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.

Beau had been the most social of puppies. When I took him for walks, he would stand up on his hind legs as we passed a dog in a yard, and whine as I dragged him away on two legs, like a sad circus clown. Unleashed, he could play for hours with another dog. Any dog would do. The game was always the same, a kind of tyrannosaurus rex fight in which the two dogs stood and crashed into each other, fell to earth, whirled around, and did it again. I loved to watch him do this. To me it was beautiful.

So it perplexed us when he began to show signs of turning anti-dog. Instead of rejoicing when he encountered other dogs on the sidewalk, Beau would emit this low, hostile grumble. Where once he had yipped and barked enthusiastically, he now regarded other dogs with a cruel, curled-lip sneer, like an evil Elvis.

His dominant streak was widening. The father's aggressive demeanor, just like his blue coat, was beginning to manifest in the son.

I was at a pet food warehouse store, the kind that let you take dogs on leashes through the aisles. Beau always loved going shopping at these places, and I think perhaps he thinks all stores are pet food stores, because those are the only ones he has been in. Occasionally he has committed a faux pas against this delicate system, lifting a leg to urinate on a bag of premium dog food. When he did this I glanced at the assistant store manage in alarm, as the yellow pool formed around the base of the bag. But she knew what I didn’t, that Beau was not the first dog to mark that spot. Indeed, he was merely adding his two cents worth to an ongoing conversation.

So I'm dragging Beau from aisle to aisle. As usual he's interested in everything that moves: goldfish, crickets, ferrets, the works. But around the corner comes an adorable white husky puppy. Beau greets him with a horrible snarl and strains to move forward and get him.

Stunned by the display, I make a joke of it to the puppy's owner: "That must be a really evil dog you have there."

She accommodated me by saying that, yes, it was an evil puppy and my dog was very discerning to see that.

 

But the problem ran deeper than one evil puppy. When we get a dog, usually as a puppy, aggressiveness and dominance are far from our minds. Sure, some dogs bite -- I mean really bite, not the hand-chomping thing Beau liked to do. Beau could never bite anything. He was innocent in his heart.

I remembered how he looked at me when I first met him. He was so meek, so grateful, so eager to have someone to love. And my plan was to raise him to be a spirit-dog, joyful, life-affirming and pacifist in all his inclinations.

As a puppy, your dog will nip you and you will laugh it off, or wince, and tell yourself he is just teething. Or it is a mistake -- his little sharp tooth just happen to catch the web between your thumb and index finger, and tear a painful gash in it. It was your fault, and you promise to be more careful in the future.

Lurking in the back of your mind is the awareness that you have taken something derived from a wild wolf into your home. How thin the membrane is between his amiable doggy nature and the feral side, you’re never quite sure. You’ve heard tales of dogs who could never overcome their lupine half, and bit people, or were forever getting into scrapes with other dogs, and had to be destroyed. But not your dog. Not after the way you raised and trained him.

A friend told me how a group of dogs, huskies and shepherds, that had lived together for ten years suddenly turned on the oldest female, whom they had honored and respected all that time, and killed her as a group. And afterward they were the same playful, goofy animals, chasing a rolled-up sock while their friend lay dead beside them.

Something happens in the dog/wolf brain that we just don’t get. It is incredibly upsetting when you see it starting to happen in a dog you thought was unalterably kind.

At six months, Beau's dominance began to kick in. He began putting his paws on the other dogs’ shoulders. Gently at first, like he was giving them a word of friendly advice. But then less gently, as the games wore on. Eventually he took to clutching the other dog and mounting her or him from behind. If the dog didn’t like that, teeth were bared and gnashed. As often as not, Beau would toss the other dog on its back and put its throat in his mouth, growling all the while.

All this would usually happen while the other dog’s owner and I would be chatting amiably about the local sports team or sewer assessment. Suddenly we would be aware that my dog was threatening his dog’s livelihood. It was embarrassing. I would leash Beau and ask him a series of ridiculous questions (“How are you going to have friends if you do that?”)

 

For several months Beau lived in an in-between zone, frolicsome and frisky one moment, violent and intimidating the next. In any social event, he could act any of a number of ways, or act one way and then switch in a moment to something ugly. He could do almost anything. He could bark insanely, growl, bare his teeth, or just intimidate the other dog with a killing stare. Or he could go into action, flipping them on their backs and fastening his teeth on their throats. He was the opposite of a bodhisattva: he was a bully, preying on puppies, weak males, and older dogs. He was driven not by soul but by the storm of hormones raging in his bulging testicles.

One day he attacked Britt, the queenly Doberman. It was as if all the training she had given him had blown away. It meant I could no longer trust him with even the least threatening dogs -- older females.

At my birthday picnic on the fourth of July, he tossed poor little Binks, the dog no one loves except the little girl who owns him, on his back and bit him, handing me a $105 vet bill as a birthday present.

He had excuses. His ears were bothering him that day. It was an exclusive party, and Binks showed up late and uninvited. And Binks had never been a favorite of Beau's.

But the biting was unacceptable, and it ruined my day, even before a yellowjacket in my margarita crawled onto my upper lip and sent me pronking about the picnic table in pain.

 

What was going on? I asked, daubing my lip and racking my brain trying to understand the dog.

When he acted up, I would scold him. I would choke him with a too-tight hold of his collar while I scolded him. I even whipped him across his butt with the leash when he would do these things, during the moment of flare-up.

But my actions only confused him. He would grin idiotically when I berated him, hoping I would revert to behavior he liked. To him, this was my behavior problem, or the other dogs' behavior -- but not his!

In short, he was beyond help. And my plan for raising him to be free and wild was failing.