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Running with Sherman Page 8
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You don’t have those problems with Lugnut, for instance, a three-year-old Golden Lab who has been deployed to help the emotional adjustment of soldiers returning from combat duty. The U.S. military has made such a shift in favor of animal therapies that it has appointed a major to serve as its ranking “Human-Animal Bond Advisor” and established nationwide programs, including Paws for Purple Hearts and Warrior Canine Connection, to work with struggling veterans. Read the testimonials from grateful families and you’re guaranteed to wipe your eyes: thanks to these companion dogs, men and women who were too gripped by dark spells and terror to get into a car or go to the mall with their families are now functioning again—and doing so without the dosage mishaps that came from nasal sprays. Outside the military, dogs are also helping sexual assault survivors deal with their own natural anxieties about safety and human contact. Service dogs will rouse their owners out of nightmares and are terrific at providing survivors with a sense of security when they have to turn their backs to operate an ATM.
But where the story takes a peculiar turn is when you look at raw body rebuilding. Take heart attack patients: If you own a dog, you’re twice as likely to survive the first year after a major coronary incident. What other treatment doubles your chances of survival without a prescription? Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy need only one hour of animal-assisted therapy a week to see their depression and anxiety reduced by half. Elder-care facilities don’t even have to bother with dogs; just put a fish in great-granddad’s room, they’ve found, and he’ll eat better, put on healthy weight, and be more social.
Why? No one really knows, exactly. But why do we have to? That’s the question that makes E. O. Wilson want to bang his head against Harvard’s brick walls. The real question isn’t what we get from animals. It’s what we lose without them. If the animal-human bond improves our lives in every way—if the sick get stronger, the traumatized feel safer, our children learn faster, our prisons become safer—then the reverse is also true: Without animals, we’re weaker. We’re sicker. We’re angrier, more violent, more afraid. We’ve taken ourselves back in time, back to those desperate days when humans were alone on the planet, peering at wolves and hawks and wildcats from a distance and wishing we could somehow connect. Once we became allies, we had it good—until we turned our backs on the best friendship we ever had.
The good news is, we’re trying to fix what we ruined.
The bad: we may have waited a little too long.
Our animal intuition is dead. If you want proof, take a look at Cesar Millan’s bank account. The “Dog Whisperer” crawled through a storm pipe from Mexico to arrive here as a penniless teenager, and since then he’s donated $1 million to Yale University, mostly to finance a shelter-dog program but partly to show he’s now rich enough to give money to a school that already has $27 billion. Cesar made a crazy amount of cash from the simplest job on earth: teaching people how to walk their dogs. More Americans have pets than children; we’ve got nearly 200 million dogs and cats, and we spend nearly $70 billion on them every year, yet Cesar is a living testament to the fact that we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. Cesar charges $1,000 a day to teach you how to prevent the dog you brought into your own home from crapping all over it, and his waiting list for seminars is forever. Deep inside, we still feel that ancient yearning to connect with other creatures. But when we try, it’s a disaster.
“The dog is not thinking, ‘Thank God Cesar finally got here!’ ” Cesar explained to me.
“People think I have a special power,” Millan has said. “The dog changes when I come in, and for them that is magic. But the dog is not thinking, ‘Thank God Cesar finally got here!’ The dog is responding to my energy. In the animal world, everything is energy.” Cesar himself is a little baffled about why this energy is such a mystery; the only training he ever had came from watching his old abuelo handle the hounds on the family farm. Yet look who comes to Cesar for help: Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Jerry Seinfeld, even John Grogan of Marley and Me—all natural charmers who command the attention of millions, but not the hearts and minds of their own pups. Tony Robbins! The guy was life strategist for Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, but no match for a four-pound terrier named Missy-O.
And seriously, dogs are a joke. When it comes to training animals, dogs are beginner level, pure bunny slope. We invented them, after all. Dogs are the only man-made species; when we began partnering with wolves, we took over their bloodlines and began tinkering. Whenever we had a new need, we created a new breed; we played Dr. Frankenstein and match-made males and females to create whatever oddball mutations we were hankering for: short legs, snouty noses, fiery tempers, cuddly fur. Meanwhile, business for Stone Age Cesar Millan was already booming; in Saudi Arabia, an early sandstone etching shows a hunter led by his thirteen hounds, two of them tied to his waist, all of them looking well trained and remarkably similar to the Canaan dogs still prized by desert nomads today. Since the dawn of human history, we’ve been selecting and breeding the dogs we liked best, genetically engineering them to do one thing and one thing alone: obey. After 30,000 or so years, we’ve created the MacBook of the animal kingdom, a creature ready to operate right out of the box.
Dogs, in other words, ain’t no donkeys.
We’ve been messing with donkeys for only a few thousand years, just a fraction of the time we’ve invested in dogs, and the results have been impressive: the donkeys have barely changed a bit. You could stick Sherman in a field full of his African wild-ass ancestors, and in about five minutes you wouldn’t be able to pick him out from the crowd. Donkeys are so tough to tame, we saved them for last; first, we toughened ourselves up by domesticating just about everything else with hooves—cattle, sheep, goats, even llamas. When North African tribes finally gave it a try, they realized donkeys have two very special qualities:
· Wow, these things are strong.*
· And freaking deaf.
Donkeys don’t react; they reason. They’re not like horses, which can be forced to obey out of fear. They’re not really stubborn; they’re survivors. If a donkey smells danger, its first and fiercest instinct is to turn to stone. You can force a horse to leap into a river, but if a donkey doesn’t know exactly where it’s going to land, its feet won’t leave the ground. For wild donkeys on African plains and mountain ranges, that insta-freeze instinct was a terrific survival adaptation; predators couldn’t scare them into plunging off a cliff or revealing their whereabouts, since the less they moved, the better their dun coats blended into the landscape. Horses are speedy, but when it comes to steadiness, stamina, and heroic resistance to heat, cold, and thirst, you can’t do better than a burro. Nothing we’ve done to domesticate donkeys has weakened that instinct, which is great: it makes them idiot proof. No wonder misfits and monarchs of all stripes—prophets and prospectors, conquistadors and trappers, hermits and explorers, Jesus and his mom, King Solomon, the prophet Muhammad, and even Queen Victoria—made long-ears their transport of choice.
Even George Washington, “the greatest horseman of his age,” according to Thomas Jefferson, was privately a donkey guy. Away from the battlefield and back home on the farm, our first president was also our first donkey aficionado. King George of Spain gifted a pair of burros to Washington, who liked them so much that he built them into America’s only breeding herd. Washington was outmatched, though, by an ancient Egyptian king whose burial place was discovered not long ago. When archaeologists opened the tomb, they expected to find the king’s favorite courtiers buried in the “high-status area” around him in a protective ring. Instead, he was surrounded by ten beloved donkeys, sacrificed to be his guardians in the afterlife. Do you know what other animals were ever given that honor? None.
Ask Curtis Imrie on the wrong day, on the other hand, and you’ll hear a very different theory about how those donkeys met their end: “If you want to explore your capacity for mur
der,” he says, “try a burro race.” No one knows more about the donkey mind than Curtis, who bred his own champions from wild stock and ran the twenty-nine-mile Fairplay race for an astonishing forty-two consecutive years. After four decades, though, Curtis would grade his own mastery at just a notch above okay. Once, Curtis was nearing the finish of a fifteen-mile race in Buena Vista, Colorado, when his burro, Jackson, suddenly skidded to a stop in front of a wooden bridge. Nothing Curtis did could persuade Jackson to put one hoof on the bridge, even though it was an out-and-back race and Jackson had already crossed the same bridge, no problem, less than an hour ago. Curtis finally had to tie Jackson to a tree, walk into town, and return with a winch-equipped Jeep to pull the 750-pound animal across the bridge, one slow crank at a time.
“Indians didn’t have donkeys,” Curtis says. “They saw ours and thought they were called ‘Goddamnyous.’ Donkeys know their rights and they can shut you down fast.” If a pro like Curtis got stonewalled by Jackson, what hope did a rookie like me have with Sherman? But imagine the payoff if I could pull it off. If I could crack the donkey language barrier and get Sherman to join me for the adventure, I could show the way for everyone else who wants to partner with an animal but doesn’t know how to begin. Whatever that Stone Age hunter did to inspire his loyal pack, whatever secret Cesar Millan whispered in Tony Robbins’s ear to sync his brain with Missy-O’s, that’s the kind of knowledge I could learn by bonding with Sherman.
There was no way I could do it on my own. I had to find a Donkey Whisperer, and I knew only two. One was Curtis, who was 70 years old and 2,700 miles away. The other was Tanya, who was right in front of me but staring daggers. If I couldn’t change her mind, this project was dead before it started. How would I get Sherman to race through the Rockies when he wouldn’t even step onto the driveway?
* Loosely translated. Not to mention speculative.
8
The Barely-a-Puddle of Doom
“That might be his brain, not his feet,” Tanya said.
Four days had passed since Sherman arrived, and three since I’d nearly made Tanya’s brain explode by telling her that I’d tried hauling her ailing patient with the crippled hooves into the road to see if he felt like doing some jogging. I could tell she still had some doubts about me when she came by that morning to examine Sherman’s hooves, but after she’d lifted each one in turn to check the condition of the soft flesh and the shape of the trimmed hoof, she stood up with a smile.
“Looking good,” she said. “Scott worked a little miracle.”
“Soooooo—” I ventured. “You think there’ll come a point when he’ll be able to walk on the road? Maybe even run a little?”
Tanya wasn’t on board yet with my burro race idea, not by a long shot, but I could tell she was intrigued by the intellectual challenge. For a skilled trainer like her, it was like tackling a math problem for NASA; she wasn’t promising she could put a man on Mars, but she wanted to at least see if she could crack the equation.
“You’ve got no idea what kind of life he’s had,” she responded. “There could be a lot of trauma between those ears that needs to be unpacked.” She glanced at the driveway, then back at Sherman. “Okay, let’s try something. Go get that goat he likes.”
I fetched Lawrence and snapped a rope on his collar. Lawrence is always up for an adventure, especially when it might involve a treat, so he trotted eagerly beside me. We passed right by Sherman, but oddly, he didn’t even give us a look.
“Bring him out here to the road,” Tanya said, “and let’s see if Mr. Sherman follows.”
I could tell Sherman was spying on us, because as soon as Lawrence and I got a few yards away, he began ambling nonchalantly in our direction. Sherman picked up the pace as Lawrence and I got closer to the gate, first shifting into a full walk…then an anxious march…and then he charged, coming at us like a bull. I froze, bracing myself for a butting, then realized he was heading for the gate. Jesus, is he escaping? Sherman brushed past me, then skidded to a stop and turned sideways, blocking the gate with his body. His head dropped back down, his ears drooped, and just like that, he turned back into sad, innocent Eeyore.
“Oh my god!” Tanya shouted. “I love it. Look how he’s playing you!”
Lawrence still had eyes on Tanya, convinced that she was packing treats, but when he tried to get to her by squirming past Sherman and passing through the gate, Sherman wedged himself into the gap and refused to move. Sherman wasn’t letting Lawrence go anywhere without him, which meant that if Lawrence didn’t understand how dangerous the world was outside that gate, then Sherman’s only option would be to spring into action and save them both.
“Shermie, you rock star!” Tanya laughed. “All messed up but wicked smart. Dude, he’s like the Good Will Hunting of donkeys.”
The wheels in her mind were turning. She gazed at Sherman, processing that little stunt he’d just pulled. A lot had been stolen from Sherman during his years in captivity. His muscles were withered, his body was sagging and soft, his trust was severely damaged if not altogether lost. But that? That mad dash to rescue Lawrence? Whatever else he’d lost, Sherman seemed to be showing that he was still determined, brave, and amazingly loyal. Not to mention kinda crafty.
“So when is this race?” Tanya asked.
“Next July,” I said. “Little less than a year.”
Tanya pursed her lips, rocking her head back and forth noncommittally. “How far will he have to run?”
“Twenty-nine miles,” I said. “Fifteen for the short course.”
“Fifteen. Is short.” Tanya rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m the one who told you to find him a job. But it won’t be easy. Sherman can come up with a million ways to make your life a living hell. See what he did when you tried to get him out the gate? He’s already two jumps ahead, and you haven’t even started.”
Tanya was back in man-on-Mars mode. “There’s only one way this even has a chance,” she said. “Anything you want a donkey to do, you’ve got to make him think it’s his idea. Let’s try something.”
She walked back to her truck and loaded up a fanny pack with horse treats. With one hand, she fed a few to Lawrence to get him out of the way, and with the other, she gave Sherman’s ears a good, friendly scratching. After a few minutes, Sherman seemed to relax a little. Tanya fed him a handful of treats, then unclicked the lead rope from Lawrence’s collar and snapped it onto Sherman’s halter. She stroked his face one more time, and then she stood tall with authority to show him who was boss and led him…
Nowhere.
Tanya pulled on the rope, gentle but insistent. Sherman dropped his butt and locked his front legs, hunkering down for battle. “That’s fine,” Tanya said. “Now we wait.” She held the rope firmly but didn’t tug, parrying Sherman in an evenly matched tug-of-war. “Wait for it…”
Gradually, Sherman relented. He took one step, then another, until he reached Tanya at the end of the rope. “Good man!” Tanya crooned, feeding him a handful of treats. When she began walking again, Sherman followed right behind her.
But when we reached the road, Sherman recoiled like it was a river of lava. “Maybe he’s never seen asphalt before, maybe he thinks it’s a bottomless lake, who knows?” Tanya said. “But with a donkey, anything you start you have to finish.” She stepped into the road, looped the rope under her butt, and sat back on it while Sherman threw every fiber of his being into reverse. One of my neighbors rumbled past on his tractor, and he had to yank the steering wheel and swerve wide to avoid running Tanya down. Tanya smiled and waved, holding her ground in the middle of the road.
Finally, Sherman placed one foot on the asphalt.
“Sherminator!” Tanya crowed. “Good man. See? You trusted me and you didn’t die.”
Tanya walked toward Sherman, reeling in the rope as she approached so he had to keep that one tentative foot planted on the road. “R
ight now, we’ve got a choice,” Tanya told me. “It’s the biggest choice you’ll ever make with Sherman. Whichever way you go, it’s going to determine the relationship you have with him for the rest of your lives.” This was the time to decide, she said, between “easing” and “flooding.”
Tanya held Sherman in the same spot, with that one hoof on the pavement, while she explained the difference to me. “Flooding” an animal means bombarding it with new sensations, forcing it to follow your commands without giving it time to process what’s happening. If your dog gets feisty and nippy around loud voices, for instance, then it’s time to break out the pots and pans. You’re supposed to hold your pup tight on a short leash and subject it to such a terrifying barrage of clanging that in the future, every other noise will seem trivial by comparison. Flood the dog’s sensory system with that decibel overload, and its fear of noise should be gone forever.
For Sherman, the flooding approach would mean goading him to keep moving forward across that blacktop road no matter what strange dangers lay ahead: the red Stop sign, our neighbor’s gigantic plow horses, the rumbling creek across the street, the creaking metal road sign for AK’s Saw Shop. Sherman would have alarm bells going off like crazy in his mind, but too bad: he’d learn that when I talk, he walks. Period.