Rudhraigh

Dogs are funny creatures. I don’t know how we managed to do it, but we managed to make animals that are both more and less intelligent than we are.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Freya is a fucking idiot. She spends hours staring with growing curiosity at her reflection in a glass door. She wants nothing more out of life than food and for me to throw a stick. She barks endlessly, whines constantly, runs around like a fucking moron and shits herself whenever she pleases. In short, she’s basically a toddler with fur.

Freya FTW from Rudhraigh McGrath on Vimeo.

But on the flip side, I’m pretty sure that with all my vaunted intelligence and ability to conceptualise and execute plans and schemes, I will never, ever be as happy as that dog is when I throw a stick for her and she fetches it for me. Every time I do it, it is the me equivalent of watching the Matrix for the first time when I was 16. Every time I even LOOK at something that I might throw for her is basically like as if I pressed a big red button on the back of her head marked “OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG”.

So, the Dog training was fucking difficult. Because Freya didn’t care about food. Food was literally just something that gave her energy for the chase. Trying to train her by rewarding her with food was like trying to distract an alcoholic with gambling. It wasn’t really going very far. So instead, I focused on trying to train her to fetch a stick, bring it back and give it to me.

And you know what? It took ten fucking minutes. And now she fetches the stick. And brings it back. And it is AWESOME.

On top of that, I started making her sit before I threw the stick. And now she sits. Whenever I tell her to. Which is also AWESOME.

On top of that, I started whistling when she came back from fetching the stick. So now she comes when you whistle. Which is the MOST AWESOME.

So, in short, Dog training taught me a lot about making sure you’re using the correct bait when trying to catch something. It taught me a lot about psychology and how you can change and modify behaviour by rewarding the impulse behind it. Like Mr Miyagi and Danial-san It gave me a glimpse into what you can achieve when you have enthusiastic students who are willing to do boring and repetitive tasks to create muscle memory. I reckon that when I have kids, it will definitely come in handy.

When I want to train them to fetch sticks. Or come when whistled at.

So, the first week of training has been somewhat temultuous. The problem is pretty simple, the book I bought somewhat predicates the idea of the dog actually being interested in being rewarded through the medium of food. Unfortunately, Freya seems to have a very simple concept of the universe and it goes something like this: Throw the stick – all is AWESOME. No throw the stick – WHINE. As such, sitting her down to try to incrementally reward her for correct behaviour is actually a pain in the ass because as much as she will eat the food you give her, she spends all her time whining and freaking out and trying to grab every single thing she could possibly put in her mouth and run away with. It’s a pity, cause it frustrates the fuck out of me to have to deal with her lack of ability to fit into the very specific scenarios the book is providing. As such, my enthusiasm has waned somewhat, and she got away with little or no training for the last few days.

This is also affected by the fact that currently we have a truly awesome amount of snow, like more than I’ve ever seen in Ireland and as such, I reckon it might be nice to just let her frolick in it for a few days with the world being awesomely full of nothing but thrown sticks.

As an aside, I noticed this morning that there’s a really funny section in this book. Basically, dog training consists of rewarding correct behaviour, you say sit, and when she sits you give her a treat.

In the book, there’s a small section that refers to maintaining your level of motivation to train the dog where it basically states that you should reward yourself as the dog reaches certain levels of capability. That you should train yourself to train the dog. So if you get the dog to reach the 4th level of “Sit”, then you should eat a Mars Bar. The 3rd level of “Fetch”? Surf a new website! So basically you can apply the principles of Dog Training to humans and I think that’s awesome! As such, I’m considering a project after this one where I train myself to enjoy things I hate by rewarding myself with a predetermined spreadsheet of yummy treats that I enjoy. How cool would it be if I could FINALLY learn to fetch things? Or sit and roll over on command!

I would be the COOLEST kid on the block!

The other day I sat in my library for a few hours and began to look through the massive stack of “How To” books that litter the shelves, each volume spending it’s life sitting in quiet hope for the day where we, the McGrath family, might possibly need to know how to Go Fishing, Start a Herb Garden or Survive a Zombie Attack. On lazy Sundays, I like to sit in the library and flick through these kinds of books considering them slowly, like I was looking reading a book in a language I didn’t understand, trying to understand the slow, gradual pace of the learning that books espouse. Knowing that the information in them are almost certainly totally out of date and feeling vaguely uneasy about the lack of comments and discussion from total strangers on the truth or fiction of the method in the article. I find it hard to really believe in anything that hasn’t even gotten enough attention to motivate at least one obviously idiotic moron into his giving his plainly flawed point of view.

The truth is that due to my daily life of nebulously empty internettery and addiction to digitally instant gratification, I’m kind of retarded when it comes to anything that requires patience or flexible attention. I think I have, over the years, lost the ability to really learn a skill from a book, if I ever really had it at all. I’m too addicted to having a feeling for the truth or falsity of a method through examination of the ensuing discussion, I don’t like to feel like I’m wasting my time. And this is true, even though I am completely aware of the fact that you almost never get genuinely useful discussion on the internet as it’s still true that the majority of people who comment are idiots with nothing better to do and the majority of clever people think their time is too important to be spent educating dimwits. The truth is, I think both are as stupid as each other, just in different ways.

I don’t think I’m alone in this, in fact one of the most obvious and vocal obsessions of the internet age is the intelligentsia’s hatred of their own inability to withstand the lure of the internet’s superficially conversational approach to human-relevant information. We’re all worried that because we have instant access to a seemingly endless glut of instantly available information that we don’t need to remember anything, that because the internet exists our minds will only ever learn to ask single questions instead of having a structure of complete understanding. The real worry is that the internet has retarded our ability to learn, because the slow and continuous training of your memory goes hand in hand with the effective use of the information it stores.

So, that aside, I’m going to have problems understanding how to learn to teach a dog how to learn from a book, because I may or may not have problems learning what it is I have to teach, even before I learn if I can actually learn from a book. And if you can learn what I mean from that statement, you use the internet too much. But I decided that since I learn almost everything these days from online tutorials and the like, that if I’m going to train this dog, I might as well train myself while I’m at it.

So I went to my favourite bookshop and looked around the sections I haven’t even visited since buying my textbooks for my Undergraduate degree and found myself a book that seems to be the real deal. I read half of it today and it seems to be pretty straightforward. It’s called “Train Your Dog Like a Pro” and is by a lady called Jean Donaldson. The process she espouses works on the idea of positive reinforcement, gradually helping the dog understand exactly what you want when you tell it to sit or stay or whatever. It’s actually pretty fascinating to read about why it is that dogs have problems understanding me, even when I speak very slowly and beat them with a pillowcase full of batteries.*

I have to say I’m enjoying the process, and tomorrow I’m starting at the very beginning, Freya’s learning to sit.

*Fluffy batteries of love obviously. Anything else would be cruel.

My father is a dog person. He always has been. He tolerates cats because cats are like ex-girlfriends you’re still good friends with, you know that there’s may be real esteem between you, a real mutual respect and admiration but you also know that you can never depend on their love. So, last Christmas, my brother, sister and I made the trek down to Cork to a guy who bred pedigree, show winning Alsatians, to finally get my dad a dog to replace the one who defined my childhood, his Canine Compadre, Loopa.

Now this breeder had given us directions to his place and it took us about two and a half hours to make the drive from Wicklow. These directions were so vague as to be a pretty fair attempt at poetry. We finally made it to this guy’s house after hours of searching around an area that seemed to have some highly localised breach in the space time continuum that meant that time seemed to slow down to the point where a single simple conversation with a local about directions seemed to take five hours. It was a nice place, unremarkable in that kind of house in the deep Irish farmland kind of way, but what it did have was dogs. And not just regular dogs. SUPERDOGS.

Yes, his dogs were insanely awesome. The mother of the puppy we were buying was literally the most insanely awesome dog I’ve ever seen. He would only have to say one small word in German* and the dog would pull out a deck of cards and do tricks beyond belief while mixing you a mindblowing Martini and barking the tune to Yankee Doodle Dandee. He’d say another and suddenly the dog would produce an origami caricature sculpture of you, emphasizing the ludicrous expression of awe on your face with a skillfull fold across the flawlessly executed face. One last short German phrase and suddenly the Dog had disappeared under a cardboard box and run an assault course that was set up to mimic the E to F connecting bridge, complete with guards, a la Metal Gear Solid 2. That dog was super, super clever and we were buying it’s awesome offspring. And this made the 6 year old in me do the happy dance.

As he ordered the superdog around I had visions of my father training the dog to sniff out crime, to learn to tango, to wield a flaming sword. I saw him walking down the street and people making way for them, young couples bringing their babies forward to be licked, old women making the sign of the cross, falling onto their knees and breaking into tears at the sight of them.

Sadly however, this assumption was not entirely accurate to the resulting reality.

Instead of my dad’s dog being able to walk tightropes and smell the lies of the unjust, a year later, the dog was a fucking asshole. Like, a complete dickwad of dickitude.

She was called Freya after a Norse Goddess of plenty and sadly, the only plenty she seemed to provide was in terms of anarchy. She ran around like a suicide bomber, smashing into people’s legs, never doing what she was told, eternally barking and whining and demanding attention like a complete asshole. She was basically me when was about the same age. My dad hadn’t even reliably trained her to come when she was called. So, needs must required that someone step up and get involved.

As such, since I have recently found that as I have some time before I’m off to NYC, I am taking it upon myself to walk her every day, and train her for about an hour. By the end of this process, I hope to have her able to come when she’s called and sit when she’s told to. It should prove amusing. Or at the very least incredibly frustrating. Either one will be fine.

*Apparently even dogs are more likely to follow orders if they’re shouted in German.