t work for free argued the foodies, who believed in training with treats, so why should dogs work for free?
Clicker trainers advocated use of small metal noise-making crickets in plastic boxes
and
food. If you can train a dolphin with our no force methods, they asserted, you can train any animal.
My attitude had always been “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and what I had learned years ago worked for me. Still, the arguments I’d read had been thought provoking. A little surfing around the net and some reading about the so-called “positive” training methods had made me even more curious. Yet when I tried to discuss what I’d read with Susan, I got nowhere.
“These people who shove food down their dog just to get it to sit are fooling themselves,” she said. “What happens the first time they really need the dog to do something and they don’t happen to have a pocket full of treats?”
“They say they only use the food to teach and then they slowly fade it away and just use it occasionally.”
Susan rolled her eyes. “I’ve never seen any of them fade anything. They shovel so many treats down those dogs they probably never have to feed them regular meals.”
“But everyone uses liver bait when they show dogs in conformation,” I pointed out.
“That’s absolutely different,” Susan said. “You have to maintain an up attitude in a show dog. Every one of them would sit without being bribed.”
When I tried to discuss clicker training with Susan, the discussion ended fast.
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Dianne, surely you have more sense than to be drawn in by that New Age nonsense. You’re not going to hang crystals from their collars instead of vaccinating, are you?”
Well, no, I wasn’t, but I knew the vets at the nation’s top veterinary schools had changed their vaccination protocols and no longer recommended annual vaccinations for common diseases. And I was intrigued by the thought of being able to train a dog without force.
So as I sat in my kitchen that Saturday morning, still feeling vaguely disturbed by my training session with Millie, I looked across the room at Robo and came to a sudden decision. The only thing Robo ever did with enthusiasm was eat. How could waving a little food around in front of his nose hurt?
I scrounged through the refrigerator and came up with some cheddar cheese. As I reduced most of the cheese block into a pile of small cubes, I gave Millie a few pieces as an apology of sorts and Sophie a few with the promise that we’d go work on her recalls soon. Feeling almost guilty, I pocketed the rest of the small bits of cheese, snapped the leash on Robo and led him out to the backyard.
Robo really wasn’t bad on a leash; he never pulled. He just lagged behind as much as the leash allowed and looked so depressed he was depressing. I shortened the leash until he had to walk fairly close to my left leg or pull. Then I took some of the cheese out of my pocket and held it so that if Robo’s mouth met the cheese, he’d be in perfect heel position.
We marched in a large circle, and as I’d fully expected, Robo ignored the cheese in my hand no matter how much I waved it around in front of his nose. When I stopped, so did he, and since then he was willing to take the tidbits, I gave him a few on general principles. What else was I going to do with all those little pieces of cheddar?
Discouraged, but feeling obliged to give the method a thorough and whole-hearted effort, I stepped off again. Bent at the waist, waving cheese and crooning to the unresponsive dog like a fool, I barely caught the quick flick of Robo’s eyes. His gaze slid across my face and away so fast if I’d been mid-blink I would have missed it.
I stopped dead in surprise. Robo never looked into a human face. Looking at me was one of the many things I’d never been able to get him to do. I would hold the sides of his face and talk softly to him, and he’d looked off into space as if I wasn’t there.
I popped another bit of cheese into his mouth and started circling again. Nothing. I stopped, fed cheese, circled again, stopped, fed cheese, circled again. Circle after circle. Just when I was about to give up, it happened again. Robo took another quick peek at me as if flirting with the devil.
Susan would definitely have described my reaction as “shoveling” cheese into Robo. With an effort I forced myself not to hug or pet. He’d never given any indication he cared about either of those behaviors from a human one way or the other, but I didn’t want to take the chance of doing anything he didn’t actively like. I took him back to the house feeling — what? Triumphant? Happy? Successful? All of those things.
Energized, I cut up the rest of the cheese and gave one piece to each of the dogs. “This is a bribe,” I informed them. “You each have to promise not to squeal on me to Susan. Deal?” None of the dogs denied the bargain, and they each accepted another payment.
Sophie followed me out to the yard with her usual enthusiasm. The training I’d done with her for years had never dented her exuberant self in the slightest, but the last of the cheese weighed heavily in my pocket. Would giving her a bit of cheese for a particularly good recall ruin all her training? Probably not, and after all, the cheese would just get stale and go to waste if I didn’t give it to her.
For her recall practice, I left Sophie in a sit and walked varying distances from her and then called her. She flew to me time after time. I was about ready to call it a day anyway, when Sophie broke her position before I called her and ran to the fence, barking. My stomach dropped. The gun was in my purse in the house. Before I could decide whether to start running myself, a thin dark man appeared at the fence.
“I thought I heard you back here,” he called. “Can you leash your dog? I’d like to talk to you.”
After a single command, Sophie came to me as if we’d been practicing. I slipped her a last piece of cheese, but didn’t leash her. We walked to the fence together. My visitor’s khaki slacks and knit shirt looked too casual for a salesman, but it never hurt to be sure.
“If you’re selling, I’m not buying,” I warned him.
“I’m not selling, I’m Ty Mullin, and you’ve been leaving messages on my phone for days.”
Tyrone Mullin. He had been a good client of Jack’s until about a year ago. Now that I had a face to put with the name, I knew there was no chance he was Jack Sheffield’s killer, but maybe knowing why he was Jack’s
ex
-client would be interesting.