by Kat Berger, 2010 all rights reserved.
When speaking with animal professionals they will each and every one of them quickly begin to tell you stories of their precious ones (both alive and passed) and the lessons they’ve learned from them. This is just such a story and although we’ve all read and heard many of these stories please take a moment to read this one as well.
Hercules came to me in the summer of my twenty-second year. I excitedly went to a local shelter ready to find a partner and friend. This would be my first dog. My family always had cats in the house while growing up. Hercules and I clicked the moment our eyes met. A shelter staff member mentioned “that dog doesn’t ever come out of his corner to greet people” and my decision was solidified. Hercules chose me to help him have a better life. We went home and things were wonderful for a couple weeks.
At the time I knew nothing of animal emotions, dog behavior or even of training. Hercules training progressed well in some ways and the two of us had clearly bonded but other issues began to creep up. Hercules clearly didn’t like some strangers. First he growled at a man on the street. No big deal in my mind, he could protect me. Then he got scared of the UPS guy walking up the driveway. Little issues creep in all over. Once when trying to clip Herc’s nails he got scared/hurt and bit my hand. Upon biting me, and my reactionary scream, he immediately ran to a corner urinated on himself and shook for thirty minutes while I tried to calm him down. Over the coming year his bond to me strengthened and his aggression to weird and unknown situations/people/things grew.
I finally went in search of a trainer to help solve Hercules’ problems. Trainer after trainer would tell me how Hercules needed more discipline and I was too soft on him. I wasn’t being the leader and so he was taking a dominant stance and in dogs that means aggression. I had to take control. Everything in my gut screamed that they were wrong that Hercules was scared but I had no where else to go. I would try a method they gave me once or twice but couldn’t follow through. I just didn’t have it in me to shock a living creature. I could feel/smell/see the pain in Hercules with each punitive correction. And it’s honestly seemed to be making him worse.
In the end I failed Hercules. I killed him by lethal injection on December 23, 1999 for the protection of other humans. I’ve learned much about the behavior and emotional needs of dogs since then and can say my training has helped save many dogs from the same fate but the trust Hercules had given to me and my failure to provide a good life for him will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Hercules is just one example of our failure as a culture to provide for animals’ needs. We use and abuse animals in so many ways from neglected dogs and cats to horrendous abuse in medical laboratories across the country. We use outdated and truncated research to explain their behavior. We claim they don’t have developed brains or emotions, as we human animals do, but then turn around and use them in research study to explain and understand human animal brains and emotions better. Our clear lack of a connection to the earth and it’s creatures as sent a disconnect in our entire society which only increases our own violence first to animals and as we now see to human animals as well.
Ethology teaches us that there must be a connectedness to all creatures on an evolutionary stage. We all agree that physical traits have developed slowly from one animal to the next. So if such things as the the spine, legs and arms have developed through evolutionary changes then why not the brain and internal states. Tinbergen claims just this that animal behavior is informed by internal states of instincts, drives, motivational impulses, and outward flowing nervous energy. Even if we continue to falsely assume that dogs behave almost solely based on a desire to continue to climb an imaginary hirarchy system through violence/aggression alone we still have given them an emotion of desire.
Cognitive Ethology continues today to explore and document how varied the evolutionary development of the brain is in all creatures. It strives to help us understand the emotional and internal states of the amazing creatures we share this earth with. I believe that until we allow all people to feel valid in knowing these states we have doomed our own species. Until my gut understanding of Hercules’ fear and pain is documented in a clear understanding of facial/body muscle movement and physiological states then we are doomed to fail again and again. Until we approach Hercules’ decendants with kindness and understanding of their internal states and gear our reactions to them with humane understanding and approaches that help to communicate between species then we are doomed to fail. In my part I hope to bridge the research of cognitive ethology to manageable bits that people can digest and use in their own lives. Giving them space to understand a new way of thinking about animals so that they can begin to heal their own heart while healing the animals they interact with as well.
