Still Life

Saturday Pip and I deployed to Virginia on an ASRC callout for the kind of search I least want to do.

The kind where, as you are doing your best to be diligent and thorough and up to the highest standards in the technical execution of your work, you fervently hope for no results, because if the ground search effort is successful, it is the worst news possible. This girl is not a missing hiker. If she's in the woods three weeks after disappearing from a stadium parking lot, it is not an episode of Survivorman.

As long as the ground search remains fruitless, there is hope: Hope that a feckless young metalhead is rockin' out in Cancun with some hairy dude named Tusk, hope that somewhere a blond is waking up with a new tattoo and a mouth that tastes like a tire fire, even hope that she plots her escape from an abductor's cellar, from a living hell that is, after all, living.

Still life.

We've had some searches over the decades in which we knew the inevitable outcome. Crime victims whose murderers had confessed. Partial remains. Evidence of blood loss incompatible with life. Witnessed drowning.

That somber chore -- to restore the earthly remains of a departed soul to his survivors -- offers no ambivalence. A successful search does not help much -- but it does help.

But these "most likely scenario" searches offer the successful searcher an opportunity to kill hope. This does not make one's day.

Then there's the plenty of time out on task to cogitate on the fairness thing.

Another massive search effort for a rich, pretty white girl.

Not that missing rich, pretty white girls do not deserve to be sought tirelessly.

But so did this lady. Exactly as much. Exactly.

And well -- you know, I could go on ...

I won't even get into the Byzantine interstate SAR politics that yesterday equated my multiply-certified, battle-tested, impeccably professional partner, myself, my two teammates, and my sixty-some highly-trained SAR colleagues with "anyone over 18 with a state-issued ID." Including the associates of a notorious felon.

Because I don't train for those people, and neither do my teammates.

Anyway, it was an unseasonably lovely day in Charlottesville when Pip and Eric and I set out to comb some woodland for clues. Pip's main job was to find any scent clues and tell me about them. We humans needed to navigate accurately, choose search tactics that kept Pip downwind of the unsearched portion of the area, avoid hazards, and use our eyes like any other searcher.

When your eyes are peeled bare for six hours, looking for drag marks, disturbed earth, a black t-shirt, crystal bling -- anything that might be relevant, anything that does not belong -- the other thing that you see is everything. Even stuff that does belong, but is worth noticing.

Like this:



I saw it as we were about to head back to our car for a snack before tackling the other half of our search area. Actually I saw Pip see it -- she noticed the contrasting whiteness, briefly checked it out, and declared it background noise. It certainly did not smell relevant to her.

Lots of deer skulls in the woods, but I never find one with two undamaged antlers. This needed to come home. Antlers don't fit into backpacks well, so I was carrying it under my arm as we walked down the road that formed one of our task boundaries.

As luck would have it, a local television reporter driving by gave herself whiplash when she saw the cute doggy in the orange vest. Never fails.

She asked if she could get video of us. We told her that we didn't have time to stop, and that she needed to check in at the command post.

This gave me just enough time to wrap the skull in my jacket before she started rolling. The press will be press.

I just really did not want to be the searcher shown on-camera dragging a skull out of the woods, no matter the species of its former owner. Some people would not, you know, grok this.

But inside my small pack was something that I do not grok.

That does not belong.



Yes, those are lemons.

They were on and under a large, vigorous, weird-looking spiky lemon tree.

Out in the middle of the dense and untraveled woods. Uncultivated.

In Charlottesville Virginia.

38 degrees latitude.

I smelled them before I saw the tree.

Pip's job description does not include acknowledging errant citrus; she continued to work while I looked around for the source of the incongruity. Since we had detected a few party spots in the course of our task, I suppose I was imagining some odd variant on these. But there was the tree, surrounded by drops and loaded with fruit.

I'd have been less surprised to encounter a family of penguins.

I've asked about it on the citrus forum of Garden Web. No response.

Everything the Googles has uncovered indicates that lemons don't grow north of Florida.

I have no friggin' explanation. None. The tree is an impossibility.

So, driving north to home last night with my teammate Chris and a bag of the fragrantly impossible, we mulled over the not-so-strange case of the missing Metallica fan.

I recounted a disagreement I had with my ONB training partner, Douglas, when I had worried that a certain individual was not above harming or killing a dog in order to seek revenge on people involved in ONB.

Douglas told me I was being ridiculous, that what I was postulating was "TV levels of evil."

Meaning: People don't act that awful in real life -- it has to be badly scripted. Douglas was referring to, let's say, Dynasty scripting.

Yet SAR responders' stock-in-trade is slogging through the consequences of TV levels of evil that are so shopworn, we sometimes wonder if we are living repeats.

We perform our duties in a world where the first, and usually last, suspect in a child's violent death is one or both of her parents.

We sit on our hands while public servants decide that an all-out search is unnecessary for someone -- someone who is not rich, is not white, is not pretty, but is just as missing as Chandra Levy.

We watch as public servants and our self-declared colleagues in volunteerism obstruct professional search efforts as they play out their territorial pissing matches and ego fantasies -- while the lost person's survivability curve plummets by the hour.

We smell the piss and neglect in the dank nursing home, and wonder how long that 98 year-old has really been missing.

We look into the glassy eyes of the mother of a runaway boy who is trying to convert us to her religion while we are trying to find her son, and know that there was a reason he hopped a freight.

We wonder how the swindlers with a magic search dog and a "100% success rate" stay out of prison for years and keep garnering breathless laudatory press coverage and the fatuous loyalty of law enforcement.

We see TV levels of evil all the damned time. More than we do on TV.

Okay, sure -- there's plenty of selection bias. We all imagined our SAR duties in terms of misplaced hikers, wandering children, stranded climbers, and trackless wilderness. Our reality is wandering dementia patients, once-a-year Nimrods with cardiac histories, the victims of violent atrocities, and the trash-strewn strip-mined gully behind the assisted-living center.

TV levels of evil are the bleached deer skull in the thicket of a SAR career. Interesting to find, but no surprise. Something that belongs.

So Chris and I parsed out the obvious selection bias, and just went with people we knew in our personal lives. The neighbor who stabs his parents to death in their bed. The one who shoots her child and then herself. The one who invites her illicit lover in to rape her teenage daughter while her husband is out of town. The brother's best friend who murders his 13 year-old girlfriend, molests the body, and then disposes of the evidence with the help of his aunt. The former lover serving federal time for treason. And those are just the things we know about.

TV has got nothing on real life for the ubiquity of human evil. It's not the skull in the woods, it is the woods themselves.

So perhaps what we work for is the impossible. That part of the woods that we do not expect, but must be open to seeing.

Ron Remich, the unwitting Patron Saint of my SAR career. The dead man who insisted on being alive four days after he went missing without his insulin or his anti-rejection meds, and taught me that I have no right to kill a lost person in my head. No right to search for a body when I might be searching for a man.

If not for Ron Remich, I would have given up hope for young Jacob Allen. I'd have been looking for a dead boy, not the live boy we found. Maybe I'd have dismissed his parents' account and turned a jaundiced eye upon them, wondering what they'd done with their handicapped son. Given in to the omnipresence of evil. Instead, I rolled out of my sleeping bag every morning and went to work on a rescue, not a recovery.

Ron and Jacob remind me to believe in the reality of the improbable.

The inconceivable existence of a wild lemon tree in central Virginia. The remote prospect that a rich, pretty white girl has not succumbed to the most likely scenario, the most banal story of evil.

A bowl of impossible lemons makes a decent still life.

Flows downhill

This Spring, when Professor Chaos had the bionic implant done on his chubby, flat, right foot, I had the privilege of playing Step-n-Fetchit for him, then a few weeks of four-hour-a-day rush-hour unpaid chauffeur duty, and a couple of months of managing every farm and household chore single-handed.

Which metaphor I never appreciated properly until we got the farm, and had a hundred-times daily lessons on how a given chore or repair that would take two people two minutes takes one person a half hour and a small storm-cloud of profanity.

A dog may be far better than a hired man for helping with livestock, but they suck at holding the window frame while I screw in a new hinge. Also, cannot lug a five-gallon poultry waterer.

The by-catch of all this, aside from a persistent vile temper in excess of the baseline, was the near-destruction of my upper back and neck.

A new physician, presented with the primary complaint of neck and back pain and severe paresthesia in both hands, questioned whether my insomnia might not indicate a need for antidepressants, and ordered up a a few fuck-you radiographs and a butt-cam for good measure. Neither revealed anything of interest. So, ipso facto, nothing wrong with me, thankyoucomeagain..

(Anyone know a decent internist/GP in the North Hills of Pittsburgh? Someone who, you know, actually practices medicine? Still looking ...)

The chiropractor strung me along for about six weeks, and I still couldn't feel my hand.

Finally, in July, my witch-doctor friend flew in as close as Dayton to teach a clinic. I drove out the night before, and a half-hour after deplaning, she got into my back, made me do things that made me cry, and essentially fixed me. Within four days the parasthesia was gone, and it has not come back.

Today Professor Chaos is having his left paw sliced, and I no wanna repeat.

So last month, I spent a couple days devising a labor-saving gadget that is, after a four-week trial, safe to say, the cat's ass.

The most tedious chore on the farm has been keeping the poultry supplied with plentiful, clean water.

First of all, there isn't a single commercial poultry-fount design that I would kick a duck in the ass with. We have at least six different designs, and each one of them sucks in some different way -- fragile, tips, leaks, won't open, won't close, hard to clean, clogs, breaks. And none of them are cheap, at least, for what you get.

So I bought some parts and made a poultry waterer that is easy to keep clean, does not leak, does not clog, does not tip, and never leaves my birds without plenty of water -- and I've only refilled it once since I installed it. It takes less than a minute a day to clean, and there is no heavy lifting involved. The heaviest work is pulling the garden hose up about 12' with a string.

First, I bought a self-filling dog water bowl. About $12 on sale somewhere.

I already had a 55 gallon plastic barrel that had served as a rain barrel for many years at our former home. It had cost me $5 -- I see them on Craig's List for $10 all the time nowadays.

I installed a new plastic spigot near the bottom. Spigot cost about $3 at Trader Horne.

I had some good-quality hose that I'd salvaged from the curb quite a while ago. Someone ran over a long, expensive hose with his lawnmower, and rather than cut out the damaged part and repair, he pitched it. My gain.

A shut-off valve for the downhill (in-coop) end -- about $3.

Male and female ends for the hose, about a buck and a half per.

My poultry are cooped in the lower level of our bank barn. Upstairs is hay storage and gear/equipment storage.

So I moved the empty rain barrel into the upper part of the barn, directly above the chicken coop. Positioned it over a strong beam near the foundation, and set it up on some cribbing so that the spigot isn't so close to the floor that the hose kinks.


Ignore the wood detritus around the barrel -- it rained down during roof repair last week.

Drilled a hole in the floor. This was harder than it sounds. The floor is oak, and 1 1/2" thick. Fortunately that is two courses of boards, so I was just able to pull this off with a hole saw and a chisel.

Fed the hose through the floor, and down into the coop.



Secured the bowl to the wall so that the chickens have to reach a little in order to drink. Shorter chickens can stand on the ramp to the pop-door. This way, less junk gets into the bowl.

The bowl is mounted on four screws with its keyhole mounts. It is secure on the wall, but easy to lift out to clean.

I just bring a bucket into the coop in the morning, lift the bowl off the mount, slosh the dusty water into the bucket, wipe the bowl off with a damp rag, and make sure that the new water glugging in is clean.

The drip you see at the shut-off valve in the photo is because I had just cleaned the bowl and inadvertently loosened the connection a little. I've since cranked it very tight.

I could have just as easily placed the barrel outside and uphill of the coop. This would have made filling it even easier. I bring the garden hose from the house up into the barn with a string that dangles down through a siding board that isn't nailed down at the bottom, and gives the barn swallows an entrance when the door is closed. But since the barrel is white, I wanted to keep it out of the sunlight so I wouldn't have to contend with algae. I also have some terra-cotta colored and blue barrels, and those would be better for an outdoor installation.

If I lived someplace level, I'd have built a frame/platform for the barrel that raised it to about chest level, and placed it very close to the coop.

Someone asked why I don't just run a hose straight to the coop from the house.

Last year, a hose that I left on burst while I was out for the day. Came home to a well cistern that had actually been sucked dry. Fortunately our well-pump has a safety shutoff and didn't fry, but we were without water for a day.

This single innovation has cut poultry chore time by about 75%.

Come winter, we'll probably have to go back to hauling water on the coldest days. I could heat the reservoir, but keeping the hose flowing overnight, when the birds don't drink, would be a bitch. Still, unless we have another apocalyptic winter, this should be about a month of water-hauling total.

Pedigree

H/T to Patrick over at Terrierman for this post about the AKC's streamlined merchandise-handling software for puppy-mill retailers.

Seems that I remember a few years ago, the AKC hacks backed down in the face of a torch-and-pitchfork mob of breed club delegates who objected to a speshul marketing program designed to keep puppymill products on the AKC rolls, the better to profit from the money-for-paper scam that pays those Madison Avenue salaries.

What they did, of course, was just transfer the scheme to an administrative hidey-hole and quietly go forward with their attempt to re-capture market share from the puppymillers' new, no-questions-asked "registries."

Reading the PDF instructions for Petland clerks on how to instantly register "inventory" with the AKC -- a nice cut of additional revenue for the retailer, and the only way Ron Menaker is going to make his boat payment -- I was struck by this clause under "Adding a Dog to the Store."

Dogs can also be added to the general inventory by the AKC based on the AKC’s assessment of the dog’s pedigree. The store will fax pedigrees for non-AKC dogs to the AKC and the AKC staff determines if the dog is eligible for AKC registration within two business days. Eligible dogs are automatically uploaded to the inventory.

Wow.

Just, wow.

The one thing that AKC could reserve for its dubious bragging rights was a claim of "purity" and "pedigree integrity."

What this meant in paperwork terms was, if an owner neglected to properly register his dog or bitch within the allotted time, if he lost the registration paperwork, or for any reason all the i's weren't dotted and the t's crossed, that dog's offspring could never be registered. Nevermind that the dog was clearly purebred, that the owner had the dog's pedigree, might even own the dam himself. Did not matter.

And puppies from unregistered parents in most breeds could not command anything like the price for registered pups.

Which is, you know, deranged. Regardless, this created a powerful incentive for owners snap to it and fill out the paperwork and send their money to Madison Avenue each and every generation.

This obedience to unelected authority has always been very important to the dog fancy set. A "reputable" breeder has his paperwork in order. A dirtbag BYB doesn't send in his registration fees.

But a puppymiller did -- until the "industry" discovered that they could make things much easier and cheaper for themselves by creating their own "flexible" no-questions-asked money-for-paper schemes.

Now I'm pretty sure that an ordinary pet owner who has a "pedigree" for his purebred dog, but no litter registration slip, is still hosed.

But apparently a pup from unregistered parents can now "qualify" almost instantly for AKC registration -- for inclusion in the "pure" gene pool of whatever breed. Just so long as it came from a puppymill and is being sold at retail from the deli case at a mall near you.

No DNA testing. No photographs. No review by experts from the breed club. No investigation into the paperwork irregularities. No punitive fees for the special case.

Because getting a cut of the profits from the living "inventory" is going to goose the bottom line this week way more than being a stickler for record-keeping is.

As for next week -- well, I guess that depends upon who finds out and what they do about it, doesn't it?

How do you dog-fancier breed-club snobs feel about the Missouri-born inventory getting an instant administrative upgrade to "pure" and "AKC-registered?"

If contemplating each puppy's mother languishing her whole life in a wire-floored crate so that the registration fees for her lifetime production output can help support your dog show habit has no goddamn effect on your conscience.

If you don't give a rat's ass about the health and behavior of these little units of inventory once they are bought and installed into your neighbor's home as "members of the family."

If you meekly accept that you are being held to a higher standard of record-keeping than Helga the Kansas puppy farmer.

Can you at least give a shit that your precious "purity" -- the last thing that your Overlord In Dogs has to offer you -- is being tossed away on the say-so of Tammi at Petland and some faceless clerk in Raleigh?

Consent and Compulsion

Please do not click on the photo link of Barry White in the second paragraph unless you are sure you want to see it. If you are easily upset by images of cruelty and animal suffering, do not look. I did not reproduce this photograph in the body of this post for a reason.

Instead, consider the portrait of Barry White as he is today.

Barry White had the honor of starring at the sentencing hearing of his former owner.

He was fortunate that he did not have to attend in person, but the sheriff's photo of him on the day he was seized as evidence glowed larger than life over the proceedings. His face screwed into a rictus of terror, eyes wide, tongue lolling and blue -- he has clocked out of a reality revealed by his emaciated flanks and pelvis (obvious even under his matted strawlike coat) and the necklace and cape of shit-and-mud pendants that must have doubled his weight.

Not long after that sentencing hearing, eight months after that photograph was taken, he and eighteen others were released from their special indenture by the judge, and I was allowed to evaluate him.

Most of our evaluations of the ONB dogs were pleasant, interesting interviews. Barry White's was not. I was traumatized by his completely genuine and inconsolable terror -- but not nearly as much as he was traumatized by having a leash hooked to his collar.

I promised his handler that day that, if it came to it, I would personally foster Barry White. She'd only recently taken him on -- he'd had several handlers in succession at ONB, and none had made much, if any, progress with him. With each failed attempt to leash and handle him, his spinning alligator reflex was reinforced and strengthened. This was not an act or contrived panic; the possibility that he would harm himself in his hysteria was real.

Parties with connections to Barry White's former owner were still planting and fertilizing rumors among the volunteers that Douglas and I were the Doggie Death Squad, "culling" (yes, that word was used) those dogs who "failed" their behavior evaluations. Handlers feared for the lives of the most regressed dogs; after eight months of repeatedly showing ourselves as good as our word, toxic slander still seeped into the hindbrains of otherwise sensible people.

I gave her some ideas for working on the leash hysteria, and steeled myself to welcome into my home a dog who could not be walked. She didn't have much time, and I didn't have a lot of confidence in the power of the few things I could suggest to work quickly.

Still, he was not an entirely discouraging case. He allowed his handler and me to sit with him in his stall and cut some of the few remaining mats from his fur. He did not seek the touch, but he didn't offer to bite us, or froth in terror, either.

And then there's his eyes. Barry White looks straight at me, and his eyes do not ask -- they require. Require acknowledgement, demand an answer, insist that I recognize him and work to give him what he needs.

A week later I watched him, leashed, following his handler willingly around the kennel of the Moore Lane hospital, where he'd come to be neutered. I still don't know how she flipped him so fast.

And three weeks after that, I opened his crate on the Barking Bus and led him out for a constitutional in my hayfield, then into the newly constructed kennel run that is his next waystation on the road to a life as a normal dog.

Every day we have our quiet time, during which we work on his willingness to approach a person and to be touched without flattening himself to the ground in surrender. And every day we have our walk, usually with my own dogs and young Cole, sometimes just the two of us. On many days, he can also follow me for some of my chores.

Until a few days ago, I held a 16' nylon long line on our walks. There was always a belly of slack dragging behind us as he followed at my heel sporting a huge dog smile, but I kept my grip, mindful of the possibility that something could panic him and make him bolt.

And there are points where he puts the brakes on. Barry White is afraid of doorways, gates, and constrictions. He still can't cope with a human being coming at him frontally at close range. At first, he tried to flee when I would pick up a tool or bucket -- anything larger than a paperback book was fearsome if it was in the hand of a human being.

When Barry White backs up or sets his brakes, I use gentle, steady, authoritative pressure on the leash to bring him through the scary space with as little fuss as possible. Since Barry White isn't interested in love and cuddles, praise, coaxing, a game of fetch, or a nummy bribe, I compel him to move through his fear.

We've never yet reprised the spinning croc. And there have been times when I've put a fair amount of pressure on him. He has the inherent ability to keep his wits, which is most of what he needs to advance towards normalcy.

Last week I took the plunge and dropped the end of the line when we are out in the pastures. And there's Barry White, sticking so close to my heels that I can't get a photograph of him unless I tie him to something and back away. I still don't have a decent picture of his beaming "go for a walk" smile.

Even though we've been doing beautifully with the drop-line on our walks and for some of the more active routine chores, it's good policy to tether the dog when one can't keep an eye on him. So Sunday, while Professor Chaos and I raked shingles out of the barnyard, I hooked his nylon line to a fence post nearby.

All was well until I walked away towards the house. I hadn't gone twenty steps before I felt a soft, familiar tap on my calf. Barry White's nose.

Barry White has determined that his Mission From God is to follow me around the farm. The leash interfered with the performance of that Mission. That Would Not Do. So he neatly, deliberately, without drama or fuss, without fear or panic, severed the leash and joined me. It looked as if he'd taken a pair of sharp scissors to it. He knew exactly what he was doing.

In other words, at any time in the past month, as I "compelled" Barry White to move through his fear, he could have chosen to opt out. He knows perfectly well how to make the leash go away; hundreds of times, he has chosen not to do so.

Barry White doesn't totally trust me; humans have been too unreliable and sometimes dangerous for him to let go of those parts of himself he has reserved. He doesn't like having his collar taken hold of, doesn't want me to reach for him. He doesn't want to be petted, though he'll allow it if "forced." He has a ways to go.

But one thing that Barry White does trust me to do is to walk him through fear and into the possibility of happiness. He can't always help himself by himself, but he consents to let me "compel" him to do so.

And now, I consent to remember what he has told me: that he makes his own choice about trusting me every moment of every day.

Snapshot Sunday: Socialize

Cole was pulled from a pile of dogshit on his abuser's property when he was a month or so old. He spent the rest of his life, until September, behind the sheriff's evidence perimeter. He got to know and like a lot of people, but never saw a kid.

The first kid he ever saw at close quarters was a deranged-looking-and-acting toddler who came running right for him, face level and full-frontal. Cole backed up in alarm, round-eyed, and growled nervously and very, very softly. What the hell is that thing?! I just leaned forward to both greet and intercept the free-range house-ape, modeling what I wanted him to see.

Five seconds later, Cole's alarmed round eyes changed to astonished, and his ridiculous squirrel tail began to wiggle. Omidog, it's a tiny human! How cool is that?!

And that's how Cole's Day of Discovery went at the Audubon Society Apple Fest. By the afternoon, he was playing "needle in the haystack" with the little children as if he'd been romping with them all his life.

Absolutely essential to Cole's future as a working dog. Liking kids is not optional.

Saturday AMRG did wilderness safety programs for 600+ Cub Scouts/Parents. Pip, Rosie, and Cole assisted. Every one of the cold, wet scouts helped to "socialize" Cole.

As a donut-spare English shepherd, he has found that he heartily approves of downsized humans. Something about playing with action figures that are on the same scale.

Paper Plate Recall: The Basics

Ten minutes before this picture was taken, young Cole (far right, with his butt velcroed to the ground) did not know what the word "stay" meant.

I learned the paper-plate recall from colleague Dick Russell of Baton Rouge. Dick wrote a detailed but unillustrated article about this obedience drill. Until recently it was available several places on the web, but I can no longer find it to link to the original.

So here is my own guide to this useful and entertaining exercise, without Cajun wit, but with illustrative photographs. You can click any of them to embiggen.

My model for the photos is young Cole, my Operation New Beginnings foster pup. The photos were taken just before he earned off-leash freedom here. He had no inkling of "stay" when we introduced the exercise, little idea of "come," would sit for a lure, and was a bold, energetic pup with lots of confidence and no environmental sensitivities.

What is it?

The paper-plate recall is a training drill that very quickly provides excellent building blocks for three useful exercises:

• Come
• Stay
• Send Out

And, if you choose, is also a nice drill in which to practice the finish to heel.

When you get it right, the exercise develops a hypnotic progressive rhythm that is quite satisfying to dog and trainer alike.

What do you need?

• A plate or other target. I use heavy plastic or metal rather than paper, as we have this thing called wind in Pennsylvania. A dog bowl works fine. For dogs that like to retrieve the target, a heavy ceramic tile works well. Contrasting color/brightness to the ground is very helpful. (After you master the basic sequence, you will need additional plates in order to progress. But for the first few days or weeks, you only need one plate.)

• A generous supply of very tiny, very delicious treats -- chicken, dried liver, hotdog. Very food-motivated dogs will work fine for their regular kibble. I sometimes have two kinds of bait, one high-value and one lower-value -- see below. A bait pouch on your belt is helpful to maintain a rhythm.

• A large open training area relatively low in distractions. As smooth and level as possible, and well-mowed if it is grass. Lawn, golf course, playing field, church parking lot, driveway, beach, gymnasium. You will be walking or running backwards, so plan accordingly.

• Safety containment appropriate to the reliability of the dog -- fence or 30' minimum long light line. No retractable leads. I typically train this exercise with no containment at all on pet dogs who have a "sort of" recall, and use a long line for the first few sessions of untrained animals.

• If not using a long line, a short leash or collar tab for the first few drills (usually can be taken off after less than five minutes.)

• Dog. Dog should have some inkling of what the words "sit" and "stay" mean. I typically introduce this drill to group classes after the dogs have been practicing "stay" for two weeks. I have personally taught it from scratch to dogs who have the barest notion of "sit for a cookie" and no stay, but I recommend this only be attempted by serious trainers who have practiced the exercise successfully on trained and partly-trained dogs.

How do you do it?

1) Put your target (plate) on the ground.

2) Place one smidgen of your yummy bait on the plate.

3) Stand no more than 3' from the plate, facing it. You should be positioned so that most of the training space is behind you. You will be backing up as the exercise progresses. Variation: You can move the plate further out each time you increase the distance. We did that for the purposes of getting photographs. This makes it harder for the dog to keep track of the target. I prefer to move the dog and myself on first sessions, and then later on mix it up by moving the plate further out on the same line.

4) Put your dog, with leash or tab (or long line) into heel position. (That is at your left side, facing the same direction you are, shoulder even with your leg, no more than about a foot away.)

Cole in the start position, target clearly visible in front of us.

5) Sit the dog and tell/signal him to "stay."

6) Extend your arm towards the target and command your dog to "go out" (or whatever command you are going to use). Make your movement very exaggerated.

Cole's first sendout.

7a) If your dog immediately goes to the plate to take the bait, praise him at the moment he has it in his mouth, simultaneously backing up about two - three steps past your original position and grabbing another treat from your pocket or pouch. (Go to step 7)

Successful first sendout.

7b) If your dog looks confused when you first signal the go out, get him started towards the target with you left hand helping him with the leash and collar in the right direction, praise as he finds and takes the bait, and step one step back from your original position while grabbing another treat from your pocket or pouch. (Go to step 7)

7c) If your dog is still hesitant or confused after some collar guidance, quickly lead him to the plate, praise as he finds and takes the bait, and step backwards to your original position while grabbing another treat from your pocket or pouch. (Go to step 7)

8) As soon as your dog has swallowed the treat from the plate, give one clear command to Come. The command is Dog Name + "Come."

"Cole, Come!"

9) As your dog comes back to you from no more than five feet away, bring your in-hand treat down to his level in front of you. As he reaches you, lure him into a sit while commanding Sit. Feed him as he sits. Praise and stroke him down his back while he continues to sit directly in front of you.

Good recall to front.

10) Return your dog to the heel position (most need collar guidance to do this). Command him to Sit, and then signal/command him to Stay.

Cole is now very motivated to go out to the target, and I'm telling him to stay while I leave him.

11) Step forward and re-bait the target.

Because we can't back away from the target during the recall, I am moving the plate a few feet further from Cole.

12a) Return to your dog and put yourself back into heel position with him.

12b) If your dog breaks position, correct him verbally, and if necessary with the leash, back into his sit stay -- in the exact same position where he was before he broke. Don't allow him to gain any ground. Don't be punitive or loud about this -- just calmly replace him and remind him to stay. One he's back in position, return yourself to heel position.

13) Repeat starting at step 6. Repeat at least a dozen times the first session. Twenty is better.

Second sendout, twice as far as the first.

If you had to help your dog forward to the target and treat, you will still be standing about 3' away from the target for your second iteration. Don't back up until your dog is going out to the plate with just the command and arm signal.

If your dog went out on his own or with just a starter tug on his collar, you will have backed up a couple of feet. The target will now be further away. When you send your dog, he will have to go further. When you command Stay, you will be going further away from him. Both are challenges. You want to gain just a little ground on each iteration so that your dog gradually masters the difficulty of the longer send-out and the temptation of the greater distance from you on the stay.

But your best recall will come when you are backing up rapidly. So when you call Come, walk or run backwards as far as you can before your dog reaches you, receive him and feed and praise him, then gently swing him into heel position and walk forward to a position just a few steps further from the target than your previous spot.

If you start 3' from the target and do 12 repetitions on your first training session, backing up a couple steps on each rep, you will be sending your dog to a target about 40 feet away by the end of ten minutes. And your dog will be holding a stay while you walk 40 feet away, put food on the ground, and return to him.

Yes, in ten minutes.

I first practiced this exercise on Moe, who as a seven-month-old already had a pretty good stay and a great recall, plus an abundance of enthusiasm. In our first session he progressed to a 200 meter stay and sendout -- we had to stop when we ran out of township park. Dogs without the obedience foundation and with less drive and confidence will require much slower and more incremental progression.

Troubleshooting

Dog is hesitant to go out

This is more common than you think. Keep close to the plate as dog gains confidence. You can move around the plate in a circle in order to mix things up. Use a more tempting bait on the plate -- whatever your dog likes best. And be sure to start with a hungry dog -- don't feed him before the drill session.

Cole has become confused on a longer sendout (same session, moved outside the pen and onto a 30' drag line). He looks back for help.

I move forward a few steps and give an exaggerated directional cue with my arm. This is enough to address his momentary confusion. Cole does not lack confidence, he just doesn't know where the target is and has not learned to trust that it is on the line yet.

Success! Now I need to start backing up and preparing to call him.

As he's momentarily distracted by an uninvited interloper, I increase my pitch and excitement, and move away from Cole more rapidly for the recall.

If the dog has a great recall and a hesitant send-out, or he would rather run around on the send-out, try using a better bait on the plate than the unexciting one you use for the recall.

Dog breaks stays, tries to make an end-run around you to the bait, runs the other way, and generally makes it difficult to correct the break smoothly (insubordination rather than error)

Use a long line. If he rushes the plate, block him and correct with a strong NO for any rudeness in attempting to get around you, through you, over you. It's crucial that he never get to take the bait until he has been sent for it. If he takes off the other way and it is not because he is afraid, give him a leash correction and return him to his original spot. Keep the exercise low-key to avoid overstimulating the dog -- again, the slow progressions and ritual drill should become almost hypnotic in their ability to focus both human and dog.

If the dog is running from you or from the pressure, then close up the distance to the target, send him one last time, and end on a positive note with a good recall. Work him in subsequent sessions with smaller increments from the target. This is not insubordination, it is confusion and possibly fear.

A persistent offender on the stays should first be worked close to the target for several sessions. If the dog continues to break frequently and/or resist correction, stop paper-plate drills and spend 2-3 weeks working on Stay and Leave It in other contexts.

Dog is good on send-outs but slow on the recall, or does not recall

Start by increasing the value of the reward he gets for recalling. Use regular kibble on the plate and nummie treats in your hand. Praise and pet him lavishly when he comes. Run backwards and raise the pitch of your voice to be sure you are tempting and inviting to him. Be sure you aren't doing anything he perceives as punitive after he comes to you -- no manhandling in returning him to the sit at heel, no scolding tone to the Stay command.

If he's having fun at your expense, use a long line and drill at that length until he is coming back reliably.

Dog hits threshold where he won't go out any further, or seems to lose the target

Work the dog at the threshold distance where he is still succeeding, moving around the target in a circle so he is approaching from different positions. When he's fast and accurate on those, slowly start to increase distance.

Get down to dog level -- can you see the target? It's easy for a foot-tall dog to lose sight of the target in shaggy grass or slightly uneven ground. You can try elevating the target.

I can get the longest send-outs the most quickly in bowl-shaped terrain, where the dog can most easily see the target at a distance.

If you work incrementally, the dog will begin to take the "line" from your arm signal.

What this Drill is Not

The paper-plate recall is a food drill. It can serve its purpose without ever fading or randomizing the bait. As such, it is not a substitute for the obedience exercises done in a variety of contexts and without the promise of a cookie. Practicing this drill will help you increase the speed and precision of your dog's recalls. It will help build your dog's ability to hold a stay at a distance from you like no other exercise. And it is absolutely the quickest way to start a send-out for later advanced work. But unless you work on those commands in different contexts and without bribes, the drill practice will not jump context and translate to daily life in a reliable or predictable way.

Later we'll revisit the paper-plate recall drill and discuss advanced variations with multiple targets and directionals.

A class of beginning obedience students, third week, start paper-plate recalls with their dogs. Note that the dogs are on 15' drag lines in an unfenced area, and are working simultaneously about 20' apart. They are staying focused on their own plates and are not distracted by the other dogs' sendouts and recalls.

Lest anyone think that this is difficult to teach.

Note that dog in the center is a Jack Russell terrier.

Snapshot Sunday: Guest Blogger

While our plans for a simple, one-day, finish-by-sunset-and-grab-a-beer roofing job on the barn gang aft agley on Saturday with the discovery of rot in the base, our emphatically non-farmer nieces had to find ways to entertain themselves while Dad, Uncle Ken, Aunt Heather, and "Uncle" Bill bled money and profanity all weekend.

Fourteen year-old Brady borrowed Bill's camera, and came up with these:

Cole and Rosie: Vicious and Dangerous

Bwaaa haaa -- just kidding

Still-life with dew and turkey feather

Pokeweed after frost

Narragansett jake strutting

Fleabane

Ameraucana cockerel. Rooster voted least likely to end up as coq a vin this year.

The new generation of young photographers is going to be a fearless bunch -- liberated from the expense of film, able to get instant feedback on what "worked" and what didn't, and open to experimenting and accepting the happy accident. I envy them the freedom of digital, even as I'm nostalgic for the stink of developer and the pall of the red light bulb.

That said, the kid is a better photographer at fourteen than I am after almost three decades of on-again, off-again efforts -- the last six with decent quality digitals.