Bones would rain from the sky: deepening our relationships with dogs

254 Pages·2002·1.24 MB·English

by  Suzanne Clothier

BONES WOULD RAIN FROM THE SKY Suzanne Clothier For anyone who
has ever dreamed of being able to Really talk to their dogs-and "hear" what they
have to say...
The names and identifying details of both dogs and people mentioned in this
book have been changed in order to protect their privacy. Copyright
[*copygg'2002 by Suzanne Clothier All rights reserved. Warner Books, Inc.,
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Visit our Web site at
www.twbookmark.com. An AOL Time Warner Company Printed in the United
States of America First Printing: September 2002
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clothier, Suzanne Bones
would rain from the sky: deepening our relationships with dogs/suzanne
Clothier. people. cm. ISBN 0-446-52593-6 1. Dogs-Behavior. 2. Dogs-Training.
3. Human-animal relationships. 4.human-animal communication. I. Title. SF433
.c56 2002 636. 7"0887-dc21
Book design by Mada Design, Inc. still NYC FOR GRAS, christian and bear
CONTENTS 1.in the Company of Animals1 2.a Black Dog's Prayers13 3.d.es
with Dogs31 4.the Quality of Connection50 5.walks with Dogs58 6.take It from
the Top66 7.calling Dr. Doolittle82 8.pigs in Pokes93 9.and Nothing but the
Truth103 10.what I Really Meant to Say Was ...118 11.take Me to Your
Leader13 2 12.leadership Is Action149 13.^wh Couch Is It, Anyway8165 14.i'll
Go First-This May Be Dangerous175 15.my, What Big Teeth You Hff185 16.put
Down the Pancakes and No One Gets Hurt203 17.what Timmy Never Did to
Lassie219 18.in Search of Soulful Coherence237 19.matters of the Heart253
20.cold Noses, No Wings275 Acknowledgments 298 Recommended Reading
If a dog's prayers were answered, bones would rain from the sky turkish proverb
You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your
intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful What you'll discover is
yourself. alan alda
My only mistake was licking her knee. Until that moment, they had been quite
tolerant of me panting quietly under the dining room table, a good place to lie on
a warm summer's evening. I was a smart dog. I knew I might have been cooler
lying on the slick tile in the bathroom, or even outside, shaded by the bushes
along the foundation. But I would have missed being with my family. Seen from
beneath the table, framed by a tablecloth, my family appeared as a collection of
limbs and clothing: plump knees, knobby knees, scabby knees, tired-looking
ankles rising pale and thin from sensible white socks, pleasantly grubby feet idly
rubbing the rungs of a chair, a flip-flop dangling from a swinging toe.
I shifted to lean against a woman's knee, eyes closed as I breathed in the sweetly
familiar perfume that rose from a hollow on her ankle. Absently, she reached
down to pat my head, and grateful for the attention, I licked her knee. With my
aunt's startled cry, my blissful moments as the family dog came to an end. It was
not fair, I thought resentfully as I was hauled out from under the table and placed
unceremoniously in a chair with the command, "Sit here and eat like a human
being!" All I wanted was a dog. If I couldn't have a dog, the least my family
could do was allow me to be a dog. And everyone knows that dogs lick the
people they like. It was a typical middle-class family that owned Me,no more
dysfunctional than most, and certainly not one that encouraged such odd
behavior in its eldest child.
While tolerant of and kind to animals, neither of my parents were "animal"
people. It was not for want of love or acceptance that I was drawn to animals,
though for many children animals do freely offer the unconditional love and
acceptance often lacking in young lives.
Yet long before I knew disappointment or anger, long before I learned how
hurtful and complex human beings could be, there was an instinctive gravitation
toward animals. Animals of every description drew me to them simply because
they existed; they were, and are, my Mount Everest,ultimately defying any
explanation of their magnetism, unbearably inviting-there to be seen and
possibly known if I am willing to undertake the expedition.
It was not enough to watch animals, or even to touch them. I wanted to see their
innermost workings, to be inside their minds, to see and feel and smell and hear
the world as they did. My experiments in "being" an animal were usually carried
out in private, since my mother's tolerance for my animal behaviors had pretty
much vanished by the time I had licked one too many knees. In playing house
with my sisters, however, these skills and experiments were encouraged, as they
allowed for exciting new story lines to be developed. Typically, my middle sister
would play mother (a role in which she was and is extremely fluent), and our
youngest sister would accept whatever role we assigned her. Without exception,
I played the family pet. Sometimes I was a dog, sometimes a horse, and
sometimes, stretching myself to more exotic roles, I played a cougar or a lion or
a tiger until the requisite fierce roars had exhausted my throat. In my lifelong
quest for fluency in animal languages, fluency in Dog was the first and the
easiest. After all, native speakers lived in my neighborhood and could be readily
studied. Whether in the company of a living, breathing dog or only conjuring the
countless fictional dogs in my head-Bob, Lad, King, Buck, Lassie-I practiced. I
practiced panting, to the annoyance of my sisters and to my own dismay when I
discovered that in the company of animals far from cooling me as I had read it
did for dogs, panting only made me dizzy and left me wondering if dogs ever
hyperventilated as I did. I tried lapping water and eating from a bowl on the
floor, wishing each time my muzzle were longer and more suited to the task. I
truly loved (and still do] gnawing on bones from a steak or a chop, and
understood at least in part why dogs look so blissful when granted such a treat. I
practiced not turning my head when I heard a sound behind me but instead
cocking an ear in that direction. It frustrated me that lacking highly mobile and
visible pinnae I was unable to display publicly just how skilled I had become.
Tail wagging presented problems not easily solved-a rolled shirt or towel gave a
rather dead effect, no matter how much I wiggled my hindquarters. Ultimately, I
settled on a wag much like my ear movements comrefined, subtle, and known
(most regrettably) only to me.
I perfected several growls, a snarl and a snap that ended with a delightfully
audible click of my teeth that rarely failed to alarm those at whom it was
directed. My hurt-dog yelp covered the complete range of having my paw
accidentally stepped upon to mortally wounded and was realistic enough to stop
people in midstep. And of course, my barks were convincing-so much so that I
was occasionally employed to bark menacingly if my parents weren't home and
someone came to the door. In college, my one-man "dog fights" were guaranteed
to liven up a boring night in the dorm bathroom. It's amazing how easily you can
convince otherwise intelligent people that there are two poodles at war in a
shower stall. There were other languages to be mastered as well. Horses eclipsed
even dogs on my passion scale, and when at age ten I began riding
lessons, a new language of movement, gesture and sounds opened to me. By age
twelve, I had mastered the basics: the greeting exchange of slow, careful breaths
in each other's nostrils; the nicker; the whinny; the alarm snort; the head tosses
and snaking neck movements of an annoyed horse; the slitted eyes and pinned
ears of anger; even the high-headed, wide-eyed sideways retreat of a spooked
horse. To this day, when startled, I sometimes revert to a horselike shying.
Annoying childhood pranksters attempting to dunk my head into the water
fountain while I was drinking failed to realize that I had my ears turned back to
hear them. They were always surprised when, as any horse might, I kicked them
with great accuracy. Of course if they'd been able to speak Horse, they would
have seen the pinned ears and the slitted eyes and known that they'd been given
fair warning. My only regret in learning the basics of Horse when I did was that
it came too late to be truly useful. Between ages six and eight, I worked on my
most ambitious role-the simultaneous roles of a Canadian Mountie, his horse,
and his dog. If at that tender age I had known more than rudimentary Horse, my
gallops through the neighborhood would have had far more authenticity.
To the best of my ability, my love of animals was incorporated into every aspect
of my life. My mother encouraged my interests even though she did not always
understand them or share my curiosity and delight in all aspects of the natural
world. She learned to check with caution any container in my possession. A
mere Dixie cup might be home to a frog or a collection of shed locust skins or
even a deliberately grown mold. Her laundry basket might contain newly washed
socks or neatly folded pajamas; just as easily, it might be home to a naked baby
bird with hideously visible internal organs. Her card table, turned upside down
and wrapped in chicken wire, became home to Buster and Dandy, a pair of
Rhode Island Red chickens who, as much older chickens, repaid her tolerance by
merrily eating every blossom on three flats of Mother's Day plants.
Without a single question and little more than a raised eyebrow, my mother
supplied me with pie pans, flour, molasses, and a paintbrush. Though she may
have idly hazarded a wild guess as to what I had in mind, nothing prepared her
for the reality of what I did with these items. I had just finished reading The
Yearling, as she well knew-she'd been the one to find me sobbing so fiercely on
the living room sofa that she actually feared one of my friends had died. But
seeing the book in my hand, she ventured sympathetically, "I suppose you've
gotten to the part where he shot Flag, huh?" I nodded and sobbed louder. "Well,
dinner's ready whenever you are." Once I had recovered from grieving for the
yearling deer, I decided to use Jody and his pa's method to track honeybees in
my own neighborhood to their hive. The book had discussed at length the
seemingly simple matter of using molasses to attract bees who would then
receive a dab of flour on their behinds, said flour then serving as an easily
followed visual marker of the bees' flight. I can now categorically state that my
Great Bee Experiment proved only that this classic book was entirely a work of
fiction, and that bees object rather violently to having flour dabbed on their
behinds. It was not the last of my Great Experiments, but it was one of the more
painful ones.
Only occasionally did my enthusiasm overrun my mother's considerable
tolerance. I'll never know what rare gleam in my eye warned her when I asked
for a small kitchen knife one fine summer afternoon, but she hesitated as she
reached into the kitchen drawer. When further questioning revealed that I meant
to carry out an exploratory autopsy on a dead rabbit I had found, she flatly
refused me the loan of even a spoon. To this day, I am left wondering if a
potentially brilliant career as a veterinary surgeon ended there and then.
But it was probably just as well. The proficiency in math that veterinary
schooling requires was not my strong suit. Very often, school bored me. I might
have fared better as a scholar if the rather dull Home Economics class had been
replaced with a truly interesting course, say Barn Economics or Kennel
Management 101. Had my teachers been wise, I could have been encouraged to
love algebra at a tender age if only the math problems had been: "Seventeen
zebras who left at noon are traveling west at nine miles an hour. Six lions who
left at four o'clock are headed east at eight miles an hour. When will the zebras
and lions meet, and how many zebras will be alive after that meeting?" The
requisite cars, planes and trains usually invoked in these problems left me cold
and disinterested.
Even my spiritual life was woven through with animals. Despite the emphasis
our church placed on Jesus (who, I noted, did not even have a dog!), I felt a more
natural alliance with Noah, my childhood hero. (jonah, having had such an
intimate relationship with a whale, was another favorite of mine.) Given a Bible
with a concordance, I immediately looked up every verse-and there are many-
that contained mention of an animal: eagle, ass, horse, sparrow, lion, dog, sheep,
lamb, cattle, goats, swine. I took to heart the notion that all of God's creatures
were his creation, just as I was. As such, I assumed they were as welcome in
Sunday school as any of the little children. And so it was that at a very tender
age I had my first crisis of faith, which began with a coonhound I met on the
way to church.
He was a grand dog, black with rusty tan, just the perfect size for draping a
companionable arm across his back as we walked. And he was an agreeable dog.
It took little effort to convince him to accompany me down the stairs and into my
Sunday school class, where he settled politely next to my chair. How the teacher
missed our entrance, I'll never know. I was not being secretive; it had yet to
dawn on me that this was not a perfectly appropriate guest. In fact, I thought as I
settled down to hear the day's Bible story, a dog and Sunday school was a
heavenly combination. Singing out the names for roll call, the teacher would
glance up from her list to bestow a beaming smile on each child as they
answered. "Suzanne?" she asked brightly, her teeth gleaming as she turned her
head my way. Perhaps it is only in my imagination that she gasped and stepped
backward; perhaps I've only dreamed of how her lips twitched and snarled with
unspoken horror. At any rate, I do recall her question, "What is that dog doing
here?" There was an unpleasant emphasis on the word dog. I thought it was
fairly obvious and said so. "He's here for Sunday school." Her response shook
my innocent acceptance of the church's teachings: "He does not belong here." I
was dumbstruck. Doesn't belong? Isn't he one of God's creatures? Didn't God
make him too? Surely Jesus would be glad to have a coonhound in church,
especially one that wasn't bothering a soul. If I could bring this scene to life on
film, I would cast an articulate, passionate child who, with tremendous presence,
argues the dog's case, quoting Scripture so fast and furious that the teacher
eventually bows to the greater command of the Bible as a weapon, yields to a
deeper underin the company of animals' standing of God's love for dogs, and
allows the dog to stay. Unfortunately, I was not articulate in the face of wrath
and could only weakly protest as I squirmed under her glare. "He smells." With
that final statement, the teacher revealed the limits of her love for all of God's
creatures. (in retrospect, I realize that had I brought in a real leper with stinking
bandages or a drunk down on his luck and reeking of the gutter, the teacher's
Christian charity might have fled as quickly. But I am older now, and a touch
more cynical.) I was outraged, and protested with vigor: The dog did not smell.
Well, to be perfectly honest, he did not smell bad, he just smelled the way some
dogs do. And that's how God made him! My arguments fell on deaf ears. The
teacher insisted that I take the dog outside and return, sans canine, to my chair.
Sadly and slowly, I climbed the few stairs, opened the door and stood for a
moment with this dog. I apologized to him, and though I lacked the words to
express my deep sorrow at the powerlessness of being only five years old, I
think he understood. He must have, for his power and mine were similar; his
world was also full of larger, stronger people who set rules that had to be
obeyed. I hugged him-the memory of that warm, slightly greasy black coat, of
that rich musky dog scent has stayed with me all these years-and he leaned into
me, wagging his tail. With tears in my eyes and newfound doubt in my heart, I
left him standing in the sunshine and returned to Sunday school, infinitely older
and wiser.
How people interacted with and reacted to animals was endlessly educational. I
learned, for instance, that many adults were not nearly as brave as they seemed.
The
summer that I was ten, I carried a coffee can with me at all times. Sweetly
patronizing adults would ask what it was that I had in there, and ever eager to
share the amazing world of nature, I would open the top and show them my pet
stag beetle, Benjy. I do not know what they expected from a ten-year-old kid and
a coffee can, but the three-inch-long, impressively fierce-looking Benjy was
decidedly not it. A few shrieked before they could recover their composure and
his smile weakly at me; some actually blanched. All looked at me with new eyes
after that, and quite a few never again asked what I had, no matter how
provocatively I might carry a container. I suppose every child blessed with
siblings carries resentments for youthful incidents long past. Ask me what I
remember of being four years old and I'll tell you that was the year I had turtles.
Ostensibly, one of the two turtles was mine and the other belonged to my sister
Sheryl. Two years younger than I am, Sheryl wanted to do everything that I did,
though our interests were considerably different. She found babies [human
babies!) indescribably fascinating; I found them of far less intrigue than an
earthworm drying on the sidewalk after a rainstorm. Happily playing with my
turtles, enjoying the prick of their tiny claws on my hand, I was mildly annoyed
when Sheryl asked to hold one. But at my mother's urging, I agreed to share the
joy. More than three decades later, my lips still automatically lift into a sneer of
disgust when I recall how, upon my placing a turtle upon her outstretched hand,
my sister squealed, "He's got claws!" or something to that effect and flung the
hapless turtle across the room. The turtle survived the incident, which in my
memory has far outlived the turtle itself. Sheryl has grown up since then. She
now has the sense to avoid handling reptilian creatures, and I know better than to
let her. Endlessly kindhearted, she loves animals best from a distance, though
she does not always understand them; and there have been a few animals that she
has loved up close and personal, muddy paws, drool and all. She earned high
marks from me the day she discovered that an intermittent ear problem was
caused by a lone dog hair curled neatly upon her left eardrum, the result of a bed
shared with her dog. I love my sister, but despite that redeeming dog hair in her
ear, I'll go to my grave remembering the turtle incident. My father and I
frequently tangled over animals. There was a pair of kittens I recklessly accepted
and hid in the car overnight. It was his car, and despite my best intentions to
wake up long before he did and sneak the kittens into the house, I never stirred
until his roared "Suzanne!" broke the morning wide open. Those kittens taught
me several lessons. First, set an alarm if you really do have to get up early.
Second, don't put kittens in your father's car, at least not without informing him
first. Last, providing food (and lots of it) and water (lots of it) is not entirely
sufficient for a kitten's needs. One must provide a litter box as well. The kittens
went off to the local shelter, and I lost my allowance and quite a few privileges
for a while. I also forgot one night to mention to my father that a large Collie had
followed me home (quite nicely once I took off my shoelaces and my belt and
hooked the makeshift leash around his neck) and that I had hidden him in the
small shed that housed our garbage cans. How was I to know that my father
would finish his supper early and decide to take the trash cans out then? He
normally didn't take the trash out until much later. Since I had momentarily
forgotten the dog, the combination of deep barking, surprised swearing and the
bellowing of my name came as a shock. My allowance took yet another hit. A
good deal did happen to me in my youth and adolescence that easily qualifies me
for membership in any number of support groups and twelve-step programs. But
somehow, I came through it all relatively intact, bearing only a reasonable load
of baggage to sort out along my life's journey. It may be that any child with a
consuming passion is buffered against life's blows by that very passion; it may
be that the animals themselves served as both buffers and healers. I have a hard
time imagining that a stamp collection would have done as well as my animal
friends did.
where the animals lead me Through childhood and beyond, a veritable Noah's
ark of animals have accompanied me on my life's journey. Long before I read
Joseph Campbell's wise advice to "follow your bliss," I was already following
my heart's desire. There were other opportunities available to me in life-my high
school art teachers urged me to attend art school, my English teachers pushed me
toward a career as a writer. My grandfather, aware of my great love of books,
offered to pay my college tuition if I agreed to become a librarian. I was
surrounded by disapproval and dire warnings of inevitable failure if I pursued
my dreams. My stubborn insistence on following my bliss created conflict and
pain in my relation ships with those who could not understand why I spent my
teenage years at a nearby stable, why I pursued an animal husbandry degree only
to abandon that to leap at a chance to work with a guide dog organization and
then move on from there to manage a stable and kennels and to ultimately
become a trainer. At every crossroad, I took only the path that would lead me
where I wanted to go-toward a deeper understanding of a life shared with
animals. I write this book in a house filled with wonderful animals-seven dogs,
seven cats, a pair of tortoises, a parrot and a box turtle. From my window, I can
glimpse my horses, the donkey and some of the Scottish Highland cattle that
grace our pastures. There is mud on my jeans, left there by Charlotte the pig's
affectionate greeting. I know that in the warm glow of the barn lights, my loving
husband is tending to the nighttime chores, talking to calves as he hands out
treats of stale bread, settling the turkeys, chickens and quail in for the night. In
my relationship with each of these much-loved and complex beings, including
my husband, there are ghosts and echoes of all the animals that have shared my
life, and the seedlings of a wisdom crafted from both joys and sorrows. I am
grateful for the immeasurable love bestowed upon me daily by my husband and
my animals. Sometimes, I question whether I deserve such blessings. If I have
somehow grown into a person who deserves what she has been given so freely, it
is in large part the reflection of the grace and forgiveness granted to me by the
animals who have accompanied me thus far on my life's journey.
Those who do not know better label me simply as an "animal lover" and find it
charming, if odd, that a parrot flies freely through the house, that a turtle tells me
quite clearly he'd like a cherry tomato for lunch, that my dogs find it not at all
unusual to go for a walk in the woods with a turkey or a pig. I give these people
amusing tales of waking to find a cat's gift of a dead mole on my pillow or the
inexplicable presentation of a live, unhurt baby bird, and we laugh at the dogs'
latest adventures. While sometimes impressed by my knowledge of animals and
their ways, many people are bemused by my insatiable lust for an ever-deeper,
fuller understanding. For them, it is enough to have a pet, to "love animals." And
they leave our farm with an incomplete view of our life and of who I am. I am
not an animal lover or a pet owner. I am, perhaps, an animal husband in the
oldest sense of the word, but it is much more than even that. These animals are
my friends, my partners, my fellow travelers on life's journey. I do not "h"
animals as I have collections of art or books. I have relationships with each
animal; some are more intimate than others. I try to listen as carefully to each
animal as I would to any human friend. To be sure, tending to the needs of so
many creatures gives shape and rhythm to my life and to my husband's. Our
plans and goals are often delayed or altered in response to crises as simple as an
unexpected puddle on the floor or as complicated as caring for a critically ill or
dying animal. There are times when we chafe, individually and together, against
the constraints of a life with so many animals in our care. But the immediate and
undeniable reality of the animal world grounds us in ways we cannot fully
articulate though we can feel it working its peaceful magic deep within our