I loved Jennifer Holland’s book, Dog Smart: Life-Changing Lessons in Canine Intelligence, so much that I asked her if we could talk more about it sometime. Jennifer is one of those great adventurers, fueled by grit and curiosity, who scuba dives with sharks, and camps with Indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of the Unlikely Friendships series, and is forced by National Geographic (ha), to travel around the world and write about it. Cool.
We had a great talk; such fun to hear about her experiences with hunting dogs, sniffer dogs, guide dogs, etc. I asked her was what surprised her most, in all the research she’d done on canine cognition. First, she mentioned just how many dogs there actually are in the world–perhaps 900 million or so, with at least three-quarters of them being free-ranging. That is one successful evolutionary story.
She was also fascinated by the training of what’s often called Intelligent Disobedience, a term popularized by those who train seeing eye, or guide dogs. Imagine being blind, and are about to cross a street. You’ve been alerted by a sound that traffic is stopped, so you say “forward” to your dog, and move into the crosswalk. Neither you or the traffic technology see the car barreling around the corner, but your dog does. He refuses to move forward, disobeying your cue. And saves your life.
There are lots of other examples–not always life and death, but often critical to the visually impaired. What if you are about to walk into a sign at the height of your head? Watching out for things at human head height can be the most challenging to teach service dogs, because they don’t usually look up when they are scanning the environment. They have to learn that their job is to avoid obstacles that wouldn’t just be in their way, but their person’s way too.
Serendipitously, I also recently interviewed, Laura Magnuson, one of our loyal village members, about what it is like to have a Guide Dog. (This for or an upcoming post, stay tuned, it’s fascinating!). I asked her, as a blind woman who has had four Guide dogs, what the impact of “Intelligent Disobedience” training has been for her. She has a new dog, Kyle (Welcome Kyle! We love you already, can’t wait to “talk” more!)
Kyle is a young dog, still in need of lots of training from Laura, but has already saved her from big trouble. She works on a busy campus, and was crossing the street soon after getting young Kyle, when he stopped dead in the cross walk after she’d said “forward.” (FYI, she’d been taught, years ago when she used a cane, to cross the street as fast as she possibly could. If you have no sight, stopping mid-street is hardly something you’d be comfortable doing.) But she trusted the training, and trusted her dog. Turns out there was indeed a car in the cross walk.
Talking with Jennifer about “intelligent disobedience” got me thinking about how often that happens in sheep herding. Every top handler has a story about the time their dog saved their run by disobeying. Perhaps they said “right,” but rather than complying, the dog stopped, and turned at looked at them. Best translation is “Really? Are you sure?” And every handler has the rueful story of when they ignored the dog and repeated the cue, the dog did some canine equivalent of shrugging and saying “Well, okay . . .”, and the run went to hell because the dog knew exactly what the sheep were thinking, and the handler didn’t. (Ask me how I know.)
I am sure that there are lots of examples from other fields, from scent detection dogs to hunting dogs to . . .? Which leads to the discussion I’d love us to have about when does it happen, but how you knew, or didn’t, that the dog was overriding your cue because he or she knew better. It’s relatively cut and dried with the “car in the crosswalk” example, but in sheepherding it takes no small amount of experience for the handler to know when the dog is simply not complying (for so many reasons–including “I don’t want to go left, there’s too much pressure there from the sheep and it scares me), or is making an “intelligent” decision (“If I go left, the sheep will bolt back to the set out pens, and we’ll both be sorry.”), based on understand the eventual goal, to not do what you ask. I would love LOVE to have a discussion with you all about when this has happened to you, how you knew (or didn’t) that your dog was right, and what happened.
Part of what I love about this is that it continues our important discussion about giving dogs more agency, and being more respectful of their intelligence. Which, circling back to where we started, is also something Jennifer talks about in her book, Dog Smart. Join in the discussion?
By the way, if you’d like to hear more about Dog Smart and Jennifer’s adventures, she and I will both be on The Larry Meiller Show on Tuesday, August 27, from 11 to 12:30 central. Thanks so very much to Jennifer and Laura for taking the time to talk earlier this week!
MEANWHILE, back on the farm: We’ve been to two trials in the last two weekends. Here’s the scene from the “Nippersink trial” last weekend. Yeah, it is gorgeous, isn’t it! (But actually in a different location due to a family crisis, this was at a gorgeous farm outside of Portage.)
Here’s Skip the previous weekend, watching the sheep being moved from one pen to another.
Regrettably, our trial results have not gone well lately. After winning first and second in his first two trials, the next trials have had the kind of sheep that Skip can’t handle. Skip is a defensive player, and is brilliant, truly brilliant on flighty sheep. He puts just enough pressure on them to move them without scaring them. But, the sheep in the last two trials (and several to come), have sheep described as “hay bales” by a top handler, because they are so hard to move. These problems are on me: I bought Skip being told by one of his owner’s that Skip “didn’t have enough power to move heavy sheep on a hot day.” Well, that’s what we have in Wisconsin in summer. And yet, we bought him anyway, because we fell in love with him, and Maggie fell in love with him, and we are in a perfect position to monitor his bad heart, and I just couldn’t send him back, even though I wanted a dog to run in the Open class. So, like I said, on me.
So I’ve scratched running several upcoming trials, aware that if I was a great handler I could have done more to help Skip. But, although I feel like I’ve learned a ton since I got him (4.5 years ago, is that possible?), I know it’s not fair to keep putting him in these situations. It’s frustrating, because he has been SUCH a good boy, doing everything I ask, I feel like I’ve learned so much about the sport, but he can’t move the sheep fast enough to finish the course. If my priorities were winning trials, I would have gotten another dog a long time ago, but I also love my garden, and writing novels, and this blog, and my energy is limited. Please send a fairy godmother to make me younger and healthier and have more energy.
Good news though: My novel has a publisher! At least, I think it does. I’ve been waiting two weeks for a contract, and so shouldn’t say more until that is finalized. I will say that the publishing world moves at the speed of molasses on a cold day–the manuscript was done in mid-January. My patience, not my strong suit, will continue to be tried because the novel won’t be out until early 2026. Argh. A year and a half! That’s not nothing when you are 75. I can’t wait for you to meet Maddie, the novel’s protagonist! I’ve grown so very fond of her, and am starting work on the second novel with her, and her dog, Jack, at the center. Stay tuned. Stay patient, and help me do the same.
In other news, I went totally out of my comfort zone and co-hosted a fund raiser for one of my favorite authors, Nickolas Butler, who is running for the Wisconsin Assembly. I reread Nickolas’s first book, Shotgun Lovesongs, over the weekend, and was reminded how powerful great writing can be. If you want to read a book that leaves you with renewed faith in humanity, read this one.
I leave you with sexy dog ears: The unique ear posture of male dogs who are courting females. Ears up straight up and drawn toward the center. I’ve only seen it in this context–male dogs courting a female. In this case, the female is Maggie, who is spayed, but seems to attract a lot of male dog’s attention. (There was also a bitch in heat at the trial.) It’s usually accompanied by a curled tail, and often the dog standing on his toes. I call it a full body erection. I also think it’s adorable, sort of “sexy-cute,” the Ryan Reynolds of dog dom. Maggie was not as amused as I was.
I hope this leaves you amused yourself, and ready to join in on the conversation about “intelligence disobedience.” (Anyone have an idea for a better name? I think it needs one.)
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