Born to Bark

"[A] quirky blend of history, science, and personal experience by psychologist and trainer Stanley Coren...has a lot to teach us about dogs." --O: The Oprah Magazine

Auteur

Stanley Coren an international authority on sidedness, is professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Born to Bark: My Adventures with an Irrepressible and Unforgettable Dog (2010), among other books.

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"For Christmas the woman who would become my wife bought me a dog—a little terrier. The next year her Christmas gift to me was a shotgun. Most of the people in my family believe that those two gifts were not unrelated."

*So begins *Born to Bark, the charming new memoir by psychologist and beloved dog expert Stan Coren of his relationship with an irrepressible gray Cairn terrier named Flint. Stan immediately loved the pup for his friendly nature and indefatigable spirit, though his wife soon found the dog’s unpredictable exuberance difficult to deal with, to say the least.

Even though Flint drove Stan’s wife up the wall, he became the joy of Stan’s life. The key to unlocking this psychologist-author’s way of looking at dog behavior, Flint also became the inspiration behind Coren’s classic, The Intelligence of Dogs. Undeterred by Flint’s irrepressible behavior (and by the breeder’s warning that he might be untrainable), Coren set out to prove that his furry companion could pass muster with the best of them. He persevered in training the unruly dog and even ventured into the competitive circles of obedience trials in dog shows, where Flint eventually made canine history as the highest-scoring Cairn terrier in obedience competition up to that time. (Stan chose not to tell his wife that the highest-ranking obedience dog of that year, a border collie, earned a total score that was fifty times higher.)

The longest-running popular expert on human-dog bonding, Coren has enlivened his respected books and theories about dogs with accounts of his own experiences in training, living with, loving, and trying to understand them. A consummate storyteller, Coren now tells the wry, poignant, goofy, and good-hearted tale of his life with the dog who (in the words of his own book titles) taught him How to Speak Dog and How Dogs Think and whose antics made him ask Why Does My Dog Act That Way? Illustrated with Coren’s own delightful line drawings and photos, and interwoven with his heartfelt anecdotes of other beloved dogs from his earlier life, Born to Bark is an irresistible good dog/bad dog tale of this extraordinary, willful pooch and his profound impact on his master’s insights into canine behavior as a research psychologist and on his outlook on life as a whole.

Échantillon de lecture
CHAPTER 1
FIRST MEMORIES

For Christmas the woman who would become my wife bought me a dog—a little terrier. The next year her Christmas gift to me was a shotgun. Most of the people in my family believe that those two gifts were not unrelated.

The dog’s name was Flint. He was an oversized Cairn terrier, mostly gray with black pricked ears and a black mask. Weighing about 23 pounds and standing something over 13 inches at the shoulder, he looked for all the world like a jumbo version of Toto in the original film version of The Wizard of Oz. For thirteen years he was my dearly beloved companion, and for thirteen years he and my wife were at war with each other.

I was trained as a researcher and a psychologist; however, Flint was a key that unlocked for me a way of looking at canine behavior and human relationships with dogs. Some people consider me to be an expert on dog behavior and the bond that humans have with their dogs. If the opinion of those people is correct, then I must admit that my primary education came from growing up around dogs and watching and interacting with them. My university-level education came from my research and study of the scientific literature on how dogs think, but my postgraduate training was the result of living with Flint. It was Flint who taught me how to watch dogs and the reactions that they cause in the human world that they live in. He also introduced me to the world of “Dog People,” some of whom may be fanatical, loony, and misguided, but most of whom are empathetic, caring, and dedicated to their canine companions. Many of these Dog People became my friends and the source of much of the pleasure that I have experienced over the years.

My life’s activities are divided between two different environments. The first is the ordered and structured world of the university, scientific research, data, and research publications. It is a world populated with many staid, serious, and predictable people and equally predictable and structured situations. My other living space is the chaotic world of dogs, dog training, and dog competitions. This world is populated by dog owners, trainers, handlers, judges, and competitors, many with strange or unique ideas. It is also filled with dogs of every variety and temperament, some well trained, steady, and friendly, and others that have been allowed basically to run wild in their human habitat. The canine universe seems to be driven more by emotions than logic, so apparently random things may happen. As Flint soon taught me, often the best response to such unpredictable events is a sense of humor. Going back and forth between these two worlds is much like looking at a Hollywood feature film where the director is trying to give you a glimpse of the workings of the mind of a schizophrenic, alternating between ordered reality and delusional fantasy.

Flint became a part of both of those lives. He soon showed me that I had a lot more to learn about dogs and that there were some clear holes in my knowledge of how dogs think. However, there were even more holes in my understanding of the nature of the bond that humans have with dogs—or, as in my wife’s case, the bond we may not have with a particular dog.

Let me start by giving you a bit of history about myself before that canine whirlwind arrived on the scene. Dogs have been the signposts that have marked the various stages in my life’s journey. For as long as I can remember there was always a dog in my home. The first dog of my memory is a beagle named Skipper, but there was at least one dog earlier than that. I have seen photos of me rolling around on the ground with Rex, who was a husky-type dog, either a Malamute or a Siberian husky. If we can read anything from the few photos we had, I dearly loved that dog and, according to my mother, he adored me. One photograph provides some evidence of why our bond was so strong. In it I am sitting next to Rex and I am happily chewing on a dog biscuit. My mother claimed that in that photo Rex was looking at me with great love and affection, but it appears to me that he was looking at the dog treat and hoping that something edible was about to happen for him.

One day, when I was around eight or nine years of age, my mother and her sister, my Aunt Sylvia, were having coffee together and looking at some old family snapshots. As they sat chatting and laughing at the black-and-white images, the page turned to reveal that particular picture of Rex and me. Sylvia was appalled.

“Chesna, that is disgusting!” my aunt said, and immediately went into the lecturing mode that she used when she felt that she needed to instruct someone and bring them to her own moral and intellectual high ground, “Stanley is chewing on a dog biscuit. It’s unsanitary. It’s unhealthy! It’s nearly child abuse!”

“Sylvia, it’s just a dog biscuit,” my mother gently replied. “The first time I gave Stan a biscuit to give to Rex, he st…