If You Really Love Your Dog, You’ll Treat Him as One

Starbuck, an Old English sheep dog mix named after Burt Lancaster (which is another story), was nudging me with his moist black nose, trying to ingratiate himself so that I would take his sweet, ugly face in my hands and kiss it.

Believe me, I wanted to.

But I held back.

“For your own good,” I told him, “I’m not going to lay a finger on you.”

Sandra Ackerman, Starbuck’s owner, seemed to approve. We were sitting in the kitchen of her house in Capistrano Beach the other evening talking about our love of animals.

My restraint with Starbuck, one of Sandra’s three dogs, showed that I was beginning to understand what real love means.

“Dogs should be treated like dogs,” Sandra Ackerman says.

I’d come to see Sandra, a self-taught animal behaviorist who helped found the San Clemente Animal Shelter, because I thought I could learn something.

I did: It’s a dog’s life.

Here’s what I mean by that. Sure it’s OK for me to hug and kiss and whisper sweet nothings to the dog of my choosing, but what happens when I leave, huh?

Does the dog come to work with me? Sit next to me in restaurants? Share my popcorn at the movies?

No to all of the above. The fact is, I will love this dog and leave him, alone, with no one to poke his cold nose against. Then he will become lonely, morose, living for that moment when he hears my key turning in the door lock.

In short, who am I to make a dog’s life as neurotic as my own?

“If I hug and kiss him as much as I want to--and I want to--then he suffers terribly when I leave him,” says Sandra, effectively demonstrating the treat-’em-like-dogs approach by talking about Starbuck as if he weren’t there hanging on her every gesture, mindful of every change in the tone of her voice.

“He becomes emotionally dependent on me,” she says. “So if I keep hugging and kissing him all the time, then I would be indulging myself at his expense. If it were any other reason, I don’t think I’d be able to control myself.”

So you see that Sandra is no cruel-hearted despot when it comes to dogs. This is a woman, in fact, who has turned people away from the animal shelter after they have expressed one or more wrong reasons for wanting a dog.

Sandra does not believe in dogs being conscripted into guard duty, for example. She even admits to emancipating at least one.

“There was this one dog, a wonderful dog, who had been hit by a car,” she says. “We fixed him all up, he was such a good dog, and then we found out that they had him guarding some lumber company, tied up. . . . I got a call in the middle of the night, ‘Sandra, we have got to go and get the dog.’ I have no problem with that.”

But Sandra is willing to rescue humans, too. So long as those humans have dogs, that is. Local veterinarians and the San Clemente shelter have her card, which reads “Canine Hotline: No Charge,” propped up on their counters.

Sandra takes calls from people with dogs that gnaw on furniture or snap at children or forget that the canine bathroom is outside the house.

“I like to talk to a person who is desperate and who loves their dog,” she says. “That way they listen.”

Sandra knows about this. She was once there herself. It started with Shea, a tan shepherd mix whom Sandra brought home from the Laguna Beach animal shelter 11 years ago.

Shea was destroying the sofa. Sandra, untrained in dog psych at the time, responded in the tried-and-true manner of screaming like a maniac and whacking the dog with the palm of her hand.

“I hit her, but I didn’t think I hurt her,” Sandra says. “So my husband came home and I said to him, ‘Go in there and hurt her.’ I wanted him to hurt her. Of course, he just couldn’t do that. . . . We stopped fishing because my husband can’t kill the fish that are flopping in the sink.”

It was then that Sandra found a better way: obedience school and the mantra of positive reinforcement.

“When the dog does something wrong, what people do is they grab him and they tell him how bad he is,” she says. “In effect, what they are doing is rewarding the dog by touching the dog. The dog is getting the attention he wanted. Negative attention is attention, and dogs will get attention any way they can. . . . What people are doing is training their dog to pee in the house, or whatever it is he is doing.”

What Sandra suggests is rationing your attention and affection--”you can’t just give it away, they have to earn it”--or, in other words, treating a dog like a dog.

So this is where I came in. I thanked Sandra for dazzling me with the breadth of her knowledge and headed home, to my husband and daughter and two cats.

Yes, that’s right. We do not own a dog. And thank goodness for that.

I, for one, would never be able to control myself.