Cris Mazza
Northwoods Nap
Classically Conditioned
Four in the afternoon is the hottest time of day, even in a place where one can escape the worst of the Midwest’s summer heat and humidity. In winter, four in the afternoon is dark. In June, it won’t be truly dark—dark enough to see the billions of stars and streaking comets freckling the sky—until ten. I cannot start evening fishing until seven, and even that is prompted from impatience, not twilight. I’ll be in bright sunshine for an hour. The four o’clock nap helps to defer me. Suspends me between whatever chores I’ve given myself to accomplish after the morning fish and before the evening fish.
Chores may include working on a new essay, revising one, or getting emails ready to send when I next visit the motel parking lot twelve miles away where I use the WiFi. Other tasks: Scrub the concrete basement floor with lemon or pine-scented solution where the last of the winter melt’s dampness still shadows the base of the walls and the foundation’s cracks. Go out to set the minnow trap or go back and harvest the minnows. I might paint a doorframe or hang laundry. Sandpaper a driftwood project—a fish likeness I plan to mount with a lure in its mouth—or restring a spinning reel for the real fish I pursue. Tend the woodland garden where the bee balm, sundrops, turtleheads, and mint I’ve planted have been joined by wild daises, buttercups, and goldenrod. Mow the “lawn” that’s mostly not grass, which I would leave to be a mini meadow of more daisies and hawkweed, but it’s mosquito and tick habitat, so a ring is kept clear around the cabin with the edge of the forest well defined. It’s there that I exercise my forest-fanatic dogs.
Why wouldn’t they want to root around in the woods? So a Frisbee on the mowed area keeps them happy and engaged and away from potential skunks or porcupines digging for termites in old logs, or fleeing deer leading the dogs too quickly into the forest, disappearing into Northwoods wilderness.
Still, if the dogs do go too far in, they’re not lost except to my eyes. No worries, unless my call isn’t met —after, at most, two beats of silence—with the crashing of their feet on layers of leaves and sticks as they sprint back to me. They have been habituated to respond to the word here by returning to me at a run. Potentially, a life-saving practice.
Initially, training them did involve teaching them to associate receiving a cookie when they came (back) to me. (Cookie = any treat, from dog biscuits to cheese to hotdogs to leftover steak.) But a response to the call, the drop-everything-and-go—especially when a dog’s got his nose full of the vast wild world—won’t be achieved with any dog without making an impression, early on, in controlled-environment training, using something that is capable of making that impression without my hands on the dog. Defense of (not apology for) the stimulation (not shock) collar starts with understanding the definitions of classical and operant conditioning (or training) and how they work together.
Classical conditioning (which is not usually called training) is an association formed between two stimuli, most commonly illustrated by Pavlov’s dog, conditioned to salivate when he heard the ring of a bell because he had heard the bell every time he was fed. The conditioned association can happen through a planned experiment like Pavlov’s or by accident. I don’t like the taste or smell of dried banana chips because I once threw up after eating them. These kinds of associations are also often the result of faulty logic: B followed A, therefore A caused B. (The ringing bell did not actually cause salivation.)
But classical conditioning is used in animal training: most often (or most successfully) with aquatic mammals. When they hear their “bell” (actually a click), their classically conditioned association that it means food causes them to feel the same pleasure as having gotten the food. Afterwards, they do get the food, but since they hear the click and feel this pleasure while doing the desired behavior, it’s the behavior itself that starts to trigger the pleasure.
It sounds so pure, so kindly cooperative. But what if an animal, a dog, is gaining pleasure from his nose, his taste buds, his chase reflex, so that any conditioned pleasure received from responding to a human call to return is lost in the blizzard of other naturally occurring endorphins?
Enter operant conditioning (which is called training), with its grossly misunderstood positive vs. negative and reinforcement vs. punishment. Basically, in a training context, positive means adding or presenting. Negative only means removing or taking away. Reinforcement applies to increasing a behavior. Punishment refers to decreasing a behavior.
Setting aside how immediately the positive (presenting) or negative (removing) has to happen, here are the possible combinations and how they’re supposed to work:
1. Something good can start or be presented, so behavior increases (positive reinforcement). Dog sits when commanded and gets a cookie.
2. Something bad can start or be presented, so behavior decreases (positive punishment). Dog barks and receives a spray of lemon juice, so resists barking.
3. Something good can end or be taken away, so behavior decreases (negative punishment). Puppy bites while playing so owner yells OUCH and stops playing; puppy learns not to bite.
4. Something bad can end, so desired behavior increases (negative reinforcement). Head harness (instead of neck collar) turns a dog’s head sideways if the dog pulls out away from trainer, so when dog walks without pulling, harness stops turning dog’s head. Dog learns to walk on lead without pulling.
Too frequently, most people—even some who train dogs— think the first two are the only training methods. Many misname the second one “negative reinforcement,” with both terms used incorrectly.
Once operant conditioning with positive reinforcement teaches a dog to come to a trainer on a particular command—pairing the word here with running to his person to get a cookie—the dog needs to learn that responding is not a choice. Ever see a dog let loose in a park, with his owner calling and screaming, but the dog never even turns to look? Collar-conditioning training with low-level stimulation (negative reinforcement) ends that. Similar to spaying and neutering or shots, the lesson is insurance to possibly save a life.
Once—not in the Northwoods at the cabin, but home in Illinois— Tommy and I were out in liquid predawn, past the property’s tree line on the edge of a soon-to-be-harvested tawny cornfield with a creek bordering its far side, not for the romance of the setting, which was stop-time tranquil, but because I needed Tommy to poop before leaving for a dog show, and he is an artist and politician with his shit: must be placed correctly and where his constituents might notice. Both the tranquility and poop finesse ended when three deer hidden in the cornstalks bolted for the creek and Tommy followed, all of them bounding, like porpoises breaking the surface of the water, until, in seconds, all four animals were out of my sight and the cornfield was, once again, silent.
Until I gave the call: Here!
First it was my heartbeat drumming, then his footsteps crunching, and I saw him a few times, momentarily appearing among the tops of the corn, until he was back beside me. Glowing from the classically conditioned pleasure of returning for his praise, but also from the joy of the chase.
Not just that chase but The Chase, the canine business, a feral part of him that may be domesticated but still detonates, his brain flooding with dopamine the closer he gets to the quarry. This is why the farther a dog gets into the chase, the more difficult it becomes to “call him off.” Which is why the recall has to be not a whim or an option but a serious transaction.
A more crucial save-your-life recall situation had occurred at the cabin several years earlier with previous dogs, Tommy not yet born. I had two Shetland sheepdogs, twenty-four and twenty-eight pounds, noisy and full of stupid confidence—or all three of us were. Despite the cabin compound having no fence, I stayed inside and let them out every morning, shutting the door after them to hinder mosquitoes. The Shelties’ desire to be fed was so strong that they would pee and return in sixty seconds. Usually, I watched through the door’s window, although they could easily go out of that range of vision. One morning, I couldn’t see them but heard their outburst of territorial barking. I jerked the door open and saw a wolf loping across the driveway and into the woods, head turned over his shoulder, appalled at the strident strangers in pursuit. It lasted no more than three seconds, and in that same span I gave the call. My memory image after that (with a palpable echo of the hot gush of not dopamine but adrenalin) is their cocky faces as they trotted back to me. And how I held them, muttering blasphemous curses, while they writhed to be free so they could eat.
Foundationally, it was the initial classical conditioning that formed an association between a stimulus (the word here) and immediately returning at a run. And isn’t this how we’re all always being trained, by life? To seek, to avoid, to achieve, and to learn how to stop discomfort. That doesn’t mean that some, or even many, accidental classical-conditioning life lessons don’t go awry. I won’t eat dried bananas.
So it is also the associations of stimuli that make a Northwoods nap in late afternoon soothing beyond mere sleep. The sheets retain a tint of DEET from my neck, arms, and shoulders, for me one of the smells of summer. The forest protects the cabin from direct sunlight, and a curtainless window is open above the bed. Breezes flutter or rattle leaves in maple and birch. The conifer needles hum, branches may creak. Birds twitter, call, mutter, sing, occasionally screech, or knock a rhythm against a dead tree. When all else is still, sometimes a loon keens from the nearest lake, three miles away. Or a sandhill crane gurgles, far overhead. During rain, the music is a faraway waterfall with the nearby patter of individual drops hitting the closest branches, then spattering below on the matted layer of last year’s leaves hosting this year’s ferns among moss-coated, rotting logs. Before and after the afternoon’s passing showers, sometimes in between, with the forest still breathing in the background, a bee or a wasp, even a common fly, drones up close, a zigzag buzz, then it’s quiet again.
One night, or pre-morning, lying beneath the open window, I woke to a chilling canine scream. The pitch, the abruptness instantly suggested coyote instead of wolf. Not native, coyote moved into the far northern forests after the old growth was decimated, around the turn of the nineteenth century, during a logging frenzy without foresight. The woods were transformed into a badlands of stumps, perfectly comfortable to the opportunistic, desert-dwelling coyote. Now, a century later, the forest restored (albeit never truly replaced), the coyote are at home in deep woods as well.
But even more likely, the sound was a fox, perhaps the cry called a vixen’s scream, although both genders are known to use it. The shriek lasted no more than five seconds. Whichever it was—even possibly a cougar?—the sleeping dogs beside my bed never stirred.
There are other sounds the dogs don’t notice, but I do. Gunshots. I try to imagine target practice, not poaching or thrill killing (coyote, considered vermin, are legal year round) or frustration. (A man I knew took a shot at some spawning steelhead he couldn’t get to take his bait. Thankfully, he missed.)
There’s a sound I used to think was the slow rev of a generator, one that fired automatically when needed (if there is such a thing), but only at a remote deer camp with no electricity, farther into the woods than my cabin. I now know it’s a male grouse drumming, a noise he makes with his wings on a hollow log. Starting slow then accelerating. More felt than heard. So adroitly cadenced. I must have been beguiled—actually, more like provoked—into assuming it was human-made. Until I discovered its natural source, a shy bird calling a mate, I had perceived the reverberation with dismay. It sounded too much like the thumping heartbeat of a stereo. The kind I couldn’t escape in the late ’80s, in my postwar slab house on the pre-gentrification east side of San Diego, assaulting me from across the street. A swaggering sixteen-year-old in orange parachute pants and untied sneakers marking his territory.
My apprehension when hearing the grouse: classical conditioning. Now that I know, I will begin to desensitize.
Not easy for us, but even less so for a dog. Rational explanations— learning the truth, understanding his own basic psychological responses—aren’t available. Even if abstract comprehension was possible, there’s sometimes not anything rational to explain. One of the most common fallacies about dogs, voiced by almost every well-meaning person who’s adopted a pet from a shelter, is that a dog who cowers, who displays submissive fear, has been abused. First, pet adopters like to believe they are rescuing an animal from a tortured life—just springing him from a concrete-floor cage with certain death in a week or month isn’t enough. But dogs can be genetically submissive, and the body language of cowering is instinctive. If you’re waving your arms or stomping your feet, it will appear as a dominant gesture, so she naturally displays submission. Even reaching over her head when offering a pat can stimulate a submissive response in a dog who was never struck by a human hand. Some dogs are born requiring socialization to human gestures, human noise, a complicated environment. A captured fox will probably cower too, so was it abused while living in the wild? You can’t just explain to it that there’s nothing to fear. In the absence of rational enlightenment as therapy, more crude methods, like flooding, often backfire. A dog is afraid of fireworks? Lock her in a chain-link kennel and put on a half-hour show twenty yards away—now she’ll be terrified of chain-link kennels and the backyard as well.
I might never stop the stress response when a stereo-booming car passes through my perception field, even on the farthest edges.
Last June, we were down for our late afternoon nap, hot and weary from chores and errands, which included a trip to a creek-side meadow, not yet in full growth, so the dogs could chase retriever bumpers in excess of fifty to seventy-five yards. (The forest- surrounded cabin compound only offers distances of twenty to twenty-five yards.) The bedroom simulated dusk while the sun, at four, was still only forty-five degrees from straight up midday and at this point probably still hotter than that. The dogs settled on the floor with sighs. I read for a few minutes, then turned off the bed lamp and rolled over. The forest was whispering, tittering, rustling, droning. Lulled, but not yet asleep, I felt a warm, gentle pressure on my ribcage. It was Tommy putting his chin on me. He only does this when he seeks direct interaction. A request. But for what? He does not sleep on beds, he knows that; and even in motels when he is invited to share the mattress, he leaves after only a few minutes.
“Lie down.” My voice flat, neither cajoling nor annoyed, not playful nor angry. He did as he was told. Again the drifting began. But again, the warm touch of his chin on my back. I couldn’t believe he needed to go out when we’d just come in, but I got up and took them both to the door, let them burst into the sunshine of the clearing. “Go hurry up,” I told them, their instruction to take care of business (a response created with classical conditioning), so the young female did so, and Tommy covered hers. Back into the bedroom, they both thudded to the floor then released the customary breath before resting. I stretched out on my stomach. A few quiet moments later, his chin again lighted on my shoulder. “What is it, boy?” I rolled over, put my hand on his ear. Immediately he hooked one paw over my wrist, his traditional gesture, either demonstrating shared affection or shared dominance. “Lie down, Tommy. Time to rest.”
He tried. But the routine was repeated. And I started to think I discerned a pattern. Each time, just before he’d touched me with his chin, there’d been one of the transient buzzings of a wasp or bee at the window screen.
Once again, I roused myself from the bed, but this time slid the window shut, then turned on a fan for white noise. An experiment. Which worked immediately. Tommy reclined (with his usual thud) beside the bed, and soon his breath slowed, and he slept.
We all did.
Had he been stung that day? He hadn’t swollen anywhere, wasn’t scratching or licking. But some dogs don’t react to a sting except when it first happens, and who says it was even a stinger? The deerfly, circling noisily, just bites, and it hurts. I once wiped one away from a dog’s face leaving a smear of blood between her eyes. Whatever Tommy had experienced, his classically conditioned response of stress when hearing this sound was all I would know. The next afternoon, just as sun-struck and drained as the day before, I led the dogs into the bedroom so we could revive ourselves for the evening hours of fishing. It would still be warm enough at 5:30 for them to come with me to a pond where they would swim before I put my line in. Their first leap into the water would not be tentative, despite not knowing anything about the slope of the bank, the location of subaquatic logs or rocks, or even what monsters might live in the water—none dangerous to them, but how would they know? They’d act the same in Florida where alligators are the sunken logs.
The window had been open all night while we’d slept, so I left it that way. Moments after we all settled, a bee buzzed at the window screen, and Tommy’s chin was on my back. I turned to face him, and in almost staged behavior, his eyes rolled upward to his left, toward the window. A gesture so clear I could put it in quotes as dialogue.
I closed the window, turned on the fan.