“Oscar!” “Caspian … Ajax … Hector?”
“Rover …”
“Clarence … Clarence … Clarence. …”
We were at the dinner table, and the conversation had degenerated into name-calling. With just over a week before the Puppy comes home, the children had abandoned debate and were simply pitching out prospective names.
“Doggie,” suggested the youngest.
“Doggie? Oh, that right!” I butted in. “I’ve been meaning to tell you all what the monks told me today.”
One of the teenagers groaned. “No way are we calling him Doggie.”
“No, no,” I said. “But the name Doggie has exactly the properties that apparently work best for dogs.”
The children looked at me doubtfully.
“According to the Monks of New Skete,” I explained, “Dogs respond best when they have names of two syllables and when the second syllable ends with a vowel sound. Like: An-ya. Or Sal-ly.”
“Or Dog-gie.”
“Not Doggie, that’s a terrible name.”
“OK, not Doggie, but the point is, apparently dogs don’t react as well to multisyllabic names as they do to simple, sing-song names. So we should choose a nice short, vowelly one.”
“Agamemnon,” said a wag.
“Just because it says so in that book doesn’t mean we have to do it,” one daughter pointed out.
She was right, of course. As neophyte owners of a soon-to-arrive young dog, we do not have to follow the advice of the Monks of New Skete. The monks, members of a Byzantine-Rite Franciscan community in upstate New York, have been raising and training German shepherds for some four decades. Among their books is a terrific primer called “The Art of Raising a Puppy,” of which I am now a disciple.
All my life I’ve seen people walking and playing with dogs (and, as faithful readers know, for fifteen years I’ve resisted getting one), but I am starting to see these relationships very differently. Before reading the book, if I saw a dog straining on his leash while his master yanked it back I might have thought, “Bad dog.” Now I’d now be tempted to think, “Bad owner.”
As the monks write with tenderness (but not sentimentality), puppies need kind, consistent, enlightened behavior from their humans if they are to grow into “good dogs.” They urge us to consider the animal’s point of view.
For instance, when a puppy comes to live with a family, he’s leaving behind his original pack to join a new one. It’s only fair to welcome him gently, without rowdiness, with compassion for his emotional confusion.
Moreover, when a dog joins a pack, he needs to know where he fits in the hierarchy. The monks have abundant wisdom about this, with observations that seem almost trivial from the human perspective but which matter immensely to the animal. For example, if a dog is resting in a doorway, should you step over him or nudge him out of the way with your foot?
The answer would seem to be: Let sleeping dogs lie. Yet it’s wrong: If you yield to a dog, you are telling him that his rest is more important than your convenience. What you offer in politeness, he will take as your submission to his alpha-dogginess. But of course you expect to be the alpha, the rest of the time. Asserting your primacy only erratically will confuse the animal and produce misbehavior.
Such monkish insights are becoming a regular part of conversation, as we count down the days to Christmas and greenhorn dogdom.
“You’re right, sweetheart,” I told the girl. “We don’t have to follow the advice of the Monks of New Skete. But we’re darned well going to.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
