Roxane Gay & Everand Originals Presents: Good Girl: Notes on Dog Rescue

By Elaine Castillo and Roxane Gay

The fourth installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. Award-winning novelist and essayist Elaine Castillo details her life spent rescuing and training dogs, a story that reveals just as much about modern society and culture as it does our relationship with humankind’s first domesticated animal.

Like many of us, Elaine Castillo wasn’t a dog person — until she was. Her conversion came in the form of a flea-bitten, nine-year-old German shepherd with missing teeth and an intense gaze. Xena cracked open Castillo’s heart and ushered her into a new world of mutual love and trust, and eventual heartbreak.

Good Girl tells the story of Castillo’s decision to adopt an older dog and of the two precious, life-altering years they spent together. More than the standard life-with-my-dog memoir, it also turns a lens on the long, often fraught relationship humans have had with these animals, dating back to when we first welcomed them to share our fires and food. (Women, she notes, were likely the first to bring dogs into the fold, making them woman’s best friend.) “To trace human history is to trace the history of dogs because, of course, we invented them,” Castillo writes. Good Girl examines and complicates what this invention has meant for both dogs and people.

Throughout her essay, Castillo grapples with two of the thorniest issues surrounding dog “ownership” (itself a loaded word): buying versus adopting, and training techniques. What types of dog people choose, where they get them, and how they treat them aren’t just personal decisions — they’re societal barometers. In poorer communities — such as the rural areas that produce the most rescues — dogs are often kept for protection; they are a byproduct of racialized poverty and vulnerability.

Some dog breeds, including Castillo’s beloved German shepherds, are inextricably linked to violence and the oppression of marginalized people. German shepherds are also the breed most associated with harsh training methods and the false yet stubbornly resilient alpha-wolf theory that says dogs respond best to dominant (i.e. male) humans. As she points out, the long-standing “teach your dog who’s boss” mode of training is toxic masculinity in microcosm and toxic for the dogs themselves.

Castillo uses her own experiences with Xena as well as other dogs she’s adopted or fostered to explore the many ways dogs come into our lives, and how we create space in our lives and our hearts for them. In doing so, she reminds us that dogs are a mirror. They are who they are because of who we are. What if we were better stewards, she writes, “models of gentleness, of play, of responsibility, of care, protection, and mercy. Models of giving away power, of comforting the ailing and injured, of not having to win all the time, of showing tenderness to the vulnerable, of providing for others first. What kind of dog training might that produce? What kind of families, for that matter?”

We’re several thousand years too late not to have a complex emotional life with dogs, Castillo argues. Let’s challenge ourselves to do better for the dogs we share our lives with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Apr 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094456423

Elaine Castillo

Elaine Castillo, named one of “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People” by the Financial Times, was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for several prizes, including the ELLE Big Book Award, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library. Her latest book is the highly acclaimed How to Read Now, an exploration and manifesto on the politics of reading.

Book preview

Good Girl

Notes on Dog Rescue

By Elaine Castillo

EVERAND ORIGINALS

Copyright © 2024 by Elaine Castillo

Published by Everand Originals, an imprint of Scribd, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Cover concept by Catherine Casillo

Cover design by Tifa Kerbal

ISBN: 9781094456423

First ebook edition: April 2024

Scribd, Inc.

San Francisco, California

Everand.com

For more, visit www.everand.com and follow @everand_us on Instagram and TikTok.

Au commencement, Dieu créa l’homme — mais voyant sa faiblesse, Il lui donna le chien.

Anonyme

In the beginning, God created man — but seeing his weakness, He gave him the dog.

Anonymous

Introduction

By Roxane Gay

I am not a dog person. My family did not have pets when I was growing up, so I never got into the rhythm of having a furry creature around. And then there was the time when I was five years old or so and Targa, the German Shepherd that belonged to the family who lived behind us, bit me on the ass. I didn’t require stitches or anything, but the experience left a mark. From that moment on, I nurtured a healthy fear of dogs, big and small. I wanted nothing to do with them, their barking, their panting devotion, having to pick up their poo, or having my face licked. And then I met my wife, Debbie, who is an ardent animal lover. Like many people during the pandemic, we got a puppy, Maximus Toretto Blueberry Millman Gay. He is now a three-year-old Maltipoo who allows us to attend to his every want, whim, and need. I find myself taking dozens of pictures of him every day. I am obsessed with his eating habits. I love dressing him in cute shirts and sweaters, every day. I am not a dog person but, I suppose also, I am.

Elaine Castillo, the author of this essay, also wasn’t a dog person, and then, in her midthirties, she was. She is the author of the novel America Is Not the Heart, a generational saga about a displaced Filipino family, and the essay collection How to Read Now, which tackles the politics of reading in the present day. Her writing has also appeared in The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, and elsewhere. She is an incisive cultural critic whose intellectual work is deeply researched and brilliantly written, as evidenced by this essay and all of her writing.

In Good Girl: Notes on Dog Rescue, Elaine chronicles how she met what she terms her soul dog, Xena, a German Shepherd rescue she and her partner welcomed into their home. This essay is, in part, a fascinating cultural history of German Shepherds, how the breed is (mis)understood, and modes of dog training and what they reflect about how we think of power and dominion over other living creatures. It is also a beautiful, personal narrative about becoming a dog person when you least expect it. Castillo writes with her characteristic rigor about what it means to help rescue dogs find their way back to emotional and physical wellness.

This is one of those essays where the author’s curiosity introduces you to subjects you didn’t yet know you wanted to learn about. Good Girl: Notes on Dog Rescue expanded my understanding of what it means to share your life with a dog and what it means to do it the right way. Whether you are a dog person or not, you will love the journey.

I FELL IN LOVE WITH HER AT FIRST SIGHT. A handful of pictures on a website. Not my type, not my partner’s type. First to love: her soft, sharp face. Then: her long dark torso, black and tan and shaggy. Her right ear, partially flea-bitten. Her missing front incisors, extracted due to rot, only the yellowed-out worn-down canines and molars left. Her elegant, black lips closed around a pig ear. Her steely, focused gaze in one photo, which I would later know to be her squirrel-detecting, soon to be squirrel-chasing, gaze. The only thing I didn’t fall in love with was her name, which we changed in the first week to something that felt more fitting, both for her and for an old war-weary bisexual such as myself, a name she took to immediately and always came running for — her recall was ironclad, squirrel-excepting. Xena, as in warrior princess. She took my family name, too, so: Xena Castillo.

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IT SEEMS AS THOUGH EVERY year, an essay comes out in the ever-capacious field of popular science, trying once again to convince Western society, at large, that alpha-dominance power dynamics, usually purported to be based on wolf pack structures, is a misconception. A misconception debunked, first and foremost, by the biologists and animal behaviorists who mistakenly put forth the theory of wolf pack order in the first place: like biologist David Mech, whose 1970 publication The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species became — to the dismay of Mech himself, who repeatedly disavowed the book in later years — an urtext for all the would-be alphas of the world, eager to find in nature the logic of domination they always seem more than happy to nurture.

But if you listen to dog trainers and behaviorists, specifically trainers and behaviorists who support the use of what is known as positive reinforcement training — also referred to as reward-based training, force-free training, and LIMA (least intrusive, minimally aversive) training — you’ll find a cohort that has, for many years now, understood very well the scientific fallacy of the alpha-dominance theory and most of all the material harm of its persistent distortions. Hierarchy malarkey, as Kathy Sdao, renowned dog trainer and certified animal behaviorist, calls it in her 2012 book Plenty in Life Is Free: Reflections on Dogs, Training and Finding Grace.

The positive reinforcement school of dog training has always had to understand the seductive lie of alpha dominance, because its misappropriation forms the philosophical basis of what’s known as aversive training — which is not just the school of dog training that is positive reinforcement’s main competitor (if we’re speaking in market terms, that is: these are the two types of trainers to whom new dog owners, frantic for help, will usually turn) but is also the school of dog training that is the historical foundation of all modern dog training and indeed the foundation for much of the modern human-canine relationship, both with working and companion animals.

The early curriculum for what we now understand to be aversive dog training began — as many modern ideas about power and dominance began — in imperial Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. Colonel Konrad Most, born in 1878, began training police dogs in 1906 while he served as police commissioner at the Royal Prussian Police Headquarters in Saarbrücken, then an industrial center close to the French border, its economy reliant on the nearby Saar coal basin. In 1910, Most wrote the book that became the foundation of all dog training — though purchasing it online now typically comes with a warning note with conscientious sellers informing readers that they do not condone the methods espoused in the book, stressing that the text is primarily valuable as a historical document — Training Dogs: A Manual, accurately translating the equally straightforward German title Die Abrichtung des Hundes.

In 1912, Most headed the State Breeding and Training Establishment for Berlin’s police dogs, responsible for much of the original research around service dog training, particularly criminal tracking and apprehension. During World War I, Most served at the side of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, then the commander in chief of the Imperial German Army’s Eastern Front, who would later become the second elected president of the Weimar Republic, eventually appointing one Adolf Hitler as chancellor in January 1933.

Most helped orchestrate the use of military dogs on the Eastern Front — Hindenburg was particularly lionized for his victory at the Battle of Tannenberg, which saw the decisive defeat of the Russian Second Army — and eventually came to oversee the use of all military canines on both the Imperial German Army’s Eastern and Western Fronts. In 1919, Most was decorated by the Prussian War Ministry as creator of the Canine Service in the World War of 1914–1918.

What is the actual object of training? Most asks in the early pages of Training Dogs. "It is that the dog shall only do what we find convenient or useful, and refrain from doing what is inconvenient or harmful to us.

This requirement cannot be completely reconciled with what is acceptable by, or of advantage to, the dog. A man often requires a dog to refrain from its natural activities or undertake those which are unnatural to it. Canine instincts, for example, prompt a dog to pursue, corner and catch prey, but not to bring it to a man. The aim of training can be achieved only by exercising compulsion whenever the dog does not spontaneously do what is required of him.

Now: Why do I give a shit about imperial Germany, imperial Germans, and what they have to say about dogs? There’s the simple fact that I became, in my midthirties, a dog person. There’s the other fact that the dogs I have thus far chosen to share my life with, both as rescues and as fosters, have happened to be German Shepherds, the breed of dog most commonly associated with