Introductions

After Trixie, and everything else that had gone awry in my life, I was questioning if I could tolerate yet another failure. At the same time, I knew that I needed some sense of purpose if I was going to conquer the uphill mental struggle I was taking on. The desire to pull out of my depressive fog was burning inside of me, and this new task helped me to see that I had not given up altogether. There was still hope. With all of the time I had on my hands, I had survived with ideas to move forward. They were nothing too radical, but I had completed all of that remarkable education, and I had resolved to put my focus there. I was willing to give a new dog a try, but this time I would do it differently. I planned to stack the deck in my favor.

Fortunately for me, the field of psychology has an aspect that I had not yet found useful, but it was indeed present in the back of my memory bank that day at the shelter. It was a pleasant surprise to begin to access my knowledge in the field of conditioning and learning, as well as behaviorist techniques for training animals. During my undergraduate work, I remembered taking a course that detailed much of the work of B.F. Skinner, and of course, Pavlov (the psychologist that performed a lot of research with dogs). So I was already familiar with Skinner’s techniques teaching mice and pigeons to perform certain tasks based on positive reinforcement. 

I decided to put my schema to use while doing the dog search. When I embarked with my children to the animal shelter to look for our new pet, we stopped along the way to pick up some tasty dog treats. I was planning on using the treats to do a sort of test to see if our doggie of choice was “trainable.” I didn't plan to leave with any animal that I couldn't get to sit by using the positive reinforcement techniques I had learned in college. I also knew I didn’t want a puppy. I thought that a puppy would be too much of a challenge.

I realized I wanted a companion animal, one that was small enough to be a lap pet, so I had already convinced the kids to keep an eye out for a small dog. We all agreed that the animal shouldn’t be more than about twenty pounds. We also knew that we didn’t want a dog from a “pack” breed, one from the hound family like Trixie had been. That was the list of search criteria when we entered the shelter looking for our new pet companion: no puppies or pack animals, small when full grown, and trainable.

As we got out of the car and began walking towards the shelter doors, a nice man greeted us, “What type of animal are you looking for?”

“We want a small dog,” my son answered.

“We have a few small dogs here today,” the man continued. “The smaller dogs are kept over on the East side of the building in the back.” He led us towards the correct location inside the shelter, and opened the door to a corridor that had several small dogs secured inside their pens. The air felt clammy and cold and smelled like a campground lavatory. The clamor of nonstop barking and howling filled our ears, and when we looked around, all we could see were little dogs with tired eyes staring back at us with what looked like despair.

“I like this one,” my son was gesturing towards a smaller, matted up, silver-gray wreck of a dog, who looked like a tangled mess of fur. The dog was yipping and leaping around at the gate with glee upon meeting my son for the first time.

“That one came in last week,” our volunteer guide stated. “He’s a Miniature Schnauzer, but he’s not available yet. He was picked up as a stray, along with another dog. His owners may contact the shelter and retrieve him until the deadline, which is next Wednesday.”

My son looked heartbroken, and as we continued to search for a dog, he kept coming back again and again to the silver-gray Mini-Schnauzer. My daughter and I went around to all of the other dogs that were available, and were unsuccessful in locating an appropriate pet. The man seemed to take this into account, and brought over a magazine that showed a Mini-Schnauzer with a proper groom. While it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, the dog in the magazine looked sleek and handsome. Most importantly, when it was full grown, it would be small. As I skimmed the magazine article, I became more interested in trying to see if the little doggie would be intelligent. The article noted that the breed was a great family pet, bred to keep the rodents away, a quick learner, and intuitively wanted to please. I was intrigued.