What the Dog Knows Read Free Page A

that’s what we told ourselves. We expected this pup, from West German breeding lines, to be higher-energy and tougher than Zev, who mostly loved to lie in the grass and smell the flowers. We already had a dog who took some of our time and energy: a beautiful female Irish setter we had adopted from my father several years before to help him adjust to a new life with a lovely woman who wasn’t accustomed to large and quasi-uncontrollable dogs. We offered to take Megan to lighten the dog load. I lied to David and told him it would be fun, a real adventure, not just a filial duty, to adopt a year-old Irish setter in heat.
    Though Megan was now four and had graduated beyond those moments when we fantasized about placing her on a nice farm in the country, my feelings about Irish setters hadn’t changed much since childhood. They had filled our small house in Oregon with their gaiety, their indifference to obedience, and their uncanny ability to bolt. They would disappear into the dark fog of the Willamette Valley, cross-country journeys to nowhere, ending up lost, miles away from our little house on the hill. Always at night. Their other sins were insubstantial:jumping on guests, snagging empty rolls of toilet paper to play with, occasionally slinking up onto beds and easy chairs when no one was paying attention. My father loved their minor mutinies, loved to stroke their silky setter heads. They distracted him from a grinding schedule: a demanding research career; a wife who, because she was paralyzed, needed nursing; and three occasionally wild children who needed raising. The setters and their escapades were his only vacation.
    Unlike my father, I didn’t want dogs as a distraction; I wanted dogs who would engage completely with me and vice versa. By my early twenties, I had settled on German shepherds as my favorite breed. Partly because I loved their intelligence and dignity and their physical resemblance to wolves, partly because they were the antithesis of setters. David met me when my second shepherd was still a young dog and fell in love with him. Zev was an easygoing ambassador for the breed.
    David and I realized the squashy mole needed a name that suited him better than Coda. His entry into the world felt less like a tail end and more like something improvisational. So David, a lover of jazz, renamed him Solo.
    Animal behaviorist and author Patricia McConnell, who has devoted a good portion of her career and research to dogs with behavior problems, has a chapter in one of her training books on anger management in dogs. She wrote about her reaction when her favorite border collie gave birth to just one pup: “I’m supposed to help people, not cause the very problems I’m trained to alleviate, so when the vet confirmed that the litter contained a total of one puppy I was beside myself. You might think that it wouldn’t be a crisis but it felt like one to me.” McConnell briefly considered euthanizing the pup before rejecting that idea as she held the small warm bundle of fur. “Over the years I have seen what appeared to be a disproportionately large number of singleton puppies with serious behavior problems.” She was the dog behaviorist who knew too much. Nonetheless, she decided she wouldexperiment. For the good of her research and perhaps the good of future clients who came to her in desperation over their singleton dogs.
    When he was only five weeks old, McConnell wrote, the border collie pup growled at her in fierce aggression, lips curled back from tiny milk teeth. “All I had done was touch him.”
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    You like me because I’m a scoundrel. There aren’t enough scoundrels in your life.
    â€”Han Solo, The Empire Strikes Back , 1980
    Joan nicknamed the singleton pup “HRH,” for His Royal Highness. Solo was the king of everything. He had the canine equivalent of an Exeter education before he was eight weeks old.