Dog May Have No Manners, but Diploma Says Otherwise

Last week, our wharf rat with the soulful eyes who goes by the un-dachshund-like name of Coco received in the mail a certificate officially acknowledging her graduation from Dog Obedience Training. It was a miscarriage of educational justice on a level with heavyweight champion Mike Tyson being awarded a degree in philosophy or the University of Oklahoma graduating a member of its football team.

I never went to school with Coco--I have to draw the line somewhere --but even from the admittedly biased accounts of the 11-year-old kid in our household and his mother, who did go, Coco didn’t exactly cover herself with glory. And she blew the final exam badly.

All I know is what I see at home. Coco has, to my knowledge, never yet come when she was called. My wife insists that this behavior must be learned, and Coco is still too young for such expectations. My childhood recollection of a half-dozen dogs--none of whom ever came within a country mile of obedience school--is that they just naturally came when I called. Coco does, admittedly, walk better on a leash--which is to say we no longer drag her along the street. She plows along, nose in the gutter, a minor triumph of training.

Otherwise, I see absolutely no positive results of Coco’s formal education. She still sleeps in my wife’s flower pots in spite of repeated punishment when she is caught there. She still chews up anything she can get her mouth on, including paper, which she seems to find especially palatable. Last week, I finished one of these columns and put it on the kitchen counter. Apparently it blew off because the next time I came into the house, I found Coco eating it. She had gone through two of the three pages, masticating it into small pieces which took me an hour to gather and reassemble with Scotch tape. She apparently swallowed one whole paragraph on Page 2, and I suppose the one positive point to be made is that my prose didn’t give her indigestion.

If she has any long-term concept of the word no , she’s given no evidence. She’ll stop whatever mayhem she is committing momentarily, probably because of the force with which the word is delivered. Then she’ll go instantly back to it.

When I suggested these shortcomings to the 11-year-old kid after he proudly opened her “Obedience Training Certificate,” he pointed out in her defense that she got a score of 196. Sure enough, there it was, right on the certificate. “Coco has completed the Puppy Novice course in dog obedience training with a score of 196.” One-hundred ninety-six out of what? The 11-year-old kid insisted that it must be out of 200, but I suspect that it must be out of 1,000. Or perhaps 10,000.

At any rate, Coco’s identity has now been established by the 196 she proudly carries into a life of manuscript chewing and flower-pot sitting. She almost seems to sense that. “Don’t holler at me,” she says with the soulful eyes. “After all, I’m a 196.”

I always try to find something positive from every event in my life, and I’ve been mulling over Coco’s 196 to that end. And it occurred to me that throughout our formative years, we are graded on everything. Grades become an open sesame to all sorts of good things for kids, legal tender in an adult marketplace. A buck for an A at home. A special lunch with the teacher. Approbation and affirmation for good grades--and, conversely, irritation and sometimes even rejection for bad ones. Acceptance at a good college. Scholarships.

Kids take to all this in many different ways, depending on their individual security systems. Some kids play the game to the hilt, doing whatever they have to do to get the grades, a little contemptuous of the system. Some kids wrap up their identity in grades and are devastated if they don’t perform perfectly. Some kids stick their thumbs in the eye of the system--and turn out to be geniuses in one field or another. And most kids struggle to overachieve, building as much credit as they can.

Then we are suddenly dumped into a system where we aren’t graded anymore. Where all sorts of things school didn’t prepare us for--like office politics or personality clashes or competitors who choose to cheat and get away with it or wildly different levels of priorities and ambition--sometimes become more important than skill or dedication. In such a situation, the only consistent and clearly defined measure of success becomes money. Thus, the accumulation of money becomes our adult grade card, and we are increasingly fascinated with the Lee Iacoccas and Frank Lorenzos and multimillion-dollar athletes and movie stars in our midst. At that level, the amount of money becomes meaningless--except as a grade card--and we in the media help it along with the “Ten Highest Salaries in American Business” or “Honor Roll of Baseball’s Million-Dollar Players.”

But to those of us who either have no stomach, desire nor resources to play this game, Coco’s obedience training score offers an alternative. We can just give ourselves 196s--and get on with our lives.