Free Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs by Suzanne Clothier

the grief created by the mother
who sees her son as she chooses to see him-a
future doctor-when the reality is that her son
wants to be a baker. Our dogs cannot be little people in
fur coats, nor should they be asked to be. The
glory of any relationship is not in finding ways
to shape the other to suit our needs, but rather in
celebrating the fullness of who they are.
In accepting the view of the dog as an
    attractively packaged, user- friendly
blend of instinct and conditioned responses, we put
on blinders that work to exclude anything that does not
fit neatly within that explanatory framework or that
cannot be "proven" via scientific method. Even the
great scientist Albert Einstein pointed out,
"Everything that can be counted doesn't necessarily
count; everything that counts can't necessarily be
counted."
If we cling to a stubbornly Western notion of
animals, we may deny the mystery and beauty of
what we experience in our daily lives with
animals and build barriers that keep us from what is
possible in deeper levels of relationship. It is
sobering to remember that until relatively
recently, the mute or deaf among us were considered
inferior in countless ways simply because they could not
share the largely verbal language that we use.
What makes Helen Keller's story so timelessly
compelling is that one person, Anne Sullivan, was
able to reach past the known and embrace the possibility
that within the damaged physical shell of a blind, deaf and
mute child, there was nonetheless a mind and a heart as
fully human as her own. In that simple but
profound perceptual shift, Anne Sullivan was
indeed a miracle worker who opened the
floodgates of possibility. To explore the
possibilities, we must be willing to shift our
view to include dogs as thinking, feeling beings who-
while vastly different from us-are very much like us in many
ways. In the shift to a view of the dog as a thinking,
feeling being, we open floodgates of our own.
The technicalities and mechanics of behavior and
training are useful and valuable to our understanding of
dogs, and I urge all readers to educate themselves
continually. As Goethe noted, "There is nothing more
frightful than ignorance in action." Limited knowledge
means limited
choices and limited expression. Every artist, every
craftsman, every practitioner of an art (such as
animal training) strives to master the tools of their
trade for one reason: to allow the full, clear
expression of their heart to shine through. To long
to express one thing but actually create another,
lesser or incomplete thing is a terrible thing to the
soul.
Still, it is good to balance knowledge with the reminder that the
Western mind's rigidly scientific approach
to animals is a recent development in the long
history of man and dog. Long before learning theories
and jargon such as positive reinforcement or
stimulus control
crept into the world of dog training, long before Skinner
ran a single rat through a maze, men and dogs had
found ways to dance together. Science cannot explain the
beauty and mysteries that deeply move us. It cannot
explain the power of a dog's head laid on our
knee, or why a man might lay down his life for a
friend, or even why we love as we do. Nonetheless,
even scientists fall in love, and it is said that some
even talk to their dogs.
    An intellectual understanding of canine psychology,
behavior, learning theories and more is helpful and
sometimes necessary. By degrees, our knowledge combines with what
our hearts tell us, and we move forward in our
search for a way to dance with our dogs. To learn to dance
with a dog or any other being, the desire must come from
within, from your heart. In our search for deeper, more
meaningful relationships, we must be careful
to recognize that while knowledge is helpful, it can also be
limiting, serving to block our view of what is
possible, weighing us down so that we cannot move
lightly