Not Your Stick

Ernie about to be introduced to a
hitherto obscure Law of Nature

Cole has taken on our latest foster, young Ernie, as an interesting project.

There wasn't much for him to do in the first week Ernie was with us. The New Guy was living a very restricted life -- tied to me, on a long line on walks, kenneled, in a crate, or gated into a room with me where my eyeballs were always on him. This is how it normally starts with fosters here.

Ernie got opportunities to play outdoors a bit, after dark, when the poultry had gone to bed. He and Cole played keepaway in the front, running round the landscaping bed that is overgrown with mint. In our house, only fosters wear jingly tags -- helps me keep track of them.

Without a sound cue, Ernie appeared to believe that every time Cole disappeared around the other end of the mint island and froze, he had disappeared off the face of the earth. He'd stand and whine until Cole would sneak around into sight and recommence the game.

On Friday, I took the leash off during daylight for the first time. All the dogs were hanging around near the two big maple trees above the house. No poultry close by, so I was confident I would have time to intervene if Ernie forgot the chicken manners he'd been learning while on the long line.

After a short romp, Cole settled down to enjoy chewing a stick.

Or so it would appear to the casual observer.

What he was actually doing was writing and executing a lesson plan, conceptualized in the form a game.

The name of the game is Not Your Stick. The rules of Not Your Stick are simple: That stick? Not yours. That other stick over there? Also, not yours. The stick so small you think I can't see it? Nope, not yours. (Click the little speech-balloon icon lower left for captions.)



To a decontextualized observer, what this looks like is just Cole being a little shit. And he is certainly capable of being just that.

Since Ernie landed in foster largely due to his previous failure to appreciate the twin principles of Not Yours and Keep Your Mouth off of Not Yours, I was more interested in seeing where this would go. I'd had several opportunities to correct Ernie for putting his mouth on things that did not belong to him in the house, and he'd taken the correction well, seeming to contemplate this new information without being overly worried or sensitive. And Cole not only stopped short of overt bullying; he gave the impression of conscientiousness in his titration of timing, pressure, and display.

After Cole explained the Not Yours principles to Ernie using four or five sticks in order to achieve generalization, he allowed Ernie to pick up a stick and retired a short distance away, and benignly observed him enjoying a good chew.

This lasted only a few minutes. All the during the lesson, my flock of curious, friendly, and exceedingly naive turkey poults had been working their way towards the field of play. This would be Ernie's first off-leash encounter with poultry.

He took the bait.

Just as I opened my mouth to correct him, Cole ran forward, blocked him, and sent him in the other direction. Cole is my turkey hound -- he not only herds the turkeys, drives the turkeys away from forbidden areas, plays a silly game with the adult toms, and brings the turkeys home when they stray, he protects the turkeys from predators, cars, and their own suicidal stupidity. Turkeys are his special responsibility.

Cole decided that young turkeys needed to stay in the shrubberies and were not to come out and mingle with dogs in the mowed area. He trotted the boundary until the turkeys relented and moved back into the weeds.

Ernie did not challenge the rule that these were emphatically Not Your Turkeys. He came back towards me and fawned on Pip and Rosie while Cole moved the flock.

He not only absorbed the lesson, he passed the pop quiz at the end of class.

The Word for Puppy is Blue Bear

When Hope and the four Indiana Plague Puppies first arrived, Cole did not know what to do with them.

Well, Hope was no problem. They said hello, sniffed butts, and fell in companionably. You're a bitch, I'm a dog, we speak the same dogalect, okay, whatever.

But he'd had little experience with very young puppies, and wasn't sure what was the protocol. They certainly seem to be the sort of creatures with which one plays -- but how? And am I going to get in trouble for getting it wrong?*

He started, wisely enough, with keepaway. The chase me, I've got a prize game avoided the pitfalls of wrestling -- one was neither being perforated by scores of needle teeth nor risking a Momma-delivered ass-kicking for inadvertently squashing a tyke.

And he likes keepaway. He'll play it with sticks, plastic water bottles, pine cones, turkey feathers -- anything that is handy.

But not with the pups.

Before the pups arrived here, I set aside a nice pile of different types of dog toys -- rubber, fabric, rope, tennis balls, plush -- for them. I also bought three new toys for them -- a vinyl baby's tub toy, a squeaky plush bone, and a squeaky plush blue bear or man or something. Possibly Manbearpig. Let's call it a bear.

When Cole wants to play keepaway with the puppies outside, he runs back inside through the dog door, goes to the kitchen, and comes out with one of the new toys. Always. For a month he has been playing with the pups -- four, then three, now two pups -- and if the game is keepaway, it is one of these puppy-specific toys every time. Usually the blue bear.

He quickly went from being nervous about intimate contact with young puppies to quite comfortable. He's Uncle Cole now, supervising the pups whenever they are outside, ensuring that they don't get carried off by owls. The last two pups have the run of the kitchen now; the gates impede the free flow of adult dogs to the front door, so they go out the dog door in the back. When I open the front door from the kitchen to take them out, he dashes out the dog door, gallops around the house, and meets us on the porch, ready for duty. He plays lots of other games with them now, but they still play some keepaway every day.

This week PC has started letting the pups tag along for his morning chores with Sophia. It's great fun for him, and the pups discharge some of their evil and aren't rioting quite so badly in the mornings. I can indulge in luxuries like getting dressed and a few household tasks before taking them out, and the pups are content to play in the kitchen. But they aren't the only interested parties.

This morning I became absorbed reading something upstairs in the bedroom; Cole was being a bit nebby, but I didn't pay any attention to him. Which was the problem. He had something to say.

He ran downstairs and shot out the dog door, returning a few minutes later with the ice-encrusted blue bear. Sat in front of me and poked my knee with it.

I want to play with the puppies. Let them out.

I'm not sure what sense of propriety led Cole to the conviction that the blue bear, the tub toy, and the squeaky bone (which has been missing, probably in a snow drift, for some time now) are the only objects suitable for puppy keepaway. It doesn't surprise me that he put those three objects in their own category. This is the pup who found and identified a box of old dog toys in the clutter of our barn only days after arriving from a kennel life in which every object he could access was a dog toy. He didn't touch any of the tools, flowerpots, backpacking gear, gadgets and miscellaneous junk piled up there, but dove into the box of dog toys and started ransacking it until he found the best one.

One element of Cole's single-trial learning is a stubborn adherence to precedent. If something happens a certain way once, it takes considerable persuasion to convince him to do it differently going forward.

When I first brought him into the house to live, I took him into the bathroom with me when I took a shower, to keep him out of trouble. One time. A year and a half later, his nickname is still Bathmat. I'll never shower alone.

Whomever taught him the down command used a treat lure. He always got a treat, and it was always accompanied by a luring motion.

Took me six weeks to break that association and convince him that he could down without a bribe or a luring motion. But in the training session where he finally shed this acquired superstition, he learned to instantly fold onto his haunches like a penknife, at any distance from me, in about five minutes.

So I'm not really surprised that, having once decided that the toys that arrived at the same time as the pups are the obligate "playing with the puppies" toys, Cole has stuck with that association.

I got the message, and went downstairs to let the pups out, assuming that Cole was telling me that he wanted to play Blue Bear Keepaway with them.

He dashed out the back door and met us on the porch. No bear. He'd left it inside. They ran off to play some other game, maybe "Chew on Uncle's Tail" or "Dig Fruitlessly for Voles."

In the inner life of Cole, the blue bear -- his first means of interacting with the pups -- had become the symbol for playing with the puppies, or, quite possibly, the symbol for the puppies themselves.

Generous little being that he is, Cole assumed that I was clever enough to understand his symbol. Or at least, he thought it was worth a try.

Tell me again that only human animals use language.

__________

* Nervousness and outright fear of little puppies is perfectly normal for adult and adolescent dogs. I call it "Baby bear / Momma bear" syndrome. Sure, the baby bear is cute, but touch it and its mother is going to come charging out of the shrubbery and eat you. Better to run away.