First Impressions of Faith

As the TDBCR site states, Once is a habit for a Border Collie. It's exactly one week today since Faith joined us, and I am already screwing up.

About 30 minutes after we left Food Lady's place, I allowed Faith to move up front with me, and I used my free hand to scritchel her while we drove. I've done this over the years with all of my dogs. Obviously, it's an intermittent sort of thing. Sometimes that pesky steering wheel actually needs two hands! Trevor has developed the habit of laying his head down near the gear shift, occasionally knocking it out of gear. Faith did the same, and then proceeded to paw me delicately to inform me that scritching time wasn't over, and would I please continue. Now. KThnx.

Faith is a source of wonder. Here is a dog who can't hear, but is - if anything - more responsive to hints and suggestion than Natasha was. By way of calibration, Natasha's abuse history gave her really compelling reason to read her humans attentively. For her first year with me, Natasha wouldn't voluntarily get more than six inches from my foot. Stop and think about what that requires: at any given moment your human may move in an arbitrary direction, and you never want to be caught off-guard. Try it with a friend and see if you can do it.

Even by that standard, Faith's ability to read human body language is amazing. This is, of course, the adaptive characteristic that makes herding dogs such good partners - perhaps more successful than any other breeds. Being deaf, Faith exhibits this quality in refined form. What's stunning is not that Faith tracks me so precisely. It's that she makes it look completely effortless. Even though she cannot hear.

Humans have relatively weak hearing, and we are surprisingly bad at integrating input from more than one sense at a time. We are visually oriented, and we naïvely expect that our pets work the same way. My house is a daily education in how wrong this is. Our blind cat (Snickers) has zero trouble finding laps to climb in to, but the deaf dog (Faith) is frequently oblivious to her surroundings. Go back and try that "follow your friend" exercise with a set of (unplugged) over-the-ear headphones on. You'll be surprised how big a role hearing plays in tracking your surroundings when the change is right in front of your eyes. And remember that you can still hear a lot of your surrounding with those headphones on!

To be brutally honest, I'm not sure that I'll live up to what Faith deserves. And that's probably a good thing, because I'm very challenge-driven, and I really want to be the person she deserves. I guess we'll see.

In one of her emails about Faith, Sheena noted that Faith didn't get on furniture. When Faith arrived at our house, she happily climbed on couches and beds. In our house that's not a problem, but given the initial statement I was surprised. When I stepped back to look at it, I realized that there were two cases:

• Faith will get on my bed without invitation, but this followed a pattern that established she was welcome. She won't get on any other bed in the house without invitation.
• In every case where Faith has gotten on a couch, some human has expressed permission with their body language. It might only be a dip of a shoulder in a leading direction, but it's clearly there. In short, Faith reads human body language better than most humans do.

In a lot of ways, working with Faith reminds me of working with Natasha: she forces me to re-examine everything I think I know as a handler, and to grow in the process. In Natasha's case it was submissive urination. In Faith's case it's how to communicate with hand signals. In each case, there is a need at every interaction to stop and think about how to communicate clearly with the dog in a way that is right for them, and to grow into the habit of new techniques as a handler. We'll have to see if I can do that consistently.

All in all, it feels a lot like it felt to be a professor. You can be one of the top five experts in the world in "your thing", but when you enter a classroom you suddenly have to present it in coherent and non-contradictory form. It's humbling, frustrating, and rewarding all at the same time.