Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

Seriously one of the best books I've read in 2012. Ok, it's still January, but this one was fantastic from start to finish. I hit the jackpot when I picked this up at the library. Having been to the area of Wyoming where the author lives and writes about, it was captivating. The revealing way Kerasote writes about the connections with animals which are so personal and real, his thoughts on paper truly resonated with me and I could appreciate that. It was a very entertaining book in which I laughed dozens of times and also cried for the last two chapters. Truly heartbreaking and my husband thought I was having a breakdown.
Back to the beginning, I love how the author said that the dog picked him and that was that. I get that. I remember show more when I picked our rescue out of a line-up, I sensed this dog was going to be great. He looked pathetic at the shelter, but he has blossomed into the best dog for our family and our lives are so much richer with him, not to mention hairier and smellier. But, it's worth it. show less

Ted Kerasote and his friends found a dog on a river boating trip, and Ted, who'd been looking for the right new dog for a while, fell in love.

Merle was perhaps ten months old, a Labrador mix, perhaps born on an Indian reservation. Shy of people at first, he grew to trust Ted in the course of the river trip. He was wary of sticks, and wouldn't fetch. When Ted brought him home to Wyoming, both their lives change.

This is both a fascinating and a frustrating book. Ted and Merle have a wonderful, rich relationship, and most of us with much-loved dogs feel pretty confident we can interpret our dogs' side of our interactions, just as Ted does. We've experienced the joy of getting to know a new dog in our lives, and growing into a show more relationship.

But Merle was half-wild and had been surviving on his own for a while when Ted found him. He's got both survival skills and a committed habit of roaming his territory that a pup raised in a family would be far less likely to have. Full grown, he's seventy pounds. And Ted brings him home to Kelly, Wyoming, a tiny village inside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park, a village with little vehicular traffic and an established custom of free-roaming dogs.

Kerasote thinks that dogs who live inside full-time, walk on leashes, and are crate-trained only seem to be happy because they're suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. He goes on a long rant about how clicker training and positive reinforcement training reduce dogs to automata unable make their own decisions--and then, much later in the book, reveals that Karen Pryor, a major early proponent of clicker training, and a trainer of trainers in clicker training and positive reinforcement, is his favorite behaviorist.

He's got two examples from Merle's life that, in his mind, demonstrate the failure of positive reinforcement training and why punishment works better. One involves Merle chasing cattle, a behavior which he has to be cured of quickly, and Ted uses a choke collar and a long line to convince him it's a Really Bad Idea. (Why does Merle have to be cured of this quickly? Because he's a free-roaming dog, and ranchers and farmers shoot dogs who harass the livestock.)

The other instance is when Merle acquires the habit of making regular visits to a woman in the village who feeds him as much as he'll eat of extremely tasty foods, including meats prepared in extremely fatty ways. Attempts to talk to the woman about the harm to Merle's health that will result from the fact that the formerly lean and muscular dog is getting fat on this all-you-can-eat high-calorie diet are unproductive. So Ted finally resorts to using a shock collar to make visits to the woman's home seriously unpleasant.

What Ted misses in discussing both these incidents is that, far from showing that positive reinforcement doesn't work, these two problem behaviors were highly self-reinforcing. And while there are other things that could have been done about the woman feeding Merle excessively, the cattle-chasing had to end immediately, or Merle would have been killed.

Another amusing feature is that these appear to have been the only two occasions when he used anything that could be called punishment or correction on Merle, while he and Merle used positive reinforcement on each other for pretty much everything else. His admiration for Karen Pryor is more in accord with his real behavior than his contempt for all those other positive trainers.

That doesn't stop him from scolding about the misguided fools who look at misbehaving dogs and recommend exercise, mental stimulation, and crate training for them because they are bored and under-exercised. He says there's something perfectly natural going on; that dogs are supposed to roam freely, live like dogs, and make decisions!

He's right. There is something perfectly natural going on. And it's that dogs need exercise and mental stimulation, and if they don't get it, the excess energy and the mental boredom lead them to find something, anything, to do, and perfectly natural dog behavior, such as a love of chewing things, becomes destructive.

And we don't all have seventy-pound dogs with wilderness survival skills, and live in a tiny village in Yellowstone National Park. Putting in a dog door and letting them roam isn't a viable solution for everyone, or every dog.

But regular walks, visits to the dog park, involvement in dog activities, and provision of appropriate chew toys and food dispensing toys that let dogs use their brains to work out how to get their food provide the physical, mental, and social stimulation dogs need--the things Merle got by free roaming in a community where that was both safe and accepted. Correctly done, crate training makes the crate the dog's own space, a comfortable and secure space the dog can use when he needs a break from people and their antics. It also reduces a bit the inevitable stress when a dog has to be left at the vet's, if crating is already a known experience with some positive associations.

For all those criticisms, though, this is a fascinating and moving story of a man and a dog who were truly soul mates. It's a beautiful relationship and a wonderful story. You'll love Merle, and Ted's relationship with him. Interwoven with that story is the research on dogs that Ted read and absorbed, while working to deepen his understanding and appreciation of a remarkable dog.

Recommended.

I borrowed this book from the library. show less

Dogs, love and grief - This is a long book. I know that sounds like a simpleton opening, but somewhere slightly past the middle of this tome, I started finding some of the corroborating scientific information about the relationships between men and other mammals just a bit "teedjus," ya know? I mean I bought the book because I love a good dog book, so I wasn't terribly interesting in learning about horses and chimps along the way. That said though, Kerasote has written an extremly thoughtful book about men and dogs, and why they love each other - or don't. There are several places in the book where Kerasote protests a bit too much, methinks, that he does NOT anthropomorphize Merle, or the other dogs in this book, then rationalizes like show more hell, using esoteric bits of scientific trivia to "prove" he doesn't. But hell, he does. He knows it, and so do we. And we don't care. Because this is just a great love story that any dog-lover cannot help but enjoy. I have a neighbor who has, over the years, owned three retired greyhounds. When he lost the second one, who died very suddenly of a twisted gut, I felt badly for Jim. But he acknowledged quietly the age-old problem that comes with loving a dog. He told me sadly, "Dogs. No matter how much you love 'em, it always ends in grief." And that is certainly how MERLE'S DOOR ends. Oh, I know that Kerasote tried to dress it up a bit with that last (anthropomorphic) line from Merle's spirit: "I dance! I DANCE!" But my God, that last chapter was just gut-wrenching, and it brought back all the tearful times of losing dogs of my own over the years. Yes, I cried. And because of that beautiful last chapter, Ted, I forgive you for all that pseudo-scholarly "teedjusness" in the middle of the book. That final chapter clinched the 5-star rating. Thanks for sharing your story. I know, of course, there'll never be another Merle, but I hope you've found - or will soon find - another golden pal. show less

OK, I loved the book and don't have much to add to the other reviews here on LT. I do feel jealous that I am not independently employed in a way that would allow me to live in a semi-wilderness neighborhood where a dog running free with no collar is accepted. I would like to let my dogs have more space to be just dogs but I live in a suburban area with way too many cars and people who hate dogs. So they are leashed, neutered, kept in a fenced area, and sushed when they bark. But they also get regular food, lots of love, and good times. I appreciated this book because it reeked of love of this one wonderful dog, and it provided me some information about dog research I had not previously seen. I recommend it to all dog lovers, but warn it show more has a normal ending for a good dog book - and the reader will probably cry buckets. show less

I've been reading more nonfiction lately - mostly business related titles for work. However, I have also been reading a fair number of dog books - Marley & Me and Colter: the true story of the best dog I ever had - recently. I should know better - both of those books had me crying at the end. Merle's Door was no different. However, I wouldn't have passed this book up for the world. Ted Kerasote is a fantastic writer - he paints such vivid descriptions with his words that I could see Merle skiing down the mountain. The book begins with Ted and his friends on a kayaking/rafting trip down the San Juan River encountering a beautiful, red dog. The dog, Merle, joins their river trip and his life with Ted begins. The relationship and show more connection between Ted and Merle goes beyond what most people think of when they have a pet. Ted and Merle can almost read each other's minds, if Ted's descriptions can be believed (and I think they can). Ted includes research on the behavior of dogs, their evolution, and other interesting dog information - but all in a very readable way that enhances the narrative. At the end, Merle passes on - but his spirit will live on through this fabulous book. show less

I'm of two minds about this book. Bad things first, I'm afraid Ted Kerasote is a little too involved in his macho ideal of the wonders of testosterone to do justice to the topic of the need for spaying and neutering of pets. He believes dogs should be able to exist in as much of their original "dogginess" as possible, which means leaving them intact. He morns the beautiful puppies Merle could have made with his Vizsla
companion knowing there would have been no problem finding homes for the offspring. At the same time he admits that Merle has "fallen in love" with the wrong type of dog, and being rather glad that they couldn't produce puppies he says if Merle had been intact he would have just hoped he got over his misguided love. Merle's show more a dog. He would have got over his love until the next time the inappropriate dog came into heat, then his fertile attentions would resume, and those puppies, and the many hundreds others a free roaming dog could produce would not have been so easy to place. Spaying and neutering, in the long run, is the healthiest way for both dogs and the humans they live with. Secondly, Kerasote expounds on the wonders of letting his dog run free while he mentions in passing the dog attacks and unnecessary deaths Merle and his companions have had to suffer from the practice.

Now the good parts. Kerasote gives a very good alternative to the Cesar Milan idea of the necessity of a dog owner's always asserting him/her self as the alpha. He says that wolves in the wild are shown to live in a more egalitarian system that is healthier for all, and I think most intuitive dog owners would agree. We should strive for a mutually beneficial partnership with our animals rather than a dictatorship. Kerasote also mentions much research on animal nature, the nature and care of disease, and gives wonderful descriptions of time spent with his dog and they joy of the outdoors. He also has two of the most effective deaths, either of dog or human, that I have read. show less

I didn't think I would particularly care for this book, but, of course, I loved it - it's lovingly written about a dog, after all. The author is a bit holier-than-thou, but he has a valid point about how we treat our dogs in the 21st century west. And he quoted this, which was one of those lovely moments that books can give you:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

~ Mary Oliver, Wild Geese