The Spoon Game
The following is taken from Chapter 38 of the newly revised version of my first novel, originally titled A Nose for Murder, and tentatively retitled The Airedale Heiress (which was the title of my original manuscript until Avon changed it to the more cutesy version).
In this chapter, the lead character, Jack Field who's an ex-cop turned dog trainer, gives a lecture on dog training and introduces the idea of "the spoon game," based on a real-life training situation of my own that took place in 1994.
The spoon game has come to mean anything that excites a dog's prey drive, no matter how silly or crazy or insignificant it might seem to the owners. Find your dog's spoon game can sometimes mean the difference between a dog who's unhappy and frustrated, and one who not only loves to listen and obey, but just loves life and enjoys it to its fullest (at least in dog terms). Enjoy!
[The chapter begins with Jack and his girlfriend Jamie's father Jonas doing the breakfast dishes at Jonas' house in Christmas Cove, ME. Jamie and Jonas' new wife Laurie have taken the car to go Christmas shopping, leaving the men behind to have a "manly" discussion, which they do. Then Jack and Jonas take a motorboat ride to Boothbay Harbor, where Jack is scheculed to give a seminar on dog training.]
Jonas started her up and asked me to untie us and I pulled the yellow ropes off their moorings and put them in the back of the boat, then sat down, and we took off.
We got out on the river—which looked more like a wide harbor than a river to me—and Jonas asked me what I thought he could do to get Jamie to stop hating him. I was at a loss for a second, then, shouting to be heard over the roar of the engine and the thump of the water against the hull, I said:
“That’s a tough one, you know—fathers and daughters . . .”
“But come now,” he shouted, “you studied psychology. You’re a dog trainer, so you understand behavior modification. Surely there must be something I can do.”
“Well,” I leaned toward him, “we could set you up on a variable reinforcement schedule with her.”
“Good,” he shouted. “Tell me what to do.”
He seemed so earnest and well intentioned I hated telling him I was making a joke. He looked at me with hurt eyes, then stared out across the water. “Tell you what—I’ll share a little secret about dog training that may be applicable. You start by finding out what the dog loves to do most, and then you gear your training around that. I call it ‘playing the spoon game’ after this dog I once trained.”
“The spoon game? What’s that?”
We were approaching Boothbay. I waved at Dale Summerhays, who was waiting for us on the dock. “I’ll tell you all about it at the lecture,” I said.
* * *
It was held in a church basement near the mini-mall. There were about thirty souls in attendance, counting the dogs. Most of the humans sat on folding chairs, though some sat on the floor with their animals.
Dale Summerhays, a rangy, rawboned woman of sixty or so—who’s crazy as a loon and whose grandfather once owned most of the timber rights in northern Maine—started things off by asking for donations, encouraging people to adopt another dog or cat, and reminding them to spay and neuter their pets. When that was out of the way, I was introduced to polite applause.
I started by thanking everyone for coming, and for bringing their doggies, etc. Then I said:
“What I’m about to say may seem shocking to some of you, but nearly everything we’ve been taught about dogs is wrong.” This is true, but it was designed to wake everybody up.
“For instance, there is no pack leader in wild wolf packs, at least not in the traditional sense. That creature simply doesn’t exist. So how could dogs have inherited an instinct to follow him? Yet we have a constant barrage of books telling us how to be the pack leader. What pack leader? Wolf society is a self-organizing system, operating solely on the need to hunt large prey. So why do you have to show your dog you’re his pack leader to train him? It makes no sense.
“On the other side of the coin you have operant conditioning, which is fine for teaching tricks, and is less stressful for dogs than the old alpha model, but it’s a miserable failure when it comes to solving serious behavioral problems. This is why puppy uppers and doggie downers are such a big business nowadays, because most behaviorists can’t seem to solve behavioral problems without them. There are only one or two things that really help solve behavioral problems: teaching certain obedience behaviors, like the down/stay, or by giving the dog lots of playful exercise. And sometimes a behaviorist will recommend these things along with all the conditioning stuff that doesn’t work. So we have to ask why does teaching a down/stay, or giving the dog more play time, solve behavioral problems? Because the down/stay, like most obedience behaviors is an imitation, if you will—of a predatory motor pattern, called the eye stalk, found in wild wolves. And what is play except a game of ‘you be the wolf and I’ll be the deer?’ So no matter what a dominance trainer or behaviorist thinks they’re doing, it all comes back to the dog’s hunting instinct.
“The fact is, dogs are predators at heart. Never mind the current theory that wolves became domesticated because they scurried around proto-human garbage dumps like a bunch of rats, only cuter because they wagged their tails. In fact if you ask me, we didn’t domesticate dogs at all. They domesticated us! So it’s a dog’s predatory nature which makes dogs open to training and obedience, and helps solve behavioral problems.
“And because of the way the pack instinct evolved to enable wolves to hunt large prey by working together as a team, dogs actually want to learn and obey. They don’t need to be dominated or bribed into doing it. It’s as natural to them as breathing.”
This set off some heated debate, which went on for a bit.
“Look,” I said, at one point. “I understand what you’re saying and how some of you feel about this. I used to have the same ideas that you all do, that we’ve all been fed, but...” I stopped when a slim, elegant hand was raised in the back.
“What does all this have to do with the spoon game?”
I laughed and introduced Jonas to the group and told them I’d promised to tell him a story about a dog I once trained.
“This will show a practical application of what I’ve been discussing theoretically—that the key to dog training comes through playing games that satisfy the hunting instincts.”
As I was saying this Wade Pierce came in. We made eye contact, he took a seat in the back, and then I began telling the story of the spoon game.
Tina was a shy, frightened Jack Russell terrier (an oxymoron, I know) who had been originally trained by an expert trainer with a college degree in animal behavior: a well-known dominance trainer and the author of half a dozen books on training. At the time I first met Tina I had just training dogs while he’d been at it for over twenty years.
At any rate, after three sessions with her first trainer, Tina was a mess. Not only would she not obey any of the basic commands, there were actually two command words—down and stay—that caused her to involuntarily evacuate her bowels and run under the bed every time she heard them. You didn’t even have to be speaking directly to her, either. You could be on the phone and say, “I have to stay down town,” and if Tina were in the room and heard you, she’d involuntarily evacuate her bowels then hide under the furniture for four hours.
One of the first things I asked Tina’s owner was if there was anything the dog really liked to do—something that charged her up, got her riled and feeling spunky. He said there was.
For some reason, if you dropped a spoon on the kitchen floor, Tina became a different dog—confident and aggressive (like a real Jack Russell). The sound of the spoon being dropped on the tile caused her to run into the kitchen, grab the spoon in her mouth, and shake her head around as if trying to break its neck. Then she’d take it into the living room, bury it under a sofa cushion, and bark at it until you dug it out and threw it for her to chase. Then she’d go after it, grab it and “break its neck” again, then bring it back to you.
Her owner said he didn’t like playing this game with her because she didn’t know when to quit (she’s sounding more and more like a Jack Russell!)—but I knew, or felt, it was the secret to undoing the terrible harm done to her by her original trainer. So while he was going around telling people about how you have to be alpha and all the rest of that nonsense, I was quietly teaching this frightened animal to obey the same commands that had once literally scared the crap out of her. And I did it by playing the spoon game.
I started out by lying on my back and letting Tina jump on top of me. This was done to build her confidence. Once we’d done that for about five or ten minutes I started retraining the down command. Here’s how it worked:
I went to the kitchen and dropped a spoon on the floor. She lunged for it, shook her head around, “killing” it, then ran into the living room and buried it under a sofa cushion.
I took it out, teased her with it (this was to build her hunting drive), then suddenly made a downward swoop with my hand, placing it in a position that if Tina wanted to grab hold of it she could, but only by lying down first. She instantly went down and grabbed the spoon. As she did I said, “Down!” in a happy voice, even though she’d already “obeyed” the command. The first time I said it, her ears went back, her tail went down, and she dashed to the bedroom and hid.
I waited about twenty seconds, then went to the kitchen and dropped the spoon on the floor again.
She came zooming out of the bedroom, grabbed the spoon, “broke its neck” again, and we repeated the game.
We kept doing this until she stopped running away and would actually lie down, somewhat nervously, when I gave her the command to do so. I always rewarded her by giving her the spoon to grab hold of with her teeth.
Then I changed the rules a little: when she obeyed the command I would throw the spoon for her to chase instead of just giving it to her. With this added variation it took almost no time at all to rid her of her fear of the word “down.” In fact, she was not only not afraid of it anymore, she actually loved hearing it. Why? Because it no longer meant she would be forced to lie down or punished if she didn’t, it meant she got to chase the spoon and “kill” it if she did.
As I finished telling this story another part of my brain was wondering if I could use a variation on the spoon game to trap Allison’s killer into confessing. Build his confidence, make him feel that I was on his side, and then pow!—nab him.
At any rate, I finished the lecture by saying, “I’ve found that when you stimulate a dog’s hunting drive, you’re activating her natural affinity for group cooperation. In fact, in some instances, if you build her drive high enough, you can train a command once—just once—and you never have to repeat it.”
“What a load of crap,” I heard someone say.
I laughed and said, “Well, that’s what I used to think. About all the things I’m telling you. At any rate, I think we’re about out of time, so—”
“Yeah, but how do you make a dog respect your authority if you’re not the alpha?”
“Uh, I’m not sure how to answer that. Dogs act on instinct and emotion, and the idea of respect for rank and status, and having some kind of authority is more of a conceptual thing.”
“May I say something?” came a woman’s voice from the back. “I didn’t want to say anything earlier because everyone was beating up on Jack and I thought they might start attacking me too, but my dog was one of the sixty percent he talked about.” I recognized her voice. It was Nadia O’Malley. I’d trained her dog, another Jack Russell terrier named Jane. “The trainer at the puppy school we went to said she was too dominant and out of control and couldn’t be trained. I was devastated. I thought I was going to have to give her to a shelter. I couldn’t stop crying. But luckily, I heard of Jack from Dale Summerhays, and now my dog is obedient and happy. I don’t always understand why the things he does work, but they do.”
“Thanks, Nadia. Nice to see you. How’s Jane?”
She said it was nice to see me too and that Jane was fine and delightful.
Then Dale Summerhays stood up, but I interrupted her.
“Let me just say one more thing. I just want to thank all of you for your opinions, even if they differ from mine. It helps in my search for understanding the true nature of dogs. So, thank you all for coming and sharing your points of view.”
[Jack has a brief encounter with one of the suspects in the murder investigation he's working on with Jamie, then he and Jonas return to the boat and wait for the "girls."]
“Fascinating,” Jonas said, after we’d retreated from the church and Dale Summerhays had given us a ride back to the marina. “Particularly all the animosity toward your ideas.”
“Well,” I said, as we walked along and looked at the lonely wintertime sailboats, rocking in the water, “there’s probably some kind of flaw in my presentation. The ideas are valid. I guess it’s just hard for people to give up their beliefs.”
“You know, it reminds me of . . .” He told me about a cancer researcher who’d been nearly laughed out of medicine twenty years ago because his ideas were considered ridiculous. Now there’s a whole branch of medical research and millions of dollars being spent to find a cure based on those same ridiculous ideas.
“That’s nice to hear, Jonas, but let’s talk about Jamie.”
“Yes, you’re right.” He stopped, leaned his arms against the railing. “So the spoon game means I should start by finding out what she loves, the way you did with that dog, Tina.”
“That’s right.”
“Then what?”
“Then show her you understand it and that you value how important it is to her. Did you know that she’s the first volunteer ME in Maine history allowed to perform an autopsy in an ongoing homicide investigation?”
He shook his head angrily. “But she could be doing so much more with her talent than messing around with corpses and criminals! I don’t understand why she wants to do that.”
“That’s just the problem. Homicide is Jamie’s spoon game. It’s what charges her up, makes her happy; it’s what she loves.”
He nodded, sighed, and said, “I see that. I see what you’re saying. A little less of what I want for her, and a little more of what she wants for herself.”
“Maybe a lot more, Jonas: you don’t heal deep wounds with half measures. As a physician you should know that.”
He gave me a look. “Am I being lectured to now by my daughter’s boyfriend?”
I gave him a grin and put my palms up in the air. “Hey, you were the one who asked for my help.”
He smiled, chagrined. “Yes, I did, didn’t I?”
“Just play the spoon game and see what happens.”
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