Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

I canceled any plans I had to have Beau neutered, just as he began to give me reason to have him neutered.

Every time I have been confused about Beau, I have sought out Brigitte. She was grim, and a little paranoid, but she had experience with dogs that I could never begin to duplicate. 

Now I was at a very tricky crossroads with Beau, and I needed her advice. I called her, and she said she was packing things up for a big show, and she could not talk to me that day. But if I came by her place in another week, she would show me how she had dealt with issues of aggressiveness in the past. And not to worry: the problem was not unmanageable.

Relieved, I waited for her return. When I knew she was back, I drove out to her place, and rang the doorbell -- no answer. Something was wrong, I sensed. Peering through the blinds of the house, I saw that all the furniture was gone. She had moved!

When I drove by her daughter's house on the east side, the Poodle Arms where Beau had stayed when we went on vacation, that house was also vacant.

I looked at Beau, and Beau looked at me. We were orphans. From now on we would have to make our own way in the world.

I talked to people, and I read. It never registered on me that dogs do fight. The wildness in them is how they maintain their social order -- through emotional brutality. The pack stays strong when its members are on their toes, alert to the possibility of violence. Violence within the pack, like puppies rolling in mock combat, tunes the pack for violence outside the pack. Predictably, a few members are dishers-out of violence. They are endowed genetically with naturally dominant personalities. They are the leaders of the pack.

When Beau was with us for one day, and began humping our legs, he was not being sexual. He was asserting his ownership of us. It was an infantile expression of dominance. The ferocious face that his father presented when he met Beau, was now becoming Beau's face. There was nothing I could do to change that.

The dominant encounter can be expressed in terms of transactional analysis. A dog's identity is comprised of three parts -- Puppy, Dog, and Friend. Dominance is a chip placed for life on certain dogs' shoulders.

A mere show of ferocity -- snarling, teeth, growling -- sometimes resolves the discrepancy. The dominant dog will convince the less dominant dog to submit.

Or violence may be necessary. Violence occurs between dogs because they don’t know what else to do with one another. They know of no agenda except pack order. Their instincts override their training, and they scrap. Both dogs begin in Puppy mode, demanding attention. It makes a Puppy want to become known to another dog. It makes a dog run a hundred yards to meet another dog.

But when the two dogs are together, the Dog part of their personalities kicks in. Now they are parental and disapproving, desperate to establish and maintain order.

It is the Dog, not the Puppy, who fights. Puppies lose focus, but Dogs are terrific at maintaining focus. They quickly see they are intolerable to one another. Like two gunslingers whom no town can contain, there is only room for one top dog.

 

A big problem here is behavioral styles. Some dogs like to threaten to fight, or fight ritualistically, making a great to-do but not actually inflicting damage. Others like to actually fight. If you think you can tell which is which before the fur starts flying, you are wrong.

Fights don’t just erupt, but they develop very rapidly. I think it is a matter of guardedness. Take two dominant dogs and put them together. Each animal approaches the other with the possibility of peace. But it is a corrupt peace because both dogs are too dominant to provide the token of submission necessary to grease the peace. With no token offered, the guardedness of each dog increases. You can feel it increasing. Nothing is said, but if it were, it would be something like: Oh yeah? Well, Oh , yeah? Oh, yeah! Yeah!

The submissive dog will knuckle under immediately, and all will be well. A most awkward situation is when two submissive dogs get together. It is like watching Laurel and Hardy take ten minutes to enter a door. After you. No, I insist, after you. No no no, I am unworthy. To the contrary, it is I who am unworthy. You unworthy, why compared to you, I am .... It is like the trip to Abilene that no one wants to take, but everyone goes anyway.  But I thought you wanted to go.

A moderately dominant dog can be made more submissive simply by beating him in a good clean fight. But a supremely dominant dog like Beau won’t admit he is beaten. The idea of the other dog being better, even though he weighs three times as much and has spikes on his collar and gets his haircuts off the rack, is an unthinkable thought to him.

Then there is the question, if you could teach your dominant dog by force to bow down to others, would the others comply by not fighting? A few will. Some bullies simply need propitiating, and then they are meek as does. They have the will to lift their guard, provided the token is submitted. Then they are all pals.

But some won't. They attack and harm you anyway. These non-reciprocating dogs, just like nonreciprocating people, ruin it for everyone because they make it unwise to let down your guard. They make disarmament impossible.

 

The Unkindest Cut

The step most people take to curb dominance and fighting between males is neutering.

Neutering is a clinical procedure. First, the dog is placed under a mild general anesthesia. Then, using sterile technique, the surgeon makes an incision in the area just in front of the scrotum. Blood weeps immediately from this incision. The dog's testicles are removed through this incision, and the blood vessels that connected them to the dog are ligated (tied off). Then the surgeon sutures up the incision, using dissolvable sutures. Once the dog is fully awake and mobile, he is free to go home. Since the sutures are dissolvable, the dog doesn’t have to return to have them taken out.

What could be simpler? Indeed, what kind of owner would resist such a benign procedure? And everyone wants you to do it. "Neuter him," the world seems to be whispering to you at every turn. All the dog books tell you to do it. People who've had the procedure done on their dogs swear it's harmless and effective. People whose dogs your dog has attacked are especially in favor of it.

Neutering is necessary to prevent fighting and roaming in males. It helps reduce the chance of cancer of the testicles. Plus, it’s birth control – with all the millions of unwanted puppies in the world, why does your dog deserve the experience of procreation?

This is what they tell you.

Still, I had a dreadful time with the concept. I count six reasons.

One: Beauregard was a pedigreed dog. His value resided in his loins. His father was a breeder, a stud dog. He was a blue poodle, for pete’s sake. God gives you a freakish gift like that, and you snuff it out like a flaming birthday cake?

Two: Beau and I were both males. I knew in my squeamish bones that this was not a pleasant procedure. The very thought of a knife going in there and slitting the sac, snipping the connecting thread, and sewing the animal up again without his essential parts, caused me to seize up.

Three: I was responsible for Beau, like a parent is responsible for a child. Parents are not supposed to sexually mutilate their children, and I didn’t feel right doing it to Beau.

Four: Dogs are supposed to be man’s best friend – what kind of best friend castrates you?

Five: I had a problem with creating happiness with a knife. A bodhisattva dog should be able to overcome hormonal urgings and behave. I was a teenager once, I settled down eventually. Beau should be able to, too. Self-control is all that is needed.

Six: Is manageability a suitable excuse for mutilating an animal?

I suspected that everyone, dishing out this conventional wisdom about neutering, was simply wrong. Or that they were duped by the sinister crypto-veterinary establishment, which was running up huge bills for unnecessary surgeries. It reminded me of the stories that circulated about pot in the ‘60s – that you would end up in a madhouse and your children would have flippers.

If on the one hand you have all the forces of control urging that you clamp down on your dog's special purpose, there are also people to support your intuition that castration is a drastic step. I found an essay by Kevin Behan on neutering on the Internet that holds that dogs are out of control not because their testicles are throbbing with antisocial urgency, but because they are frustrated as a group by the disappearance of purpose from their lives.

That purpose, Behan maintains, is hunting. Find a happy dog and chances are that dog is doing his job of hunting in some way -- either as an actual hunter or via any of a dozen pack behaviors or hunting surrogacies -- fetching, chasing, herding, even guarding. In each case the dog engages in a kind of predatory behavior which is healthy -- the prey instinct channels sexual aggression into acceptable forms. Let me quote you a sample:

"When the prey instinct is given the time to work its subtle magic, a free flowing sociability is the rule with intact males as well even more than between females because testosterone supports a more open and malleable sexuality. Play sessions are a good illustration of this phenomenon. In one moment one dog assumes the predatory role and then in the next he acts like the prey thereby initiating a chase. The game progresses to the extent that its participants can readily switch from one "modality" to the other. The higher the game escalates, the greater the pleasure and the deeper the bond that is engendered.

Reproduction is not the primary reason for those testicles, Behan says. Their primary use is provide emotional power to fashion the pack into a disciplined fighting organization -- an army platoon -- so these relatively small creatures, working together, can run down and kill moose, bison, elk, musk ox and the like.

"While it may be difficult for the modern dog owner to reconcile his pet's "loving" disposition with the violent mandates of hunting, the connection is undeniable and the predatory heritage passed from the wolf to the dog made the later domestication possible. A strong hunting drive produces in dogs a pronounced sociability and this is then consummated via the sexual instincts, either through such obvious expressions as when dogs mount but more often through more subtle clues as when dogs give paw, roll over, lift their legs, rub their hips and shoulders against people, other dogs, or even against inanimate objects such as the ground, bushes, sofas, etc.[1]

I found this persuasive because it fit well with my yearning for a spirit-dog, a dog that radiated altruism and consciousness from its own soul or nature -- not because a veterinarian amputated all its unpleasant parts.

I am always beguiled by the "natural" approach to dog-raising -- but I am unusually unwilling or unable to put it into practice. Beau was a solo dog, a lone pet in a human family, cut off from his poodle pack. I wasn't about to adopt a bunch of other dogs on the off-chance Beau would not only not attack them, but somehow create a hunting practice in our urban neighborhood of Merriam Park, a place devoid of elk and musk ox but full of cats and little children.

Meanwhile Beau's testicles were reaching critical mass. His solitariness made him less a soldier in a platoon than a lone gunslinger. Something had to give.