Canter Bridge

The English have a fine expression for dogs like Tucker and the people who resemble them. ‘He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer’ is never spoken at the top of one’s voice. Rather, it is muttered quietly to another who has had the opportunity to observe the subject, and therefore to agree.

Tucker, it is true, was never endowed with spectacular intellect. Still, he is not entirely useless with a trick. My wife has trained him to exercise excruciating humility as he lies his little mixed-Labby frame down before his food dish, awaiting with impenetrable zeal the word ‘OK’, whereupon he leaps to his feet and dives in as though he never imagined anyone had invented anything quite as luscious as this dog food that’s been served to him this morning, perhaps oblivious to the rudimentary fact that he’s been eating the same dry stuff all his life.

In such narrow acts of obeisance, he is almost fanatically capable. On occasion, we have forgotten that he’s still in the pantry lying prone before his dish, his tail sweeping back and forth like a metronome, tensed and energetic with anticipation. Lost in some kitchen detail, we realize minutes later that we’ve forgotten to say the magic bisyllable. Tucker will not have budged.

Yet his brains are not what one would consider agile. Though Tucker has mastered two or three tricks with Olympic dedication to form, he simply cannot get others through his head.

‘Paw’, for example. Most dogs in this world fortunate enough to befriend a human who will spend any time at all with them can learn to lift a paw and mimic the odd human behavior of shaking hands. It is the dog-school equivalent of learning one’s ABC’s. Only a special deficiency, name-able by medical practitioners, could impede a child’s mastery of this most basic talent.

Yet Tucker stares at us with an almost cosmic blankness as one repeats ‘Paw!’ one time and another and another, pumping his forearm like the pump on an old farm well. He simply doesn’t get it. No lights go on, no little cerebral doors swing on their hinges. There is simply nothing there in the moment that one looks deeply into those eyes and chokes back the words, ‘Tucker, what is wrong with you?’

This, perhaps, is why it is a good thing that we have learned to speak of ’emotional intelligence’. Tucker has it in spades, the very deep colors of his psychological prowess throwing into painful relief the washed-out whites of his intellectual poverty.

Take retrieving for example, a bred-in instinct so basic to his kind that it’s become the surname. ‘Retrievers retrieve’ is a tautology so obvious as to be amazing. Labrador legend would have it that you practically can’t train a Labby not to retrieve. Like breathing, it’s a function of the medulla, unrelated to matters of will, discipline, obedience, or instruction.

Tucker (how shall one put this delicately … ?) does not retrieve.

Yet the instinct of his race is not absent. Indeed, he employs the component skills of retrieval in a powerful, psychologically acute assault upon things left lying around and the people who leave them there.

A shoe, for example, poignantly rustic in the upside-down carelessness in which it lies unheeded at the margins of room. Unsought, unneeded, it remains in exquisite repose, awaiting the moment when its owner will be moved to shod himself and run out the door to catch the garbage truck, track down the mail carrier with the letter that must go out today, or—more prosaically—amble off to the YMCA for a whack at the treadmill.

At that precise moment, Tucker will leap into action, summon unforeseen agility to reach the intended shoe just head of a human hand, and acrobatically race with shoe in mouth to angles behind rocking chairs and around corners that one had not known to exist. It is a perverse caricature of retrieval, that ancient sport that links human and canine minds into one gracefully executed project. Tucker becomes a tormenting whirlwind of evasion, possessing the shoe at the precise moment when it moves in the human mind from ignored to desired.

There is in that misshapen, unpedigreed skull no lack of intelligence. It is simply bent to ends of psychological warfare rather than to the kinds of cooperative enterprises that become warm, fuzzy articles in the dog magazines.