Whorin' just as fast as I can ...

Uh oh. Her secret identity is peeking out.

On Friday night the magic worked.

As darkness and the temperature both fell over Butler County, as my AMRG teammates established a command post, searched a house, and started lining up reflex tasks, as the rolling pages started going out to SAR personnel in Western PA promising a raw and chilly night of searching for an 80-pound boy who loves the woods but does not appreciate its dangers and did not want to be found (just yet), The Ebil One solved everybody's problem for us.

I told the Pennsylvania State Police Trooper who walked with me (gamely in his duty shoes and bulky body armor through brambles and over creeks and mud and gaps in fences) that she had scent from the boy but not a trail, as we circled his house and cut for scent-sign in the nearby woods, that she was not committed to a trail yet. There was still plenty of the boy's scent coming from his house and yard. I told him that when she had none of his scent at all, that she would yell at me.

And as we spiraled further to the west, she yelled at me on cue. Profanely. She follows in her mother's pawprints: Make your handler look unaccountably good on deployments, and like a complete ass the rest of the time.

I'll take it. I will effing take it.

Meanwhile, Perfesser Chaos and Cole were searching the boy's house. Cole was performing the invaluable job of eliminating one of the highest probability areas.  Saying no is also magical. It's more important to be accurate than it is to come up with yes.

We cut north, went downhill, and she began to cruise up a trail to the north. I put the line back on her harness. She started hauling.

"I think we have something."

She crossed the road and starting dragging me along its side, heading northeast, nose down, tail flagging. She weighs less than forty pounds. Dragged me.

Commitment.

As we approached an intersection, her head popped up briefly, so high that her front feet left the ground slightly.

"That little head-pop -- did you see it?"

"Yes!"

"We are either passing a scent pool where he paused or we are very close."

A minute later we reached an intersection.

"Hang back and be ready to stop traffic. She needs to work out all the options here, and the car traffic for the last three or four hours will have mixed up the picture."

She hauled me diagonally across the intersection, no checking and working out the options. Up over a dirt berm.  Tail-wagging now.  Smug tail-wagging.

In the gloom across a field, at the edge of the woods, something moving.

Someone moving.

"There's somebody over there!"

And that's how it went -- the way it goes in the half-hour teevee version of search and rescue and pretty much never in real life. Ending with a cold but safe child bundled in my down vest and being lectured by a police officer and, a bit later, his parents.

All that was missing was about 100 pounds of dog, ground-dragging ears, unfortunate canine body odor, and Foley artists adding dramatic baying in post-production.

Folks, "bloodhound" is a breed. "Trailing dog" is a job. The two sets overlap less than some people -- primarily those who sell oversized rheumy-eyed bloodhounds who aren't trained to trail and aren't the offspring of parents who are trained to trail -- want you to believe.

(Also, she crossed water without "losing the scent."  Twice, at least. Sorry, Hollywood. She is neither a Nazgul nor a sixth-grader)

So consider the injustice.

Many people are under the impression that search and rescue personnel get some sort of government support. After all, we only work at the behest of the police or another responsible government agency. We are on call 24 hours a day.  (Friday night's callout was date night for me and Perfesser Chaos. Still haven't seen Les Mis.) So the government pays us, right?

Not right.

Oh, but you get your expenses taken care of -- all that money for training at seminars and conferences and classes, the costs of certification, all that personal equipment, tens of thousands of miles a year on vehicles with gas prices in the stratosphere, and for dog handlers, the expense of buying, feeding, and vetting our partners, thousands of dollars every year.

Yeah, sorry, no. That's out of our personal pockets, too.

Volunteer wilderness search and rescue personnel are the biggest bargain in public safety.  Do your cops work for free? Even volunteer fire and ambulance services get grants from the state, and many services offer expense stipends to their volunteers and have some paid staff.

Not us.

Which is why, twelve hours after earning her cape and bracelets, Rosie was reduced to ...

Reduced to ...

I can't even say it. That's my dogter working the kissing booth there.

 

Lap dance is extra.

It gets worse. The boy shepherds were forced to battle one another for the entertainment of the crowds.

Oh the humanity.

But you, you can spare these hard-working unpaid professional super-heroes from the debasement of further whoring and fighting and begging for the funds it takes to keep a tiny Mountain Rescue unit up and running.

Buy raffle tickets for fabulous prizes. Come to On The Border in Cranberry on Wednesday and spend lavishly. Or just contribute directly to Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group.

Save our canine partners' dignity from the kissing booth and combat arena.

Evvie and the Leaf Zombie

When you are progressing a new pup in SAR work, there are a few rules that help things go well.

One is "One change at a time."

So you don't introduce a time delay in a puppy runaway on the same task that you ask him to find a stranger for the first time. Don't start asking for a refind* the same time you are proofing off chasing deer. Etcetera.

Contrary to the weird fantasies of pop behaviorists, we do not train search dogs inside a windowless white Skinner box, so The Universe has a way of throwing a wrench into this rule. Young Bambi is prone to sit tight and invisible ten feet from your training subject so he can jump screaming from his hiding place just as your pup heads back to you for his first refind.

And you suck it up, improvise, and your puppy, if he is a good prospect, at the very least recovers from the fiasco, and at best surprises you by not giving a rat's fanny and just carrying on. (On his annual review, the boss will select "exceeds expectations.")

One of the forces of impersonal Nature that can conspire against a new pup and handler is a training director afflicted with CRS† who tells you to try your puppy on a fun drill on a totally hidden subject that the big dogs have been doing, forgetting that your puppy has not yet progressed to "blinds" -- she's never searched for a person that she didn't see leaving to hide for her.

Turns out, if you've been doing your motivation work with a receptive learner, doesn't matter.

Especially a student who is a slave to her keen little nose.




Now I know that it is currently fashionable to never ever "stress" a dog in training, and to "stress" a puppy is the same as drop-kicking her.

Evvie is stressed here. She's too young to have had experience of big piles of dry leaves (which are not a normal feature this time of year, but no one told the oak trees in this park or our freakishly dry spring), and the sound -- and perhaps the prospect of being swallowed up -- scare her a little bit.

When Jen does a convincing impression of a Buffy vampire emerging from the grave -- I'm a little freaked out, frankly.

But her nose tells her that there is a person, and her training tells her that getting to that person is the bestest, and the biggest reward she gets from this drill is the experience of overcoming her own disbelief. By gum, the nose doesn't lie! Humans can be totally invisible. And also, big loud piles of leaves probably won't eat me. In fact, they might be a ton of fun.

The point is not to never let a puppy be stressed, scared, stretched and challenged. The point is to start with a temperamentally sound puppy and let her experience and recover from all those things.

You can meet Evvie and her teammates this Saturday, April 13 2013,  at the Pittsburgh Public Market.
____________

* The "refind" is the process by which the SAR dog leaves the person he has just found, returns to the handler, communicates that he has found, and leads the handler back to the found person. We Neanderthals train this after the dog is highly motivated to find and is ranging well in his search work. (Pop-behaviorists and those under their influence "back chain" it while demanding a conditioned signal, separate from the gestalt of search work, often before the dog has the slightest idea about actually searching.)

† Can't Remember Shit

Attention Pixburghers: The Keister You Save May Be Your Own. Also, NACHOS and WALLEYE.

Photo in honor of The Winter Who Didn't Know When to Go.

Time to bang the drums for the Unsung Geeks of the Forest.  If you are in trouble in the woods, gulleys, caves, and cliffs in the Central Appalachian response area, some of the people and dogs who drag themselves out of bed or beg off work to come find and help you are the Nerd Kings of search and rescue -- the doctors, biochemists, engineers, tech-heads and generally overedjimicated dweebs that make up a disproportionate chunk of the roster of Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group.*

Whether they are running experiments on effective sweep width of visual searchers on the Allegheny Plateau, exposing a "technological" fraud, reflexively reprogramming the National Inland SAR School's planning software during class time, geeking out over comms and navigation systems, kludging together a new and improved hypothermia field treatment protocol, or engaging in a lively "discussion" over whether the belay line on this high angle haul system requires a radium release hitch at the anchor -- they never let their obsession with overthinking, hashing out, innovating, debating, even disputing** get in the way with gettin' er done when it's time for action.

They are the teammates who I have trusted with my life -- quite literally at times -- for over eighteen years.  Every one of them a volunteer professional who sacrifices his or her time, money, and ceaseless psychic energy to the mission of saving total strangers. Maybe, one day, you.

Well, radios and GPS units, maps and Ferno litters, trailers and insurance and the Mr. Coffee at the command post aren't free.  So we are having a fundraiser.

Actually, four commingled fundraisers. A fundraising blitz. Fundraise-a-rama. The April of Extreme Fundraising. WHERE TO BEGIN?

Let's start at the climax, the end of the road. And that road is Route 228 in Cranberry Township, just 25 fast highway minutes from glorious downtown Pittsburgh.

Just what it says; print out the flyer (download a PDF here) and come to On The Border on Wednesday, April 17 any time between 11 am and 8 pm. A generous 15% of your total food and drink order will benefit Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group.

Print out a stack of flyers (black and white is fine) and hand them out at work, at school, at your PTA meeting, next to the guy selling roses on the 16th Street Bridge.

Email the link to all the Pittsburghers you know, Facebook it, Tweet it, and if you, too, are mired in geekdom, share it on Google+.  Hey, you non-Burghers can do this too! Have you fled the nest, or just have some friends in Western PA? Send it on, Baby!

I understand that On the Border has some pretty good Tex-Mex food, and am looking forward to guacamole and sangria.

But wait, there's more!

Because we're gonna have a bit of a party at On The Border, culminating at 8 pm in drawing the winning raffle ticket for a Fabulous Lake Erie Fishing Trip.




Yep, the lucky winner will get four hours of professionally-guided fishing for four people -- captain,  boat, tackle, bait and fish-cleaning. Bring your own beer, license, and sunscreen. Tip the mate!

You can fish for these:

 

Or these:

 

Or my personal nomming favorite, these:

That's a $500 value.

Tickets are $5 each.  You can buy them from me by emailing me at houlahan AT zoominternet   DOT the thing with which you will be landing those monster walleye. Or lakers. Or perch. On the day of your choosing (minus those that are already booked, natch.)

I'll mail you your tickets, or send you a scan and hold them for you.

But, sez you, I do not live near enough to Erie, PA to take advantage of this fabulous fishing opportunity.

Aha -- but perhaps you have a friend, family, business contact, or much-admired blogger to whom you could bestow a gift of chartered fishing, were you to be favored by Fortuna with such a prize?

Erie is within two hours of Cleveland, OH; Pittsburgh, PA; Buffalo, NY.

Within three hours or thereabouts: Rochester, NY; Hamilton, ON; Morgantown, WV.

See? Day trip!

But wait, there's more.

You can also buy tickets for the Reel Obsession Lake Erie Fishing Charter from AMRG members at the Pittsburgh Public Market on Saturday, April 13.  We will be at the Market from 9-5, selling tickets, running a SAR dog kissing booth, demonstrating some of our SAR skills, and possibly running a tug-of-war contest at which you may challenge trainee SAR dog Nico.

Just so you know: the tree lost. I am not kidding.

Also at the Public Market, and at On The Border on Wednesday the 17th, we will be selling raffle tickets for a separate raffle with other fabulous prizes that will also be drawn on the 17th. (You do not have to be present to win.)

Prizes will include a round of golf for two at Butler's Golf Course, a NASCAR "racing experience" with Rusty Wallace, a night at the Sun & Cricket B&B, climbing at REI, a canoe trip from The River's Edge, and more coming in every day. The generosity of local businesses and the industry of our fundraising committee has been overwhelming. How about helping to turn that generosity into cash for your friendly neighborhood search and rescue geeks by buying some tickets?

But to get these tickets, you have to show up at the Public Market on April 13 or On The Border on April 17.

 --------------------------

* Postgraduate education is not a requirement for becoming Of The Body. It just seems to sort of happen that way a lot of the time.

** Mommy and Daddy are not fighting, Sweetie. They are just having a discussion. Now go play with your rescue rack.

Welcome Spring!

Yeah, just effing kill me now.

Plan A

Ovines were always Plan A.

But first we needed the fences; those dangly things hanging from rotting landscape timbers that the former owner's barn-sour horses thought were fences certainly wouldn't do.

And the pastures were more shrubbery than graze. They needed browsie beasts to tart them up and get them ready.

So before Brandywine farm got its sheep, it got chickens, guineas, ducks, turkeys, big goats, little goats, barn cats, more dogs than we started with, fruit trees, veggies, berries, asparagus.

Finally, this February, I see an ad for four bred Katahdin yearling ewes, for less than the price of butcher sheep at the auction.

After a few phone calls, conclude that Hell Yes, it is time to start the flock.

The first trick was getting them home. We don't own a pickup truck. Slimer, our vehicular houseguest, does not count, just because I am all snobby about things like functioning master cylinders.

My trailer has a bad bearing, and it was too bloody cold and too bloody troublesome to replace it before heading down to Washington County in the sleet and slush. Plus, poor little sheepies would be cold and scared and ...

So back of the Honda it was:

I fashioned a barrier out of cattle panel and baling twine, and Miss Rosie rode shotgun on the off chance that a passenger might try to breach the cockpit door.

Word of advice.

When transporting unhousebroken ruminants inside a passenger vehicle, make sure that you secure the tarp well.

Not that my twelve-year-old car, which has not had its back seat installed for over three years, was, you know, pristine, but on the few days that it has warmed up since early February -- well, it will never be the same.

They settled in nicely, and the waiting began.

Their owner -- who was only selling them because impending surgery made it impractical for him to deal with his later lambing cohort this year -- thought they would start dropping lambs within the month.

Starting at the end of February, I tied myself to the farm.

I couldn't go down to work with the Pilot Mountain Dogs for my NESR colleagues.

I couldn't help transport young NESR Scout, my new foster dog, so a nice lady and man brought him all the way here from Virginia.

Cute, huh?

May as well have had a GPS anklet and a parole officer.

The beginning of the end arrived this morning, courtesy of Sue the Sheep:

 The speckled little monster is a ram lamb, destined for the freezer in the fall.*

The cafe au lait model is a little ewe who will contribute to the increase of our flocks. By request of FOB Kelly Bahmer-Brouse, we'll be calling her Shaun.

Sue gave no special sign that she was finally ready to blow. She'd been looking like a black tick on toothpicks for over a week. I checked on her at 0100, and all was quiet. By 0600 both big, healthy lambs were born, dry, up and suckling.

My kind of lambing, and a big reason I held out for Katahdin sheep from a healthy, low-maintenance commercial flock.

Alice looks ready to blow any minute; maybe tonight.



-------
* Don't even start with me, okay?

Mr. and Mrs. Dog

Transparency: The author of Mr. and Mrs. Dog and I are personal friends.
I am quoted once, in the chapter "Behaviorism."

Literary career not going so well? Here's the plan:

Impulsively buy a pet dog. Better yet, "rescue" one.

Fail to train him.

Be befuddled by his dogness.

Fetishize ignorance and incompetence. See "sitcom Dad" for a template for your character.

Write a dull memoir about your mid-life crises framed in a narrative about your own indulgent shortcomings at dog ownership. (Dogs are the new Ferrari.)

Cap it, if possible, with the dog's death.*

Sentimentalize the animal.

"Learn" something about yourself.

Trowel on the glurge about how they love us unconditionally.

New-Age aspartame spirituality (optional.)

Finish with grand, sweeping conclusion about What Dogs Mean that is innocent of any mastery of simple information about what dogs are.

Rake it in.

These books sell well to audiences of distracted, sentimental pet owners because they do not challenge any of their prejudices, half-conscious assumptions, or life choices.

I missed the part about the job of stories being to make us feel more complacent.

One reason that dogs know so much more about us than we do about them is that they depend on us. If the person you are living with has total power over when and whether you get to eat or poop, can have your gonads removed, and is legally permitted to have you killed if you piss him off, you will become an excellent observer. See Hegel for more on this.

What most dogs know about most of us is that we are incoherent. They adjust accordingly. The human doesn't even know that he's suffering for and from his own incoherence, so deft is the dog. The human may misidentify the visible portion of the dog's efforts, and conclude that the animal is "difficult" or "troubled."

"We think she was abused ..."

There is another way to write about dogs.

One could put oneself in a position in life where a dog or dogs become necessary. Not "necessary" to shore up a weak psyche -- necessary to achieve some human goal, some important work in a world where there is more action than in, say, a typical New Yorker short story.  Passionately necessary.

That has the effect of improving one's observational skills immensely. Never to be as good as a dog's, but better than you were before. From this follows genuine absorption, self-discipline, knowledge, perspective and insight.

Which is what farmer, novelist, essayist and sheepdogger Donald McCaig shares in Mr. and Mrs. Dog.

This nonfiction account interweaves the narrative of sheepdogs June and Luke's, and handler McCaig's, travels and trialing in preparation for the World Sheepdog Trial in Wales with other travels: visits to four pet dog trainers and a veterinary behaviorist.

Why would a sheepdogger, immersed in work that provides dogs with more coherence than a suburban pet can dream as her feet twitch in pursuit of visions of rabbits, step out of his contained subculture?

A couple years ago, noticing that most top handlers wore shooting glasses, a novice asked Scott Glenn what colored lenses she should buy.

"Rose-colored," Scott deadpanned.

I needed to change my lenses, to learn how to see my dogs afresh. Maybe I could borrow the pet dog trainers' lenses.

To see my dogs better, I needed to learn to see your dog. Funny how things work out sometimes.

The world of sheep and outruns, whistles and angles and drives and fetches -- these all make sense to sheepdogs. The same men and women who created the work have created the dog.

Airplanes and elevators, TSA agents and literary agents, kindergarten classrooms, car wrecks, parades, exam tables, and beaches where No Dogs Allowed is the law of the land -- notsomuch. But all those things are as much a part of June and Luke's world as is a stroppy blackfaced ewe, whether or not they or McCaig would choose for it to be so.

McCaig offers an international buffet in Mr. and Mrs Dog. Interspersed between accounts of sheepdog training and trial runs both triumphant and disastrous, the reader can absorb the philosophical underpinnings of behaviorism, the origin of "obedience training," the bureaucratic derangement and logistical ordeal of bringing a live dog into Britain (a dead horse, in a suitable state of disassemblement, is apparently much easier), descriptions of pet dog-training classes, a media-celebrated dog expert who does not own a dog, and the reason that legends of betrayed dogs, from Gelert and Argos to Raymond Carver, resonate so hard across time.

I have always admired McCaig's facility with descriptions of action, a place where most writers fall down for me as a reader. Perhaps this talent derives from the discipline of the sheepdog trial, the necessity of processing so much action in such a compressed moment, the compulsion to unravel what happened in painstaking detail afterwards, analyze every ear-flick and brood on every error.  Whatever the origin, McCaig can describe a trial run or a training class with the same vivid clarity as he brings to a Civil War battle. The attentive reader will be rewarded. I devoured the nearly 200-page book at one sitting, chewing every bite completely. However, it is likely that a reader who has never seen a sheepdog work or attended a trial will have difficulty visualizing the course and how it is run. (I would refer such a reader to YouTube -- try searching USBCHA trial and ISDS trial. Avoid any videos with "AKC" in the description. Better yet -- find a sheepdog trial near you this year, and make a day of the outing.)

McCaig's even greater strength, whether he is creating a fictional dog or describing a dog he knows well, is in characterization. Most writers' characterizations of dogs are no more than cherry-picked projections. McCaig shows us the real dog, or the portion of the real dog that she chooses to reveal to us. When McCaig projects, it is self-consciously --

 "Are you Max's?" the vet tech smiled at me.

I shook my head no. I didn't think I belonged to any dog, but if I did, I'd probably be Luke's, presently in the car, or June's. She was beside me in the reception room of Tuft's University Foster Hospital for Small Animals.

June eyed the big and little pet dogs and their humans. June yawned. June didn't want Donald to be hers: she had enough on her plate. Besides, how would she feed him?

 -- or, in hindsight, self critically. Luke is a "blockhead." The reader learns what that label really signifies only much later, just as McCaig does.

What it signifies is human assumptions, and ignorance, and the ways that we fail our dogs as they do their level best not to fail us, no matter how unreasonable our expectations.

It doesn't require a dabbling literary dilettante to fail a dog, in large ways or small. Real dog men and women carry the scars of their failures like tribal tattoos. The question that haunts every handler of every working dog is, and will always be, "What would she have been if she'd had a better handler?"

In contrast, the accounts of pet dog trainers and their pet methods strike me as inhibited, overly polite. McCaig brings the courtesy of a guest rather than the scalpel of an investigator to his subjects -- Tony Ancheta, Behesha Doan, Wendy Volhard, Pat Miller. The reader must fill in too much; doable for a trainer or hobbyist who knows the landscape of that minefield, a challenge for the civilian who does not. Only McCaig's interview with pill-pushing veterinarian Nicholas Dodman presents a clear author's point of view about his subject.

McCaig set out to put on new lenses with which to see his dogs -- not to revolutionize his entire image of them, but to change the tint and see if any new textures or details stuck out.

Most dog owners don't depend on their dogs for necessities, and most dogs do not help out at lambing, apprehend bad guys, serve a disabled master, find lost children, flush pheasants, or even keep the premises rat-free. Nevertheless, dog owners ask a lot of their dogs, sometimes impossible things, without being aware that they are doing so.

Even the owner of a Chihuahua blinking and shivering in her pink sweater would do well to try out the lenses worn by those who consciously ask everything of their dogs, and are keenly attuned to the gravity of those demands.

Have the highest expectations, do the work, and your dog can walk at your side anywhere on earth. He'll become the dog you've empowered to change your life.

-------------------
* Bonus points, apparently, if you are the one who actually kills the dog. Yes, that's you, Jon Katz.

I believe I do not wish any of the pie

But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much— especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him—and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub—business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day”—and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude! 

It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, “I believe I do not wish any of the pie.” 

Roughing It, Chapter 5

Mark Twain

Perfesser Chaos wants to know how Samuel Clemens knew about sonic booms in 1872.