Power (vs. Force)

When my middlest daughter turned twelve, my wife and I decided to forego the usual gifts of clothes, books and CDs, and get her a companion instead; to wit, a Rat Terrier.  She promptly named the little girl Lita, and they became fast friends, a relationship that continues to this day. But never mind that.

As I'm sure that you are aware, small dogs- specifically small terriers are usually very yappy.   I say usually, because sometimes, not often, on very rare occasions there will be a non-yappy terrier.  Lita was not the exception to this rule.  She would yap at the cars driving by on our street, yap at the people walking by in front of our house, yap at the ringing telephone, yap if the doorbell rang.  She would yap at almost everything.  It was most annoying.  But that's not the important part.

We tried everything that we could do to stop her piercing vocal outbursts: Firm reprimands, swattings with a rolled up newspaper, forcefully voicing our displeasure to her, even using a spray bottle with water.  None of these mattered a whit, except the spray bottle.  She quickly discovered that it had a 'range,' and would simply move several body lengths further away and continue her vocal outbursts.  But that's beside the point.

We finally stumbled on the solution of a 'Training Collar,' with a remote control.  For those gentle souls that don't know what a training collar is, it is a collar worn by a dog that will deliver a small but variable static shock, controlled by a wireless control device- similar to a television remote- in the hands of the owner or trainer.  We put the collar on her with some trepidation, as she was such a small dog, and waited a few moments for her to get used to it so that she would vocally transgress, and we could mete out the necessary opprobrium, which she soon did.  She soon barked at... something, and we pointed the remote at her, and she yelped in surprise at the small shock!  I think it took her about two more times of her starting up her yapping before she quickly learned that yapping equaled shock.  Maybe two minutes, overall.  We were overjoyed.  But that's not what you need to remember.

Lita, being the brilliant little canine that she is, realized a day or two later that we controlled the zapping that she felt.  The astute little bitch began to look around the room before barking to see whether anyone had anything in hand, and if not, the yappy/barking would commence forthwith.  This would continue until she saw us start to pick up something.  At that point, she would shut her mouth, plop her cute little hindquarters down on the floor, and look at us primly, as if to say, "Me?  No, I'm cool.  Not doing anything here, just minding my own business.  Did you need something?"  It was obvious that she was winning, but that's not the main thrust of what I'm saying here.

After a few weeks of this impasse, there came an occasion when Lita's urges got the best of her again.  I was in the living room with one of my children, watching a movie, and some unknown, unwanted trigger caused the little Rat to start up again.  I reached for what I thought was thought was the collar remote, but grabbed the remote for the VCR instead by mistake (hey, this was eleven years ago).   To my astounded joy, Lita obediently put her little butt on the carpet, and sat primly, quietly, for the rest of the movie.  Zounds!  We had stumbled on something!  Lita knew when we picked up 'something,' but she didn't have the acuity to correctly ascertain 'what' was in our hands.  So we found that we could get her to stop her noisemaking by picking up anything vaguely 'remotish:'  TV remote, VCR remote, they all worked.  We even took to carrying our cell phones in our hands when we were inside the house.  If it looked like she was getting out of control, we would just point our Motorola flip phones at her, and... Voila!  Instant obedience.

I had forgotten about this little trick that we used to play on our little dog until today.  In my city of residence, the local constabulary uses autonomous radar speed traps portably mounted onto trailers to keep the speed down.  The trailers are parked and powered up, and left to their own devices, to nab speeders.  It's amazing how many brake lights light up when drivers unexpectedly happen upon said trailers. 

So the other day, Thursday I think it was, I noticed that one of these trailers had been set up on a road near my home.  It didn't bother me, since I wasn't in the habit of defying existing traffic regulations, but I did notice that it had not been powered up.  Thursday...nothing.  Friday... nothing.  No power, but the traffic moved at a much more languorous pace.  And today, Saturday morning, I passed a policeman attaching the trailer to his truck to move that high tech stalking horse to another location. 

We had been duped, bamboozled, tricked, had our legs pulled!  And by the police, of all people!  For shame...  For of course, they had realized that we were no smarter that Lita, or Pavlov's dog for that matter.

And that is true power.