Introduction

I never meant to be a dog trainer.

Sure, I’ve always been interested in animals and animal behavior. I’ve watched countless nature shows, read dozens of books on why animals do what they do, taken wildlife-watching vacations, and volunteered on wildlife research projects and with animal welfare organizations. Until my late forties, words were the stuff of my professional life and animals were the stuff of my personal life.

Like many animal lovers, I was a quiet, sensitive, introverted, observant child. I was also raised in a chaotic, unpredictable, and sometimes dangerous environment by a charming alcoholic mother who was unpredictable at best, frightening at worst, and who disliked me always. Classic childhood stories of mistreated horses and dogs, like Black Beauty and The Call of the Wild, gave me examples of how to endure without losing my dignity or spirit.

For the first twenty-five years of my life, all the animals I knew outside of books belonged to some other family member or to themselves. Various stray dogs and cats arrived at my mother’s Los Angeles homes, stayed awhile, and then left by choice or old age. I moved to my father’s two-hundred-year-old rural New Jersey home when I was thirteen and immediately started working with his and other people’s farmyard critters. In addition to caring for his various dogs, cats, chickens, and Nubian goats, I boarded horses in his beat-up barns and found cast-off and neglected horses to ride, primarily bareback or on borrowed saddles until I had mucked enough stalls to afford a saddle of my own. I labored and loved these animals, even as I kept my emotional distance because I knew they could and would eventually be taken from me by their real owners.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I got a house, a husband, and a red merle Australian shepherd from a rough-around-the-edges farm. She was mine, all mine, and I was determined to be her best friend and exemplary guardian. To that end, I read books and signed up for classes, hoping to find the sort of wise and world-weary mentor who, as in my childhood books, appeared from a dark corner of the bar or the barn just in time to save an animal’s life and a young person’s spirit.

What I found instead were aggressive men wielding fetishistic devices that subdued dogs into obedience and finger-wagging schoolmarmish women barking out directions on how to properly pop a leash. The dogs they used for demonstration seemed stripped of all agency—just empty, furry vessels waiting for human instruction. This was not how I wanted my dog to be and not how I wanted to be with my dog.

I tried some of their techniques, but I didn’t have the stomach for most of it. There was the instructor who stood at the front of the class tossing a short piece of chain in her hand, describing how to throw it at your dog to get their attention, assuring us it did the dog no harm, even as her own dog slunk beneath all our chairs, terrified, and hid behind some boxes at the far side of the room. There was the poet whose essays explored the deepest wells of empathy between our two species, even as she recommended joining your dog when he digs holes in the yard, filling your excavation from the hose, and then immediately holding his head underwater to break him of the very habit you just shared. I was even convinced by one instructor to try a prong collar on the erroneous advice that it mimicked a mother dog’s nip. Once the collar was secured around my dog’s neck, she simply turned her head and attention away and refused to work with me. I removed the collar and threw it in the trash.

I quickly realized that my dog’s breed and personality, along with our habit of 24/7 companionship, meant I didn’t have to do much formal training. We naturally fell in sync with each other and found ways to clearly communicate our needs and desires, like when she banged her bowl on the floor to tell me I was tardy with her dinner. When she was two years old, I went back to that farm and got one of her half-sisters. For about fifteen years, I had a very easy existence with these two dogs. We shared endless hours in the woods, a divorce, lots of bad boyfriends, and then a good one, followed by a move to a new home in a different state. Each of them lived for about thirteen years, and after they both died, I tried to take a little time off from dogs, but quickly got sucked into the world of rescue, and before long found myself at another farm, in a different state, with a beat-up and terrified border collie jumping into my truck.

If you look into the motivations of someone who, in the middle of a successful professional life, switches careers to become, of all dubious things, a dog trainer, you are likely to find a story about a difficult dog. This person adopts a wonderful rescue dog with a sad backstory. Together, they enjoy many delightful days, weeks, months, or even years until one day, for no apparent reason, this idealized dog starts acting up in some very disturbing ways. The ensuing effort to figure out what’s wrong with and how to fix the dog takes this person down many dark alleys and to multiple dead ends until finally they emerge, a bit bruised, battered, and still a little confused, into the light of a new, mostly happy, very hard-won, and somewhat attenuated relationship.

This person begins to consider how helpful she could be and how much agony she might spare other dog and human duos struggling with similar issues. Cute canine play-on-word phrases start spinning in this person’s brain, she takes some professional education classes, attends a couple of conferences, gets some sort of certification, and soon enough is sharing lessons learned and wisdom obtained with earnest folks who have paw prints on their pants, dehydrated liver treats in their pockets, and “Who rescued who?” bumper stickers on their Subarus.

This is sort of my story. No bumper stickers, but the border collie that jumped into my truck was awonderful dog with a history of abuse written all over her body. She did manifest some serious behavioral issues, and I struggled mightily trying to fix whatever was wrong. However, it never occurred to me to turn what I’d learned into a job. I was perfectly happy with my career as a writer and brand communications consultant.

Not long after I had come to a kind of understanding about my dog’s issues, my husband and I moved across the country, and I began looking for volunteer work in my new community. I thought perhaps I could help dogs like mine by giving them a little behavioral spiffing up when they were still in rescue. I joined the volunteer teams at a private, nonprofit rescue and a city shelter and was soon taking dogs from dubious backgrounds on what I hoped would be make-them-more-adoptable walks. I also enrolled in an online applied animal behavior certificate course that looked interesting.

I quickly learned, through classes and legwork, that dogs can’t learn much and difficult behaviors tend to get more difficult when they’re in a shelter because the environment is just too stressful. The best thing for them is just to get out of the shelter for a relaxing, exploratory, sniffing walk, not a training session. I also learned that a lot of dogs are returned to rescue in the first few months after adoption, when the honeymoon period fades and their behavioral issues start to show up. I thought if I could help adopters navigate this challenge, more of them might keep their dogs.

I really didn’t want to train people, with all their messy feelings, but I wanted to help the dogs, so I offered new adopters from my local rescue group one free private lesson. I also gave a free workshop on behavioral issues to other volunteers. I didn’t anticipate that some adopters would want another lesson or two or three, or to refer me to a neighbor. Or that they’d want to pay me. I also didn’t anticipate that a local veterinarian who had attended my workshop would start referring his patients to me. I tried to find other credentialled trainers to refer to, but there were none locally. I told the veterinarian I wasn’t a “real” dog trainer. He replied, “You have the knowledge and the knack, and we need you.” Still, I resisted.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to be a dog trainer. It was also that, instead of settling down comfortably into my mid-fifties as I’d planned, I found my life unexpectedly in a series of unfixable upheavals. My consulting clients were changing priorities and moving away from the work we’d always done. The magazines I’d written for were folding. My publisher shifted focus to the kinds of books I didn’t write. My body had been stiffening up in strange and intractable ways, the symptoms of early onset Parkinson’s disease. My dogs died. Then, my husband left me.

There is a strange and eerie quiet this much loss leaves behind. The phone stops ringing and pinging. There are no tires crunching up the gravel driveway, bringing a loved one home. There is no background hubbub of another body moving in some other part of the house. No one is laughing at your jokes or asking about your day. The television and radio sound too loud in the heft of the surrounding silence. When you wake up in the middle of the night, there is no comforting rhythm of someone else’s steady breathing to soothe you, only the high-pitched howls of distant coyotes who have lost and are trying to find each other.

Slowly, this yawning void in my life was filled, bit by bit, with calls and messages from people distraught over their dogs. I was so worn down that saying yes was easier than saying no, and I quickly found that helping these people and their dogs feel better helped me feel better. So, I kept saying yes, and dogs and their humans gave my days a new rhythm and purpose.

I got certifications and experience. My writing background allowed me to transform behavioral science jargon into metaphors people understood, empathetically and intellectually, and could put into immediate practice. I found the work unexpectedly intimate, stressful, and rewarding. I said no to people looking for basic “manners” training and focused my practice on dogs with behavioral issues. I often found myself sitting in strange living rooms trying to tease the dog-related issue from stifled arguments between couples, families bickering across multiple generations, women weeping over nipped children and angry spouses, people wringing their hands about whether they should rehome the dog they’d adopted with promises of a “forever home,” people confessing how much their own issues were reflected in their dog’s.

My students often joked that I was not a dog trainer, but a human trainer. I sometimes joked that I was a family therapist. No one agreed with that assessment more than my students who were, in fact, professional therapists.

I began to write about these experiences to help myself understand and process what I was doing and then began to post little stories about my dog and human experiences to my social media to help other dogs and humans.

I was frankly surprised by the quantity of appreciative comments, thoughtful questions, and requests for more that my posts generated. I even heard from people who didn’t have or like dogs. As I read through the responses, one thing became clear: You didn’t need to know how dogs and humans coevolved or understand the unique social underpinnings of our two species to recognize the special bond between dogs and humans.

“It’s kind of incredible,” one friend wrote.

"These wolves who thousands of years ago decided it was better to be close to us, with all of our complications and differences, than to be wild. It’s a microcosm of the compromise required to be in a relationship with anyone. I think subconsciously we all believe that we can’t change. That belief both forms our identities and secretly scares us. In all your essays, you tell a story about a human being who changed for someone else—the dog—but didn’t lose themselves . . . who realized change is not only possible, it can also be good." (Rachel Balik)

Dogs changed themselves, over thousands of years, so they could live with humans. Sometimes, humans are brave enough or smart enough or desperate enough to change themselves so they can live better with their dogs. That sort of change, and what happens next, is what the stories in this book are all about. I hope you enjoy them.

Waking Up from My Dream Dog

I didn’t want a border collie. I wasn’t sure I wanted a dog of any kind. But I definitely did not want a border collie. I loved and admired the breed, but knew they were far too intense and high-maintenance for me. I’d had a good fifteen-year run with two Australian shepherds, each of whom lived thirteen active, outdoorsy, fun-filled years. I was in my early forties and had recently changed my life dramatically—new relationship, big move, very different lifestyle, freelance writing career heating up. It was time, I’d declared to myself and my husband, for a dog-free, carefree existence. I saw dogs as part of a rural life, and I didn’t live down a dirt road in a yellow farmhouse on five acres of New England countryside with miles of woodland trails right out my door anymore. Instead, I was happily ensconced in a two-hundred-year-old, four-story townhouse in a lovely, leafy, historic neighborhood of downtown Albany, New York.

My daily hikes and bikes on muddy, silent, deeply wooded trails had been replaced with the clacking weights and lunchtime rush of office workers at the local YMCA. Now, I did laps in an indoor pool instead of settling among the slick rocks and soaking in a cold stream. I traversed concrete sidewalks to restaurants, lectures, and arts events, not broad fields and root-rutted trails where a moose or black bear might be around the next turn or over the next hill. I no longer woke up and immediately got up so I could get out with a leashed dog and plastic poop bags. It was lovely to simply roll over and back into my husband’s warm embrace.

Besides, if I wanted to see or play with a dog, there were plenty around. A stroll to a local park provided me with more wet noses than I could possibly pet. Lots of my friends and neighbors had dogs, too. One couple who lived up the street had what seemed to be a rotating roster of dogs in addition to the happy little elkhound that was their constant companion. One day, I saw them walking a white dog I’d never seen before with two leashes attached to her collar and harness. I asked about the unusual equipment setup and was informed that she was shy, scared, and a serious flight risk. She’d twisted out of her collar once or twice already, and they’d had a hell of a time tracking her down. I expressed admiration that they’d taken in such a challenging dog and silently congratulated myself for choosing to be free of such risky and stressful obligations.

“Oh, she’s not ours,” he assured me.

“We’d never adopt a dog like this,” she chuckled.

I looked at them blankly.

“We’re just fostering her,” they said simultaneously.

“Fostering?” I asked. “What’s that?”

They explained that they would provide a temporary home to a dog in “rescue,” which was a private, nonprofit alternative to what we’d always called the “pound” and was now referred to as a “shelter.”

This was news to me. I’d been so long in a bubble of contented dog ownership and companionship, I’d not kept up with what sounded like welcome changes to the world of what to do with unwanted dogs. In Vermont, where I’d lived for about fifteen years, many folks handled stray and no longer useful dogs with, as the rural saying went, “a shotgun and a shovel.” I was glad to hear about this network of big-hearted people turning over their homes and free time to rehabbing and rehoming other people’s canine castoffs. I watched the neurotic creature my neighbors had so securely leashed anxiously scan the streets and twist away from any human passing by. Her nervousness set my nerves on edge. They smiled at her and told me she was something like their sixth or seventh foster. They had felt ready for a difficult case and knew no one else would take her on, so they stepped up. I admired them but was glad to wave goodbye and head home empty-handed.

A few days later, in a lull between conference calls with a couple of my large corporate clients, I was looking out the window of my office thirty feet above the sidewalk, down through the branches of the tree cracking the concrete outside my front door, when I saw them again. The husband walked confidently down the street, his elkhound bobbing at his side, while the white dog skittered this way and that, tugging at one leash and then another, as she tried to get away from all the scary things in the world and her own mind. In spite of this, he looked happy. Maybe, I thought, he looks happy because of this. It must feel pretty darn good to help a dog like this have a nice life.

I returned to my desk and, while waiting for my phone to ring, nonchalantly tapped in the name of the rescue group they’d mentioned. Just, you know, to fill time. There were pictures of maybe a dozen dogs, all different sizes and breeds, all looking friendly, with open mouths and upturned bellies. Cute. Interesting. The phone rang and I closed the tab. But a few days later, looking for something else, the name of the rescue came up in the search window and I clicked there instead. I was just giving myself a little distraction between tasks, I told myself. Better to look at cute dogs than bad news or celebrity gossip. The home page was populated with the same pictures of the same dogs. I clicked around a bit and read that this group specialized in pulling golden retrievers or dogs with golden-like personalities from shelters and finding them homes. Well then, little harm could come from me reading the dog bios more closely, I told myself, as goldens were not my sort of dog. No chance I’d foster a dog like these. I was into herding breeds. Was, I reminded myself. Past tense.

Checking out the rescue page became a regular habit. I still didn’t want to have a dog, but this fostering concept was starting to intrigue me. I could have a temporary dog, get my fix—not that I needed a dog fix—and help a dog find its real home in the process. What a win-win. My husband successfully feigned mild surprise when I brought up the topic. We could have a dog for a few weeks, then be free and easy again, I said. I pointed out that I knew he loved dogs but didn’t really want to have one, so this way, we didn’t really have one. We’d both get what we wanted. Another win-win. He gave me an indulgent smile and nod.

Our first foster was a sweet but rather dull black dog with a curved tail. He was only with us a few days before being adopted. Then we took in a small, senior dog who looked like a little brown and black bear cub but with a jutting lower jaw and short legs. I kept her for a couple of weeks, but after twice snapping at my husband, growling at a few prospective adopters, and obsessively trying to chase my regal Maine coon cat, I returned her to the rescue.

This fostering thing wasn’t feeling like I’d hoped it would. I didn’t feel gratified or satisfied or even like I was doing much good. I didn’t really like the dogs I’d taken in and was glad to see them go. My dog itch wasn’t getting scratched because these were not the sorts of dogs I liked. The whole thing was a disappointment. Part of the problem was that I’m just not a low-commitment person. I don’t do things by half measures. I’m an all-in, full-on, get-her-hands-dirty, in-up-to-her-elbows sort of girl. I needed to have a dog or not have a dog. And if I were ever to have a dog again, it would have to be a very particular sort of dog. In fact, the sort of dog I was drawing up in my mind’s eye as perhaps, way down the road, the dog I might think about looking for, was so very exact, I figured I’d never find it and that would keep me from getting a real dog again. I’m still not sure why I was working so hard to convince myself I didn’t want another dog. Maybe I was trying to accommodate my husband, even though (or maybe because) he never asked me to. Maybe I really did want to see what life was like without a dog. Maybe I wanted to see what I was like without a dog. Whatever was going on, I wasn’t becoming the easy, breezy, no-dog-pleasey sort of person I thought I might become.

I stopped checking the foster site as much, but I still found myself drawn there from time to time. I was always relieved to find no dog that tempted me. Until one day, when a courtesy posting from a border collie–focused rescue group showed up at the bottom of the home page. A border collie and border collie mixes–only rescue group? The featured dog was described as a petite, spunky, not too intense, young adult, mixed breed. Reflexively, my mind went check, check, check to several of my criteria for my fantasy dog. But of course, I reminded myself, this dog was likely to have many other more challenging characteristics not in the posting. I sighed, closed the browser, and did what I always do when I’m unsure how to proceed: I went to the woods.

Although I lived in the middle of downtown, a lovely twenty-minute drive got me quickly into the country and to a trail network through the woods atop a huge escarpment. The moist, earth-scented air and the primal rhythm of footsteps over dirt and stone teased apart my tangled thoughts. I didn’t want or not want a dog, I realized. I wanted the right dog. I’d had two great dogs, and they had set my expectations high. If I were to get another dog, I wanted things to go as well as they had before; no, I wanted things to go even better than they had before, with a dog that suited my changed lifestyle. My country dogs had adapted to city life only because they were seniors, easily satisfied with leashed walks through our in-town parks and occasional jaunts to off-leash trail systems. Yes, I finally admitted, I did want a dog, but it had to be a special dog. I realized I’d been waiting for this special dog to somehow magically emerge from the mists and simply show up on my literal or figurative doorstep, choosing me before I had the chance to choose her. Apparently, I had written myself and my fantasy dog into a romance novel. I shook off this nonsense, tapped into my normally pragmatic self, and allowed myself one thing, and only one thing to do, after which I would stop, wait, do nothing, see what happened.

My to-do was to write a short letter to the border collie rescue in the courtesy listing. I told them that I didn’t think the dog I wanted existed, but their post had piqued my curiosity. I described my dream dog: thirty to forty pounds, with the intelligence and independent thinking of a border collie, but with some other breed in the mix to soften their legendary obsessiveness and intensity. I briefly outlined my living situation and dog-owning history. A day or two later, I received a businesslike reply stating the dog I’d seen posted was not the one for me and that the dog I described did indeed exist but was a rare creature, so I’d have to be patient. I was relieved. This was just what I wanted to hear. There was no dog panting at her knee in immediate need of my particular flavor of potential rescue. I could wait around, get used to life as a dog-free human, and maybe by the time she contacted me again, I’d say, No thanks. And if I didn’t, it would only be for a very good, very wonderful dog of a reason.

When she contacted me again, it was far sooner than I’d expected and not because she’d found me a perfect match. She’d recently picked up two dogs from a neighboring state where they’d been found living under the porch of an abandoned hunting camp, so infested with ticks and fleas that when they were given medication, the pests fell off in numbers that necessitated a broom to sweep them out of the kennels. The male dog of the pair had been quickly adopted, but the shy, scared female with the loving, gentle soul was struggling with the generalized border collie bedlam at her home-based rescue, shutting down and hiding under whatever piece of furniture was nearby. Could I foster her?

I was, back then, as susceptible as anyone to sad and dramatic backstory like this one. Of course I would foster her, I said. When I told my husband about it later, I emphasized the “only fostering.” We drove to the farm that weekend. A mass of leaping, barking, squirming, and wiggling black and white border collies met us at the gate. The rescue director corralled the dogs, let us into the yard, told us to wait, took the mass of dogs into the house, and brought something very different outside. This black and white dog slunk along the ground, crawled into our laps, and when offered the chance, jumped immediately into the truck, tucking herself into a tight ball as far away from the door as possible. We all shook our heads at her pitiful presentation. We brought her home, where she cautiously but steadily climbed the hallway stairs and immediately went into hiding on a pile of dirty laundry in a closet.

It took her three days to leave the closet willingly. I’d visit briefly but mostly left her alone as that was clearly what she wanted and needed. I took her into our tiny backyard and on cautious neighborhood walks. She avoided strangers, both human and dogs, but showed no aggression. She was sweet and shy and simultaneously a little aloof and a little clingy with me. Not knowing any better, I perceived her hard bonding to me as a choice, not a fear of everything else. (I also perceived my hard bonding to her as a choice, not a combo of pity for her and savior complex for me.)

After she’d been with us a couple of weeks, my husband and I sat down to discuss the inevitable: Should we adopt her for real? He said it was up to me, because, while of course he would help, she would be my dog. He asked me what I thought of her. In a completely level and rational voice, I listed what I perceived as her attributes: calm, cool, collected, smart, sweet, biddable, not intense, adult, ignored other dogs when we went on our walks around town, starting to show signs of a happy temperament, not too high energy.

He nodded. I asked him what he thought.

His eyes filled, he bit his lip, turned over his hands, and with a shrug said, “I love that dog.”

He also said that when I didn’t have a dog, I woke up every morning looking completely lost. We both wiped tears from our faces, raised our glasses, and toasted to our new dog.

I named her Ainsley, which the internet informed me was a Scottish term for a hermitage in the woods. The name seemed appropriate given her dual heritage as a border collie and a stray. Tentative evidence of a sweet and silly personality kept cropping up. This was a lovely surprise made even more surprising as more information from the rescue and a complete checkup from my own vet revealed she had an astonishing quantity of physical traumas. We learned that when the rescue sent her to be spayed, their veterinarian found she was pregnant with a handful of puppies, a discovery made after he had started surgery. The director admitted she responded to this news with emotion rather than reason and told the vet to sew her back up in the hopes she could keep her puppies.

Unsurprisingly, given that she’d been given multiple vaccinations and was living in a stressful environment, she quickly became ill and went back in for a spay and fetus removal. When we took her to my veterinarian for a checkup, he discovered cataracts and a detached retina in one eye. We knew already that one of her back legs was scarred and twisted, and he recommended X-rays to see if we could learn more about that injury. We did. He informed us that her back leg had been badly broken and left to heal with the benefit of a splint. Then he threw up the films. They showed white dots throughout her body.

“Bird shot,” the veterinarian said, shaking his head. “She’s been shot.”

He said there was nothing to do as the pellets appeared to be lodged in muscle. If one migrated to a joint or other area that caused her pain, we could deal with that as it happened. We and our veterinarian looked back and forth from each other to Ainsley in silence as we considered the map of abuse he’d uncovered beneath her luxuriant fur. I wondered when, if, and how one or more of those hidden scars might come back to torment her.

Over the ensuing months, different dimensions of Ainsley’s personality began to emerge. She walked at my side, rarely straying more than a few feet away, even as we passed through a large park full of walkers, bikers, and dogs both on and off leash. One day, I accidentally dropped her leash at the top of our block and watched as she ran full tilt away from me, my shocked panic thankfully transforming into amazed relief when she stopped at our front door and waited for me to catch up. She was figuring out that when I gave her a toy or a chewie, it was hers and she could eat it or play with it or cuddle it, but she turned sheepish when I took an item away from her, as if she was expecting something bad to happen. If a dog approached her fast or full of exuberance, she might growl and nip a bit but didn’t pursue the dog further.

I thought she was a little strange, a little conflicted, but how could it be otherwise? Overall, I was pleased with what I saw as a loyal temperament. We did have two scary moments in our first six months together. I took her on an off-leash hike in the woods—she never went more than a few yards away and kept looking back at me when off leash in the city park—and a few moments later she stepped off the trail and disappeared into the trees. It was like she had vaporized. After about thirty minutes of terrified stalking and screaming her name up and down the trail, I went back to the parking lot and found her sitting by the car. Another time, a handful of noisy, rowdy young boys started running down the street to a large plaza where we were walking. She panicked, tugged the leash out of my hands, and started running around, frantic and directionless. Fortunately, the boys went another way, the plaza quieted, and she calmed down before getting too far away.

A year after her adoption, we moved ninety miles west into the small-town rural interior of New York State, and I sent this note to her rescue group:

I just wanted to give you an update on Ainsley. When I contacted you a year or so ago and described the kind of dog I was hoping to bring into my life, I honestly didn’t think this fantasy creature existed. But apparently you saw within that sheepish, limping, sickened, half-blind, unsure, sweet, sweet, sweet critter the dog of my dreams.

We take a long walk in the morning, and once again today I was stopped by someone who complimented my “incredibly well-mannered, patient, beautiful” dog. “Wow, that’s a happy dog.” “She’s so sweet and she listens so well.” “What a well-behaved dog.”

She responds to the most quiet verbal request or subtle hand signal with her ears and tail up and her eyes focused on me, instead of turned askance as if waiting for something bad to happen. When she came to us and I’d give her a chew treat, she’d lie down with it but was too insecure to eat it—no more. She will toss a rope braid and run with a stick. She now has lots of dog friends that she chases and bosses around instead of trying to hide behind my legs when other canines are nearby. She finds her own, quiet way to let you know what she wants, like sitting down squarely and looking longingly back toward the house when you take her for a walk on a rainy day. She is easy, calm, and quiet. Truly the best dog.

Happy ending to a sad rescue story, right? Turns out not so much, because a couple of years later, I wrote another, very different note to her rescue.

I am writing in the hopes that you can help me find a way to manage or lessen Ainsley’s increasing reactivity. At home, she is the sweetest, most affectionate, wonderful critter. But the Jekyll and Hyde thing is getting worse. For the first couple of years, she was totally reliable off leash, ignored dogs, people, cars, etc. Then she started with the aggressive dog thing, only on leash. This progressed to dog aggression all the time, with any dog, even those she had formerly played with. Then it expanded to trucks, trains, and kids on skateboards; now it is any vehicle, bikers, joggers, sometimes people walking by us on a path we regularly stroll. I am starting to be very concerned that she will bite someone.

Ainsley’s original rescuer had little advice other than to check her thyroid levels and do a blood panel, both of which came back completely normal. I had no idea what was happening to my dog, what I could do to stop it from getting worse, and how I might fix what had already changed. Many years later, I would learn a phrase widely used in rescue: “three days, three weeks, three months.” While the numbers will vary from dog to dog, that maxim is a reminder that it takes time for a rescue dog’s full personality to express itself and that the process will not be a steady progression but a twisting path with occasional milestones. Or stumbling blocks. This is because rescue dogs often come into their new homes shut down by the various insults of their previous lives. Overwhelmed with stress hormones, exhaustion, and wariness, newly adopted dogs tend to do very little as they recover and suss out their new environs. Plenty of people fall in love with this version of their dog, and then, after some number of days, weeks, months, or in Ainsley’s case, years, the dog’s fuller personality begins to reveal itself. Sometimes these changes are a delight, such as when a scared and shy dog starts to play and ask for affection. Other times, more personality brings more problems, as past trauma starts to resurface. Ainsley had been through the phase that caused delight. Now, she was startling me with what felt like unprovoked, out-of-control, aggressive outbursts.

I looked for dog trainers who might help, but the options were slim in the rural area where we now lived. I found two dog training classes. One guy told me he’d learned everything from some mountain man who trained hunting dogs and that he didn’t read books or try to learn anything new because that would just confuse him. The other guy was older, meaner, knew less, and yelled more. I signed up for classes with the guy who didn’t scream at his students. I didn’t know what else to do.

On a dark winter night, so cold that the snow squeaked beneath your boots, Ainsley and I joined a handful of other human/canine pairs in this guy’s modified garage. He stood at the center of the room, told us to spread out along the walls, and then directed us to walk in a large and interminable circle. From time to time, he’d tell one or all of us to give our leash a sudden, hard upward jerk. All the leashes, except mine, were attached to a prong collar. I’d told him I’d attend the class because I wanted her to be able to practice being around other dogs in a controlled environment, but I would not yank on her, nor would I use a prong. I had already tried a prong collar with Ainsley, but it made her miserable, so I’d thrown it away.

Even this old-school dog trainer had conceded that Ainsley was too “soft” for a prong and allowed me to use his classes for my own purposes. Round and round we and his other student pairs went in a ceaseless circumambulation punctuated only by the occasional jerking leashes and flinching dogs. I, and I assume everyone else, had no idea what he was trying to accomplish with this program. Apparently, he had a single tool and was committed to using it in all circumstances. If it didn’t work, the only option was to use it more forcefully.

There was one grim-faced couple with a young-adult, three-legged, highly anxious German shepherd. As we waited for class to begin one night, another student leaned toward me and in a gossipy stage whisper told me the dog had slipped from the car and run away the minute they’d brought him home. After several days of searching, they’d finally found him in a roadside ditch with a compound fracture to his leg. The break was so bad the leg had to be amputated and here they were trying to make sure their expensive and damaged dog didn’t think he could run off again. The husband and wife took turns working with their dog. The instructor expressed regular dissatisfaction with the wife’s technique, insisting she haul harder, more vertically, more quickly on the leash. She’d grit her teeth, turn her face away, adjust her grip, and pull against the tender neck and lean body of her dog. He’d flinch and scrabble to try and keep his balance, the pathetic stump of his lost leg moving frantically beneath the freshly stitched skin.

In the midst of the third or fourth class of our eight-week session, the instructor lost his patience with this woman. He left his post in the middle of the room, took her leash, slid his hand down close to the dog’s neck, and pulled upward, hard. The dog slipped, but the instructor strode forward and yanked again. The dog regained his footing, spun his head, and bit the guy’s hand, hard. Really hard. The instructor yelped, dropped the leash, grabbed his injured hand, and ran to the sink in a corner of the room, followed by blood spattering to the floor. He mopped at the wound with a paper towel, torn flesh becoming visible for a moment before being swamped again with blood. He went pale and dismissed class, saying he better get to the hospital. The following week, his hand was swaddled in a thick white bandage and his swagger was gone. He admitted that the fault was his own but only because he hadn’t made adequate allowance for the dog’s injuries. I never went back.

(More than ten years after this experience, a Facebook friend posted a picture of his five-month-old puppy wearing an enormous prong collar with a caption praising this trainer. I was so sad to see nothing had changed. Now fortified with education, credentials, and experience, I wrote to my former neighbor offering alternative approaches to working with his dog. I don’t know if I was successful, but all we can do is try.)

I read books and scoured the internet, cobbling together bits and pieces of information about how to manage and address Ainsley’s reactivity, but without any coaching in real time, I didn’t know if I was doing things right. One week her behavior seemed to improve, but the next, not so much. Around this time, another odd behavior popped up. Literally. Ainsley would be sound asleep and then suddenly jolt awake and jump up almost as if she’d been kicked. I talked to my veterinarian and he suggested adding antianxiety meds to the painkillers she was already on. It was hard to know if the new meds helped, but I hoped they at least kept things from getting worse.

Eventually someone mentioned that a legendary trainer lived on a farm a couple of small towns over from mine, and while she didn’t take private students anymore, maybe I should try contacting her. This trainer’s name rang no bells for me, but I sent her a note of woe. By the time she replied, I’d found and read her lovely book, Bones Would Rain from the Sky, and was hopeful that if she would, she could help me find a fresh path forward. This trainer/author, Suzanne Clothier, wrote me back and agreed to give me one eye-poppingly expensive lesson because I was a fellow writer and neighbor who was trying to do right by her dog. On the appointed day, I followed her detailed directions down increasingly small back roads and found myself in the midst of a retreat she was giving to other professional dog trainers. Our lesson was going to double as a demo on how to conduct a basic “desensitization and counterconditioning” (see page 000 for more on this) session with a reactive dog.

I didn’t understand all this language, or honestly, even what I was doing, at the time. Someone brought a leashed dog out into the field where we were gathered and stopped about fifty feet away. Ainsley clocked the dog, but at that distance, didn’t react. I was to feed her the tiny bits of steak I’d brought with me in a plastic baggie as long as she stayed nonreactive. To reduce my stress and ensure I didn’t pass any additional tension to Ainsley, Suzanne held the leash while I dispensed treats. Suzanne said things to the other trainers, most of which I didn’t really follow. Then, after twenty minutes, she said we were done. That Ainsley had done better than she expected.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it,” she confirmed with a nod.

This single, short, somewhat strange session served as my introduction to the science and application of modern, field- and lab-tested, positive-reinforcement methods of behavior modification. That lesson became a string that helped me connect the other bits and pieces I’d picked up into a more coherent understanding of how the strategy and tactics of changing a dog’s feelings about a trigger can change their behavior. This clarity helped me find new and different opportunities to help Ainsley work through her fears by giving her safe, positive, rewarding, and controlled exposures to her triggers.

I had taken Ainsley to a small, home-based boarding facility a few times in the past and now I asked if I could stop by a couple of times a week to work with her out in their yard. I came over when the boarding dogs were in the play areas, safely behind tall chain-link, and walked Ainsley around the lawn outside the fencing, exposing her to other dogs romping and playing at a distance she could handle without freaking out and rewarding her profusely for her self-composure. Then I found a couple who had just started offering casual classes in obedience and agility at their home. I asked if I could pay to attend but stay out of the actual class and wander back and forth outside the corral. They indulged me, and after a few weeks, Ainsley was calm enough that we joined the class itself. She impressed us all by staying controlled and seemingly content as she followed me and the other human/dog pairs around the arena and in close figure eights around each other. But the second we stepped outside the corral, she was back to her old self, lunging and barking at the dogs she’d been quietly walking around just moments before. Her behavior was confounding.

The promise of desensitization and counterconditioning is this: Change the way a dog feels about a trigger with lots of safe exposures and positive associations to that trigger and their behavior around that trigger will change, too. With Ainsley, I was getting the change in behavior, but not, it seemed, the change in feeling. She was giving me a performance, but beneath the act, she was still the same dog with the same feelings. Doubts and questions began nagging me. Was it possible her feelings were getting worse? Were my dogged and diligent efforts to make her face her fears making her hate other dogs even more?

I dialed back the training sessions. I took her on isolated walks and looked for opportunities to give her more freedom to just be a dog. Well, to be the sort of dog I imagined she wanted to be. Part of the pretty picture I had in my mind for Ainsley was her running around the woods and fields off leash, her tongue happily flopping out of her mouth and her mind so attuned to my voice that she instantly recalled to my side when asked. The truth was that when given this freedom—intentionally or accidentally—Ainsley would run off and disappear for anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour or more, until she returned, exhausted, sometimes dragging thirty feet of a bright yellow long line that had earlier accidentally slipped through my fingers behind her.

However, there was a quirky geographic feature near our home that offered a unique off-leash opportunity. A dramatic slab of rock jutted thirty to forty feet upward along the edge of a walking path. One narrow, sloping trail gave access to the top of this outcropping, and every other edge was a sheer cliff. Once we climbed the short trail, we were essentially on a rock island of about 1500 by 625 feet with a single access point to the mainland below. Here, I felt safe unclipping the lead to give her some sniffing and chipmunk-chasing time while I sat near the trailhead, scanning the scenery below for any approaching intrusions and peacefully planning the day ahead. After about twenty minutes, Ainsley would return to my side either by choice or in response to my whistle.

Until the day she didn’t. The by now familiar Ainsley-induced panic quickly set in as I whistled and called, called and whistled for her. I ducked and dashed along the little animal trails that wended their way around the underbrush. Nothing. I stopped and listened for some sign of her. Still nothing. I went back to the trailhead. Slowly, a distant sound pushed through the noise of my own voice screaming her name. Barking. I ran to the cliff edge, scanning the area as far as my vision would allow. My eyes finally found her. She was standing in the middle of the trail almost a quarter of a mile away, barking frantically at nothing. I ran down off the rock slab, thinking, It’s me, she’s barking for me. She can’t find me. She’s scared of something and couldn’t find me, and now, even though we are so close, she’s lost inside her own mind. I called and called to no effect on her. Then, when I was in visual range, she turned her head, looked right at me, and didn’t see me. Her face was blank. Then suddenly, thankfully, her awareness cleared, she recognized me, and ran out of her terrors to my side.

As my tears fell onto her fur, I begged her forgiveness and promised never again. I had pushed her out of her comfort zone for no good reason for the last time. As we walked home and the adrenaline in my system dissipated, my fantasy dog went up in smoke and a fresh conviction appeared in its place: Ainsley did not need to be fixed; she needed to be helped. She didn’t need to work through her fears, she needed protection from all the things that scared her. What a relief for us both. The only thing I had to do was give her a safe space to be her own sweet self.

I stopped all efforts at behavior modification. I walked her only on the most deserted paths, always leashed, usually to a thirty-foot-long line, which was as far away from me as she ever needed or wanted to be. When we went out of town, I would no longer board her based on the misguided notion that being around other dogs was “good for her.” I hired a house sitter to care for her when I was away. When we relocated again a year or so after this incident atop the rock island, my first priority in finding a new home was that it had a large, securely fenced yard where she would have the freedom to do as she pleased in peace. I stopped training her and just played with and loved on her instead.

I’d finally understood that all the training and behavior modification techniques I’d learned were not “must dos” but “can dos.” And “only dos” if they help the dog, not if they just help you. Ainsley was always going to see other dogs as that incredibly creepy relative you can’t stand to be in the same room with; you can summon enough self-control to smile and be polite at a family function, as long as you don’t have to sit next to him. But even if you spent regular time with the guy (desensitization) and he showered you with your favorite chocolate bonbons every time he showed up (counterconditioning), you’re never going to like him.

Like most epiphanies assessed from the vantage point of many years later, it may look like everything with Ainsley was resolved by a thunderclap of deep knowledge delivered fully formed on a bolt of lightning to my soul. But in lived time, this change of heart and habit involved a lot of mourning. I had to let go of the dog I had dreamed up and thought kismet had sent me. I had to give up the vision I had of myself, and wanted others to have of me, as a wise dog guardian with Ainsley as proof of my virtues. I had to forgive myself for all the things I had done wrong and trust that Ainsley forgave me, too. I had to let myself believe that I hadn’t made everything a whole lot worse for her, that I hadn’t, in my own well-intentioned way, become another human who did her harm.

The proof was in the dog. She was clearly happier. She loved having a yard, she learned to eat blackberries right off the bush, and she enjoyed harassing a few ducks I eventually brought home. The last few years of her life were peaceful for her. And also for me. My dog was no longer a project. She was just a scarred, scared, silly, strange, sweet mystery of a dog named Ainsley.