DON’T HIT THE DOG

Eighteen months prior to our adopting our daughter Vivienne – while we were still in the ‘discussion’ phase (which really means while I was still trying to push off the inevitable) – my wife Rochelle said to me, “We should get a dog.”
And I, the ever-reasonable spouse, replied; “Honey, that is one great idea,” thinking, and hoping, that we would never follow through. Because, you see, I have had dogs, and I know just what ‘getting a dog’ means. It means training a puppy in the vague and misaligned belief that it won’t turn into ‘the dog that ate all our shoes and furniture.’
“Good,” the wife continued in a tone that gave me a sinking feeling. “Because there is a breeder in Sacramento with a litter of Akita puppies that turn 8 weeks old today.”
“That’s swell, babe, but what does that have to do with me?”
“Grab your car keys,” she told me, and fifteen minutes later we were in the Highlander on our way to Sacramento.
“Why an Akita?” I asked as we drove along.
“When I was thirteen we had a female Akita, Sadie, and it was the best dog we ever owned.”
I’d seen Akitas; big, furry, ferocious looking dogs with pointy ears, short snouts and a fluffy curly tail. I knew nothing about the breed, but this ignorance was not going to last for long.
“We are going to get a female Akita from this breeder tonight – I have been looking on the Internet for the past month – and I want you to train the dog so that it can be certified as a Social Therapy Dog and visit patients at my hospital and in rest homes. It’ll be good therapy for you too,” she informed me.
Anyone who has ever been married can see what has transpired here; I had been had.
With an ever sinking feeling, I asked, “And do you have a name for this dog?”
“Kebu,” she said. “It means hope in Japanese. And frankly, you can use a little hope in your life.”
My wife is on a quest to fix me, but she has been sadly misinformed that this is even remotely possible. I am beyond repair, I know, and raising a dog was liable to do further harm to my already scarred hard wiring rather than somehow miraculously ‘cure’ me. But, I have been married a while and I wanted to stay married a while longer, and so I kept my big yap shut.
At the breeders I asked Miss Know It All how we should proceed in picking out a puppy, since there were six females. “I looked it up on the Internet,” she said (big surprise!). “We don’t want a puppy that just lies in the corner and doesn’t connect with us, nor do we want one that keeps begging for attention. Right in between is what we want; not too needy, but not retarded either.”
“Sort of like me,” I said.
“Exactly.”
We found two female puppies that fit her specifications and she clearly could not decide on which of the two to take. They looked nearly identical, grey and brown fur, a black mask on the face and ears and white stockings reaching to mid leg. Strikingly beautiful dogs.
I played with both dogs, weighed them in each hand, and then said to the breeder,”We’ll take this one,” indicating the puppy in my right hand.
“How do you know which one to pick?” my wife asked me.
“Easy,” I said. “I’m a guy; they pay me to make the big decisions.”
“I could never have picked one, they were both so cute.”
“Cuteness is overrated,” I told her. “I opted for the one that weighed the most.”
She looked at me like she would never understand me. But that’s okay, I don't understand myself either. But I made the tough decision and we drove home with a 13 lbs bundle of fur that got sick in the car outside of Vacaville and pooped on our carpet upon entering the house.
“So,” the wife said to me later that night as we lay on our big bed with the dog between us, “what do you know about training dogs?”
“I’ve trained tons of dogs,” I lied. I mean, seriously, I’m a guy, how hard can it be for a guy to train a dog? It’s a no-brainer. I’d read ‘Call of the Wild’ and ‘Whitefang’, by Jack London. Once you’d read those two books you knew all you ever needed to know about training any animal, and it boiled down to this; Listen, Dog, I am human, I am superior and you will obey or else.
I expressed sentiments more or less along these lines to my wife and she looked at me thoughtfully for a moment while I got that old sinking feeling again, and then she pulled two books from her bedside table; one book was titled simply “Akitas” and the other was titled “Dog Training for Idiots”. Oh, and it had a DVD on the inside front cover, you know, just in case you were too big an idiot to read.
Hmmmm, wonder who these could be for?
Because I am a guy and I know everything, I tossed the books towards the foot of the bed and said, “I don’t need these, I know how to train a dog.’
The wife handed the books back to me and said, “Believe me, you need these.”
So the next morning, in an effort to keep peace in our house, I started to read the books. And I am here to tell you it was a damn good thing I did because I quickly realized I knew nothing about training dogs. In fact, my fuzzy theories about dog training were not only dead wrong, they were positively destructive to any hope of ever rearing an obedient and calm dog.
In short, what I learned from the book was this; Don’t Hit the Dog!!
The book said that if your dog was disobeying you and you started getting angry and frustrated you should find the morning paper and grab two thick sections, like the front page news and the sporting news, and then you should roll them tightly into a very hard baton-like shape and then you should hit yourself in the head with this now wooden like object just as hard as you could. And keep hitting yourself in the head until it got through to your thick head that the dog was not the problem; the trainer is always the problem.
This was stunning news to me. Imagine, accountability for my own gaffes and mistakes. Positively earth shattering stuff, I tell you.
And from the Akita book I learned the following; this mountain breed was one of the last dogs domesticated and so is very much still a pack animal, hence, they are most comfortable when they have no doubt about their standing in the pack. And, most importantly, she wants to know who the leader of the pack is. And after reading what comes next, you will probably agree that the leader had better be me. To wit; Akitas were bred to do three things in Japan; hunt bears, accompany their Samurai masters into battle (they have dog-sized armor in museums in Japan), and guard the home.
In short, though Kebu looked like a little furry powder puff now, when she reached maturity she would be 90 plus lbs of solid muscle with an instinct to hunt and defend. And, the book further informed me, if the master did not properly train the dog as a puppy, well, forget about doing in later, because once Akitas reached 2 years old they were likely to become territorial and aggressive unless broken early.
Oh, and one final tidbit; the average Akita is typically somewhat aloof and probably smarter than her master. No probably about it in my case, I thought, more like definitely, and I began to get a resentment towards my wife for tricking me into agreeing to train a dog that had a higher IQ, better blood lines, and superior moral fiber than myself.
So I did the smart thing; I promptly got the morning’s SF Chronicle and wound up the front page until it was hard as a rock, and then I began to beat myself in the head with it. And, surprise, surprise, after five minutes or so I began to feel better.
And everything the books said was true!
I spent countless hours training Kebu and she became a Sonoma County Certified Social Therapy Dog that I take to old folks homes where blue haired ladies hug her and reminisce teary-eyed about big, furry dogs they once owned before their ungrateful children packed them off to the rest home.
Kebu will politely shake your hand. I can put a dog treat on her paw and then leave the room and she won’t eat the treat until I come back into the room and give her permission. I put a dog treat between my lips and ask her for a kiss and she removes it gently from my mouth. And she will nibble a treat softly from my hand, never snapping at or even touching my skin.
I tell ya, the blue haired ladies eat this stuff up!
I walk Kebu off leash through our rural neighborhood -- awash in squirrels, deer, and cats -- and she will stay right by my side even though her every instinct is urging her to run off and chase down some prey and shake it violently until it dies.
And through all of our training every time I have had the urge to hit Kebu because of some perceived malfeasance on her part I have instead rolled up the Chronicle and beaten myself about the head and shoulders in a vigorous and resolute manner.
And, I gotta tell ya, it makes me feel a lot better.
And so that is the long and short of how my sneaky wife hoodwinked me into acquiring, feeding and training a type of dog I had never even heard of, and taking said dog to rest homes where I actually do a good deed – which, as you well know by now, goes wholly against my nature.
And as I run through the hills with Kebu on a long red leash attached to my arm, or watch her asleep on her dog bed by the door into our bedroom, curled in a big grey ball, or sense her endlessly patrolling the interior of our house, looking out of our picture windows and smelling for intruders, or watch Vivienne grab a fistful of dog fur while shrieking in fiendish glee and Kebu merely looking slightly aggrieved, I ask myself; where would I be without this dog?
And I can answer truthfully; I would be a lesser person.
It’s almost enough to make a guy want to beat himself briskly on the head with some tightly rolled newsprint.