The Dog Who Spoke with Gods by Diane Jessup

Author:Diane Jessup
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER TEN

The belief in Science is the superstition of our time.

—M. WANDT

Joseph Seville continued sitting up smoking and thinking well past midnight. He thought about how he could arrange his schedule to allocate more time to the dog without exciting curiosity in his department and among his staff. He had told no one but Tom. He thought about how his life would change after his triumphant presentation of the dog and with a small, unconscious smile, he thought about the look that would be on Kotch’s face. There was a tremendous amount of work to be organized and carried out, no doubt about that, but it would be interesting, exciting work. He wished fleetingly he could share it with longtime friend Viktor Hoffman, but he would tell no one until the dog worked for him. The sharp irony of having in his possession the single greatest behavioral breakthrough in centuries and being unable to utilize the animal, contributed greatly to his insomnia. He was determined to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.

Before him lay the seemingly mundane feat of eliciting a response to a given stimulus, in this case his commands, then putting the response under stimulus control. Simply put, putting the dog’s verbal behaviors on cue. First-year student stuff. But the dog was not reacting in the usual fashion. The simplest approach behaviors were nearly impossible to achieve, and the animal’s severe avoidance behavior was precluding any actual work on the verbal behaviors.

The dog disliked him.

It was a gut reaction, not a scientific observation. But his gut told him also that, try as he might, it would take months to sweet-talk the animal into working for him, and he didn’t have months. Conditioning the dog through the use of positive reinforcement would have been his preferred method, but with his time constraints it was no longer feasible. He knew he was running out of time, both before he must submit a paper for inclusion in the Netherlands symposium, and before that erratic girl did something stupid.

Seville considered the problem of Elizabeth Fletcher. For now he saw no reason to stop her visits. Besides continuing to be dumbfounded by the behaviors he witnessed the girl evoking from the animal, he was shrewd enough to know that if he denied her access to the dog, she would have nothing to lose by going to the press or causing some other type of scene. Which got back to the fact once again, that if word of the dog got out now, when he was unable to make it function correctly on cue, it would be a screwup of unimaginable consequences. As a compromise between his desire to be done with her and the knowledge that he had to keep her quiet and content, he decided to allow daily visits to the dog, but with strict instructions that she was no longer to engage the animal in any form of verbal communication. He would explain that formal conditioning had begun and unstructured work would interfere and cause confusion to the animal.

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