Stocking Up on Treats

 “The social dynamics of a wolf pack is often used as a model for dog-dog and dog-human interactions. I have seen dog people (and some wolf people as well) caught up in the idea of always maintaining high rank by aggressive means, believing their only choices are between forcibly dominating the animal or submitting to it. The problem with this approach is two-fold. Firstly, aggression may well escalate, and secondly, an either-or choice between forcible dominance or submission is not the only choice available to wolves, to dogs or to humans.”

— from the Forward, On Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals, by Turid Rugaas

 

Having been several years since we had raised a puppy, and with the day approaching for bringing home the 8-week old Welsh Corgi who is to join our household, we got busy reading up. "Reading up," especially since the continuing pandemic precautions will keep us home and away from the "obedience" classes we have relied on with new puppies in the past.  This time we will be on our own.

The truth is, time elapsed is not our only concern. Puppy training has never been our most celebrated success. Love?  Yes. Training?  Uh, no.  This time, we resolved to get it right. 

 

But what is “right?”  It turns out that there is quite a difference of opinion on best practice. There is, of course, the long-standing, “whip-them-into-shape” theory of “dominance”.  Here, the eager trainer will find books and accessories touting the need to teach your dog that you are the boss. Choke collars, prong collars, shock collars, and the “alpha roll” feature prominently in this school of thought. Language is stern. “House breaking” is a big objective. There is lots of talk about “pack mentality,” drawing upon the genetic linkage of dogs to wolves.  

 

There is, however, another school of thought – the “dog friendly” approach.  Dogs may well be the genetic descendants of wolves, this approach acknowledges, but understanding wolf behavior no more clarifies dog behavior than understanding ape behavior predicts how humans will necessarily interact.   “Breaking” is less the focus in this philosophy than “training”.  Aversion and pain are eschewed in favor of incentivizing.  Treats and praise replace thwacks and volts.  Trainers following this path capitalize on the dog’s innate desire to please – and its subsequent rewards – rather than building on avoidance of pain and instilling fear.  Dominance gives way to partnership.

 

It hasn’t been hard to decide which path we will follow.  We look around and observe how commonly the “dominance” theory has been employed - in the way humans have historically approached their pets, to be sure, but each other as well, and all of creation – and see how poorly it has served us.  Even among people of faith.  Having wrestled the almost felonious interpretation of “domination” out of the Genesis assignment to have “dominion,” we have armed ourselves with a divine minting of James Bond’s “License to Kill.”  And kill we have – each other, the air, the soil, and the very atmosphere that suspends us.  We have, to put it pithily, been hellbent on being dominant.

 

One obvious problem with that approach is that, however satisfying it might feel to the dominant few, it simply doesn’t work very well.  Just look at the human community – interpersonally, internationally, politically. “Winning” is very loudly celebrated, but it should be obvious by now to even the casual observer that even when we win we lose.  When we get our way by coercion rather than consent, we condemn ourselves to a never ending application of power and energy to "keep the lid on" that depletes and diminishes everyone involved.

 

Another problem is that it’s sinful. People who purport to follow Jesus certainly ought to know better.  The word “dominion” is etymologically the same as “lordship,” and clearly the model of lordship that Jesus lived bears little resemblance to the practices of domination we employ.  

 

As Richard Rohr observes, “Jesus did not come to impose Christendom like an imperial system. Every description he offers of God’s Reign—of love, relationship, non-judgment, and forgiveness, where the last shall be first and the first shall be last—shows that imposition is an impossibility! Wherever we have tried to force Christianity on people, the long-term results have been disastrous.”

 

And so the puppy is coming home – a home within which we have and will often fail to live up to that biblical model, but toward which we aspire. Perhaps together we, the puppy and our whole growing menagerie, will learn from and teach one another something life-giving about life together.

 

And so, there is much training in store - all around - around the house and around the world. 

The treats are ready.  

To be given and received. 

 

The Scaffold That Sways the Future

“The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated.  A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not.  In other words, the moral mercury of life is reduced to zero.”

— Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 1949

 In the communication curriculum that Lori and I have come to value and teach, originally developed at the University of Minnesota Family Study Center, approaching an issue together involves processing a series of elements.  While in no particular order, each element requires its own care and reflection.  It all hinges on the naming of sensory data (the likes of which a camera or a microphone might record).   Within a household that "data" might involve dirty dishes or missed appointments or bills that need to be paid.  Ordinarily, establishing the data is simple.  The process gets more challenging when it moves on to consider, among other things, the unique thinking with which we surround that data - thoughts shaped by past experiences, parental influences, religious beliefs, cultural norms, prejudices, etc., and then the emotions those thoughts arouse.   But it all hinges on that common recognition of - agreement upon - the data; the facts.  

As suggested, once upon a time that was the easy part.  We could generally agree on the due date of a bill or the languishing existence of the greasy skillet.  Culturally speaking, however, that has somehow become the hard part.

No wonder we have come to find ourselves at the throat of each other in recent years.  Somehow it has come to be the case that we can't even agree on the facts - the 'is-ness" of our common reality.  Orange is green and yellow is purple and up is down and 2+2=5 -- or 20 or 2000 if that better suits our agenda.  Never mind what the recording captured me saying, it never came out of my mouth.  If I say there were a thousand on the lawn, then the photograph showing a total of 12 is fake; "doctored"; maliciously tampered with and falsified.  If I don't like "your facts", I'll simply assert "my own" that better reinforce my point of view.  

Word is that we are engulfed in a tsunami of "fake news."  The inevitable implication is that we can trust nothing, not even our own eyes and ears.

Back to that communication theory, it is difficult to parse out our respective thoughts and emotions, or consider what we are really after and the actions we are willing to undertake in their pursuit, if we can't even agree on the data about which we are purportedly thinking, and to which we are presumably reacting.  We are islands of righteously fortified, well-insulated ignorance.  Or as the band, Stealers Wheel sang in the heyday of my youth, "Clowns to the left of me; jokers to the right.  Here I am:  stuck in the middle with you."  And I don't really trust you.  

The inevitable destination of such personal and collective delusion is depravity.  We can speak from experience, because we have collectively arrived there, unpacked, and made of it a home.  Through our indulgence of the lie - our refusal to agree on the simplest facts, we have, as Thurman predicted all those decades ago, become deception itself; the moral mercury of life reduced to zero.  We are told it is all in the service of "greatness," but that, too, is a fiction.  In the eyes of the rest of the world, such faux "greatness" is variously the stuff of derision, mockery, or disconcerted perplexity.  

It isn't, of course, a hopeless state.  It is a prison, but one of our own making.  C.S. Lewis once famously observed that "The gates of hell are locked on the inside."  Whether or not that is true of hell, I am certain it is true of this desolate courtyard of moral, politically driven depravity.  We can emerge if we choose.  The key is neither hard to find nor difficult to use.  

In fact, it isn't even particularly new.  But, then, what is?  As the writer of Ecclesiastes wryly observed, "There is nothing new under the sun."  

The 19th century hymn writer James Russell Lowell insisted,

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong,
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future...

Truth.  Not wrong.  

The key is not will-power or asserted imagination, but simple honesty.  

Truthfulness sways the future.

Once inserted in the lock, the key doesn't take strength to turn; rather, simple...

...humility.

We have to give up believing that we are the only person, and the only set of opinions, in the room who matter.  And then, even when it disfavors us, and despite its occasional sour taste, to acknowledge the facts.  

And speak the truth.

Only then can we truly begin to communicate.

And get the bills paid and the dishes washed and who knows what else?