Snapshot Saturday: Her Dorkness, Lady Mayor of Dorkville

Lady is five months old. She is constructed entirely from legs, tail, and schnozz.  She has no earthly idea where her feet are located, as every morning she wakes up and they have once again migrated.

Although they like her, all the adult dogs can read the Kick Me sign that Nature has painted on her ass.  They regard this as a kind of sacred duty. Face Mecca and flatten the puppy five times a day.

I think this stage is among the most charming in puppydom. No more issues about wee-wee on the rug, minimal discussions about chewing That Which Is Not Yours, but hours of comic relief as the Lady Mayor trips on the stairs, runs into trees, flees crabby chickens, and generally rules Dorkville with a benign and ridiculously outsized paw. 

What? What about my ears?

Lady is living in free-range foster in Southwest Pennsylvania, and looking for her forever home via National English Shepherd Rescue. There is no earthly reason she needs to stay here in foster. It's not fair for us to bogart all the puppy amusement.

Choosing and Raising a Small Farm Dog: Short Form

By request from many of the wonderful participants at my farm dog presentations at the Mother Earth News Fair on Saturday, I have uploaded my powerpoint slides to the web. You can find the presentation here.

I added notes to the presentation, since the slides are mostly just mnemonic cues for me while I'm gabbling and a chance to put in some pretty pictures . The notes don't show up when you view the powerpoint online, but should if you download it. The urls for further resources are there on the slides.

After the Roseannadannas are all launched (I'm at three today, it will be two by Thursday) and I'm done feeling sorry for myself and moping around, I'll have more to say on this, concentrating more specifically on English shepherds, with in-depth information about health concerns, intelligence-gathering before purchase, and how to find an ES whose specific temperament is right for your farm and home.

Not Your Stick

Ernie about to be introduced to a
hitherto obscure Law of Nature

Cole has taken on our latest foster, young Ernie, as an interesting project.

There wasn't much for him to do in the first week Ernie was with us. The New Guy was living a very restricted life -- tied to me, on a long line on walks, kenneled, in a crate, or gated into a room with me where my eyeballs were always on him. This is how it normally starts with fosters here.

Ernie got opportunities to play outdoors a bit, after dark, when the poultry had gone to bed. He and Cole played keepaway in the front, running round the landscaping bed that is overgrown with mint. In our house, only fosters wear jingly tags -- helps me keep track of them.

Without a sound cue, Ernie appeared to believe that every time Cole disappeared around the other end of the mint island and froze, he had disappeared off the face of the earth. He'd stand and whine until Cole would sneak around into sight and recommence the game.

On Friday, I took the leash off during daylight for the first time. All the dogs were hanging around near the two big maple trees above the house. No poultry close by, so I was confident I would have time to intervene if Ernie forgot the chicken manners he'd been learning while on the long line.

After a short romp, Cole settled down to enjoy chewing a stick.

Or so it would appear to the casual observer.

What he was actually doing was writing and executing a lesson plan, conceptualized in the form a game.

The name of the game is Not Your Stick. The rules of Not Your Stick are simple: That stick? Not yours. That other stick over there? Also, not yours. The stick so small you think I can't see it? Nope, not yours. (Click the little speech-balloon icon lower left for captions.)



To a decontextualized observer, what this looks like is just Cole being a little shit. And he is certainly capable of being just that.

Since Ernie landed in foster largely due to his previous failure to appreciate the twin principles of Not Yours and Keep Your Mouth off of Not Yours, I was more interested in seeing where this would go. I'd had several opportunities to correct Ernie for putting his mouth on things that did not belong to him in the house, and he'd taken the correction well, seeming to contemplate this new information without being overly worried or sensitive. And Cole not only stopped short of overt bullying; he gave the impression of conscientiousness in his titration of timing, pressure, and display.

After Cole explained the Not Yours principles to Ernie using four or five sticks in order to achieve generalization, he allowed Ernie to pick up a stick and retired a short distance away, and benignly observed him enjoying a good chew.

This lasted only a few minutes. All the during the lesson, my flock of curious, friendly, and exceedingly naive turkey poults had been working their way towards the field of play. This would be Ernie's first off-leash encounter with poultry.

He took the bait.

Just as I opened my mouth to correct him, Cole ran forward, blocked him, and sent him in the other direction. Cole is my turkey hound -- he not only herds the turkeys, drives the turkeys away from forbidden areas, plays a silly game with the adult toms, and brings the turkeys home when they stray, he protects the turkeys from predators, cars, and their own suicidal stupidity. Turkeys are his special responsibility.

Cole decided that young turkeys needed to stay in the shrubberies and were not to come out and mingle with dogs in the mowed area. He trotted the boundary until the turkeys relented and moved back into the weeds.

Ernie did not challenge the rule that these were emphatically Not Your Turkeys. He came back towards me and fawned on Pip and Rosie while Cole moved the flock.

He not only absorbed the lesson, he passed the pop quiz at the end of class.

Take Two, They’re Small

It was a great compliment to a newly-minted dog handler to be asked by my training mentor to evaluate a litter of puppies to identify the search and rescue prospects.*

The big litter of superficially near-identical black German shepherds was from her own breeding, offspring of two SAR dogs. The buyers were a family from Pennsylvania who already owned two of her dogs, both operational SAR dogs. It was time for them to start bringing along a new pup to eventually succeed their oldest bitch.

After messing with the pups for the better part of a day -- observing the litter interact amongst themselves, taking them out one at a time for some formal puppy tests and informal play and mild stress, watching them move -- I arrived at the same answer that their breeder had. “Either of these two bitch puppies is an excellent prospect. And I can find no reason to prefer one over the other. I think they might be actual identical twins.”

A few days later Martha and Dan, SAR dogs JT and Schatten, and Martha’s two teenage boys arrived in an SUV the size of a city block, to visit for a few days, train, and choose their new puppy.

I liked them. We had a lot of fun navigating the baffling New Hampshire topography behind Annabella’s cabin. It was refreshing to cross-pollinate with handlers from another unit who were not using the interaction as an opportunity to gain local political advantage or attempt a mean-spirited alpha roll on the New Kid.

Martha agreed about the two bitch puppies. She spent three days with them, and could find nothing to favor one pup over the other. So she took them both.

Annabella tried to talk her out of this course of action, but in the end relented. Martha and Dan insisted that each one would train a pup.

Less than a year later, Perfesser Chaos took a new job. We packed up Lilly, two cats, all our crap, and the lives we had started in New England and relocated, Clampett-like, to Pittsburgh. We weren’t close enough to Martha to join her SAR unit, but it was nice having a friend and guide in the general area. Their spacious home, set back in the woods near the Laurel Ridge, was our rural refuge, as Annabella’s Unabomber cabin had once been.

Things were not going as one would hope with the puppies, Lauren and Danielle.†

They were still physically indistinguishable (to me) -- color-coded collars were a necessity. But one puppy (I cannot remember which one, seventeen years later) had taken on the role of leader, the other of follower. It was fortunate that the dichotomy was as strong as it was; that’s probably what spared that family the fun of littermate bitches deciding to kill one another at unpredictable intervals.** The fact of the relationship -- the absolute need that dogs have to define their roles relative to their packmates -- cause the identical puppies’ personalities to diverge much more dramatically than they would have under other circumstances.

I cannot remember a single dog who was raised with her mother to adulthood who could be successfully trained for a Guide Dog. Where two litter mates are raised together in the same home we have had the same results. Puppies raised in homes where there are dogs not related to them have never been affected this way by the association with other dogs ... In the case of two litter mates raised together, one becomes a successful candidate for Guide Dog work and one fails, even if their aptitude tests were equal.

Clarence Pfaffenberger
The New Knowledge of Dog Behavior
Howell Book House, 1964 (p. 125)

Lauren and Danielle presented a classic picture of this kind of squandered potential, except that neither were heading for the success promised by their early puppy profiles. They were co-dependent, whining and pacing incessantly whenever separated from one another, even if one of the other dogs was there. Their obedience and general response to human leadership was sketchy at best. I would not consider them housetrained. They barely paid attention to what their humans wanted. They lacked the aura of intelligence and awareness that JT exuded. And neither puppy was all that committed to working. The noses functioned, but the fire did not blaze.

Indeed, at a year of age, they were still “the puppies.” At two, three years of age, “the puppies.” No real progress towards operational status that I could see, and general arrested development compared to their own older dogs, and other SAR dogs of the same cohort.

One divorce and many life changes later, Martha and Dan split up “the puppies.” Each ex-spouse went away with one good older SAR dog and one unfocused, slightly neurotic, unfulfilled young pet. Neither ever fielded a second SAR partner.

Well what does all that matter to me? you say, I just want dogs as pets.

Two puppies will keep one another company, so I can go to work and not feel guilty. It’s a lot of fun watching them play with one another. And they never have to go through the full trauma of leaving their first family. They’ll be friends all their lives, so we don’t have to identify other dogs with whom they can socialize. Throw in a fenced yard -- no need for time-consuming leash walks.

Oh the temptations.

If I wasn't so aware of the number of hits this post is likely to receive from people looking for validation for a decision to buy two puppies, I'd give you the phone number of the clients who called me two weeks into their two-puppy adventure. They were "smart." They didn't buy littermates (partly because they had a thought of breeding the two German shepherd pups in the future.) They got a big robust bitch puppy and a smaller, more retiring dog puppy who was a week or so younger, from a different breeder. The two pups commenced ignoring every human directive, enticement, and entreaty, while the bigger pup began mercilessly bullying the smaller one.

When they called me, this couple who had successfully raised three children had not slept in a fortnight. I felt as if I'd come to help the parents of quadruplets who were both suffering from post-partum depression.

I was able to help quite a bit with puppy management, training, general stress levels. This was a couple who really wanted to do right by their dogs, had high expectations of them, and had found themselves completely unprepared for the onslaught.

I’m down to one Indiana Plague Puppy; Donna went home this morning. They are about 13 weeks old now, several weeks older than the optimum age for going to their permanent homes. Puppy care just got harder.

Four puppies was herding a troupe of striped-assed baboons. Two puppies are half as many as four -- half as much poop, half as much cuddling, half as much training, half as many little ferrets diving for the door or scattering like cockroaches when I needed to contain them.

Two puppies is not, however, twice as many as one. I haven’t yet suffered through a sleepless night of foresaken wailing. I could gate the two of them in the puppy-resistant kitchen for long periods and they entertained one another. I called the puppies, and if one was inclined to come to me, the other almost invariably followed. If I corrected a pup for mouthing me while she was in a ripping frame of mind, she just turned to her sister and piled on -- redirection always available..

In short, raising two puppies rather than one makes it easy and apparently consequence-free to neglect them both. It is the canine developmental equivalent of parking the toddler in front of Gilligan’s Island with a bag of gummi worms and a loaded diaper.

He’s not just less likely to get into Stanford in the long-term; he’s significantly more likely to treat you to phone calls from the school principal and later, the police chief. Or, better yet, to be living in the basement eating your Hot Pockets when he's 35.

I departed from the easy path in several ways. I separated the pups for some period of time every day, taking them each out for leash walks that were, from the standpoint of exercising puppies, entirely gratuitous. They ate from separate bowls, spent time in separate crates, had separate lap-times. But mostly, they were “the puppies.” Neither had launched out of her natal pack and into a new life in a human family.

There are things they ideally should have started learning at seven weeks -- the age at which they found themselves in the dog pound, riddled with cooties, and still a week from coming into foster care where we could begin to address their vetting and start matching them with potential adopters.

It’s neither wise nor productive to unleash two uncivilized puppies -- much less four of them -- into a non-puppy-proofed area of the house. While you are rescuing a shoe from one varmint, another one is behind the TV eating power cord. Whisk one outside when she circles and sniffs, and her brother is makes a deposit to greet you at the door on the way back in. So they lived in the kitchen and did not learn to leave my stuff alone and ask to go out.

One puppy sat sweetly for a treat or attention, another jumped on her head and started gnawing as the human reached down. Each learned that sitting sweetly for what she wants is asking for an ambush -- much better to keep leaping on my legs like a wild heathen.

Shout NO as a pup engages in suicidal or criminal misconduct, and his sister who was innocently playing with a new toy is hit with discipline shrapnel. Uh oh, maybe I shouldn’t play with my toy. Or, maybe this “No” thing is overhyped, and I can ignore it.

One puppy runs from the giant rattling monster garbage bin that is chasing her down the driveway, and her sister concludes that it must be terribly dangerous, and follows in retreat. The fact that the grown-up dogs and the human aren’t a bit worried about this thing doesn’t get through the collective puppy panic.

As a result, the last two girlpuppies were, as of 6 a.m., pig-ignorant barbarians compared to any single pup we have raised. The latest we have ever had littermates together was eleven weeks. At thirteen weeks, the girls were on the verge of overripe; when they had the rips, they were about as tame and approachable as these:


Which, frankly, they closely resembled in more ways than I care to contemplate.



The developmental window for primary socialization and learning has not closed. They will be just fine. And they are still miles ahead of our group-raised ONB puppies, some of whom were with their littermates to the age of eight or nine months.

One or two more weeks of litter-living, though, and these pups would be courting real developmental challenges.

Starting today I am sucking it up and raising one puppy properly, as if she was my own, until she goes to her permanent home. The adult dogs -- trained, civilized,‡ full members of a human family with all the privileges and duties attendant thereof -- act as uniform assets in the pup’s upbringing. They teach her things that can be best, or only, learned from another dog, and they reinforce the policies and procedures of the human household. But the real work will be down to me and PC. Little Susie is Canis lupus familiaris, not plain ol’ C. lupus. She needs to look to human beings for her physical needs, play, direction, leadership, an explanation of her world. As her foster humans, it's our duty to prepare her to keep doing that all her life.

And Miss Susie is already doing this; there is a dramatic change in her compared to last night. I liked her before; now I really enjoy her puppy company.

Here's some free unsolicited advice:

Never buy or adopt two puppies the same age to raise together. Especially littermates. Especially same-sex littermates.

Do. Not.

Here's some more:

If you are a breeder, or place puppies for adoption, never sell or adopt two same-age puppies to one home.

Never. Ever.††

You don't see that "never" here very often. Here's how important I think this is: It is more unwise to buy two well-bred puppies from a breeder who raises them skillfully and lovingly, and bring those puppies up together in the same household, than it is to buy a puppy from the deli case at Petland.

A breeder worth her salt knows this. She won't sell you a set. She most certainly won't offer, suggest, market, discount or hard-sell pups in pairs. Wanna test the balance between a breeder's behavioral savvy and her walletitis? Ask her to sell you two at once. If she says O-tay, walk away clean.

_______________________

* In retrospect, this may have been one of Annabella’s characteristically opaque Zen master lessons about what she thought I had actually done right with my first SAR dog, a truth that I later discerned about myself: I’m a fair to-middling-trainer. What I am good at is selecting puppy prospects who can withstand ham-fisted management, beginner’s mistakes, bad training methodologies, rotten timing, and the whole litany of handler incoherence -- pups who are nearly idiot-proof.

† Martha had a husband named Dan, a son named Dan -- why not just go with it again? Yell out “Dan!” and see how many beings answered.

** Two bitches in the same household who have each decided that the other needs to Go Away Permanently are among the least-favorite projects that face any dog trainer. When those two bitches are littermates whose owners earnestly believe they should loooove one another because they are sisters -- chewing up and swallowing a box of lightbulbs with a Betadine chaser ranks higher on the list of things to do today.

‡ And Sophia. Sigh. She is as God made her.

†† Of course not. Pack hounds. Buy whole litters of 'em and keep 'em in the kennel. It's all good. Carry on. I'm talking about pets, and working dogs that are not pack-hunting hounds.

Also, does not apply to cats. Kitten pairs work well, especially for owners who need them to be contented indoor latchkey kitties.

The Word for Puppy is Blue Bear

When Hope and the four Indiana Plague Puppies first arrived, Cole did not know what to do with them.

Well, Hope was no problem. They said hello, sniffed butts, and fell in companionably. You're a bitch, I'm a dog, we speak the same dogalect, okay, whatever.

But he'd had little experience with very young puppies, and wasn't sure what was the protocol. They certainly seem to be the sort of creatures with which one plays -- but how? And am I going to get in trouble for getting it wrong?*

He started, wisely enough, with keepaway. The chase me, I've got a prize game avoided the pitfalls of wrestling -- one was neither being perforated by scores of needle teeth nor risking a Momma-delivered ass-kicking for inadvertently squashing a tyke.

And he likes keepaway. He'll play it with sticks, plastic water bottles, pine cones, turkey feathers -- anything that is handy.

But not with the pups.

Before the pups arrived here, I set aside a nice pile of different types of dog toys -- rubber, fabric, rope, tennis balls, plush -- for them. I also bought three new toys for them -- a vinyl baby's tub toy, a squeaky plush bone, and a squeaky plush blue bear or man or something. Possibly Manbearpig. Let's call it a bear.

When Cole wants to play keepaway with the puppies outside, he runs back inside through the dog door, goes to the kitchen, and comes out with one of the new toys. Always. For a month he has been playing with the pups -- four, then three, now two pups -- and if the game is keepaway, it is one of these puppy-specific toys every time. Usually the blue bear.

He quickly went from being nervous about intimate contact with young puppies to quite comfortable. He's Uncle Cole now, supervising the pups whenever they are outside, ensuring that they don't get carried off by owls. The last two pups have the run of the kitchen now; the gates impede the free flow of adult dogs to the front door, so they go out the dog door in the back. When I open the front door from the kitchen to take them out, he dashes out the dog door, gallops around the house, and meets us on the porch, ready for duty. He plays lots of other games with them now, but they still play some keepaway every day.

This week PC has started letting the pups tag along for his morning chores with Sophia. It's great fun for him, and the pups discharge some of their evil and aren't rioting quite so badly in the mornings. I can indulge in luxuries like getting dressed and a few household tasks before taking them out, and the pups are content to play in the kitchen. But they aren't the only interested parties.

This morning I became absorbed reading something upstairs in the bedroom; Cole was being a bit nebby, but I didn't pay any attention to him. Which was the problem. He had something to say.

He ran downstairs and shot out the dog door, returning a few minutes later with the ice-encrusted blue bear. Sat in front of me and poked my knee with it.

I want to play with the puppies. Let them out.

I'm not sure what sense of propriety led Cole to the conviction that the blue bear, the tub toy, and the squeaky bone (which has been missing, probably in a snow drift, for some time now) are the only objects suitable for puppy keepaway. It doesn't surprise me that he put those three objects in their own category. This is the pup who found and identified a box of old dog toys in the clutter of our barn only days after arriving from a kennel life in which every object he could access was a dog toy. He didn't touch any of the tools, flowerpots, backpacking gear, gadgets and miscellaneous junk piled up there, but dove into the box of dog toys and started ransacking it until he found the best one.

One element of Cole's single-trial learning is a stubborn adherence to precedent. If something happens a certain way once, it takes considerable persuasion to convince him to do it differently going forward.

When I first brought him into the house to live, I took him into the bathroom with me when I took a shower, to keep him out of trouble. One time. A year and a half later, his nickname is still Bathmat. I'll never shower alone.

Whomever taught him the down command used a treat lure. He always got a treat, and it was always accompanied by a luring motion.

Took me six weeks to break that association and convince him that he could down without a bribe or a luring motion. But in the training session where he finally shed this acquired superstition, he learned to instantly fold onto his haunches like a penknife, at any distance from me, in about five minutes.

So I'm not really surprised that, having once decided that the toys that arrived at the same time as the pups are the obligate "playing with the puppies" toys, Cole has stuck with that association.

I got the message, and went downstairs to let the pups out, assuming that Cole was telling me that he wanted to play Blue Bear Keepaway with them.

He dashed out the back door and met us on the porch. No bear. He'd left it inside. They ran off to play some other game, maybe "Chew on Uncle's Tail" or "Dig Fruitlessly for Voles."

In the inner life of Cole, the blue bear -- his first means of interacting with the pups -- had become the symbol for playing with the puppies, or, quite possibly, the symbol for the puppies themselves.

Generous little being that he is, Cole assumed that I was clever enough to understand his symbol. Or at least, he thought it was worth a try.

Tell me again that only human animals use language.

__________

* Nervousness and outright fear of little puppies is perfectly normal for adult and adolescent dogs. I call it "Baby bear / Momma bear" syndrome. Sure, the baby bear is cute, but touch it and its mother is going to come charging out of the shrubbery and eat you. Better to run away.

Snapshot Sunday: Sibling Rivalry

The Indiana Plague Puppies duke it out to see who gets her very own Barry White.

Because you are all teh awesome, video to come.

I Don't Have to Gouge Out His Eyes After All!

Dear Heather,

During the BISSELL MVP Photo Contest, we aim to create a fun and fair experience for all contest participants. We have measures in place to detect votes that violate our contest rules, and have unfortunately discovered a number of invalid votes for some of the voting period 1 and 2 winners.

We removed the invalid votes for the voting period 1 and 2 winners and as a result, your dog, Cole is now the 5^th place winner for Voting Period 2.

Cole will also advance to the semi-finals for our new pet model selection, which will take place in April.

For more information, please refer to the contest rules, specifically section 6A. We apologize that your winning pet was not announced sooner and have implemented more stringent security measures to ensure we do not announce winners before the validation process is complete in future weeks.

Sincerely,

The BISSELL MVP Team

Edit: Remember, every day this week, Vote for Skye

Equal Time

It has come to our attention on this, the last day that you can vote for Cole, that the Fairness In Blogging Act of 2007 requires us to air a rebuttal by those who oppose Cole's candidacy for the office of Bissell Most Valuable Pet 2011.

As it happens, foster puppies Bob, Susie, Amy and Donna brought some friends with them when they came to stay at Brandywine Bone 'n' Breakfast. Quite a few friends. So many friends that one is moved to wonder how puppies so young could have networked so effectively and developed such a fanatical and loyal cadre of little buddies. So without further editorial intrusion, we present the spokescritters for the "No on Cole 2011" campaign.

A guy's just minding his own business, just hanging in there as it were, a lot of his efforts going down the shitter, but getting by, and along comes some snob like Cole with all his being shiny and not stinking and never having things that look like rice crawling around his ass. Like he's so great. His supporters claim that he was born in Montana and has the common touch, even used to hang out with guys like me, but have you ever seen a birth certificate? Let me answer that for you No You Have Not! Look at the name -- an "English" shepherd. And claiming to be a "Canine Good Citizen?" That dog is not even a regular citizen. He's not eligible for the office of MVP.


When Cole is defeated in the MVP election, we are going to take back what is ours. Starting with Bob's leg. And then on to Mrs. Evans' second-grade class. Cole's compulsory plan to apply zymox to our homes and workplaces is nothing less than socialism.


National English Shepherd Rescue is a known terrorist organization. It harbors all kinds of dangerous extremists. I have documentation here that proves that it has directly funded the deployment of chemical weapons -- referred to by the code names Revolution and Frontline -- on innocent civilian populations. Cole has pledged his MVP salary to this den of subversives. If you vote for Cole, the terrorists win. Also, I can see Russia from Susie's left ear, you betcha.

Cole is on-record as favoring firm, well-formed, and moderately infrequent poop. The Bible tells us that we are to go forth and multiply and then be expelled in a burst of mucous-and-blood-tinged diarrhea every hour or so. Cole and his so-called "science" is a threat to our traditional way of life and the values we hold dear.


Tax and spend, tax and spend, all those Cole-sponsored government entitlements for Safeguard. It's people like Cole and his lapdogs at NESR that are bankrupting this country with ridiculous runaway appropriations squandered on veterinarians and gas and pull fees at dog pounds. It's got to stop now! But hands off the kibble budget. You have to keep the kibble coming right on through Amy's gastrointestinal tract -- that's our right as Americans!

If Rosie Can Walk on Water

GPS track of a short trail I did with Rosie at training last week.
Aged about four hours.

Some pup, trailing across Lake Arthur* that way, eh?

As Perfesser Chaos set out on skis to lay the trail, our teammate Rebecca -- who had declined to emulate Our Lord And Savior yada yada yada -- asked me how we expertly determined when the ice was thick enough to walk (or ski) on.

Oh hell, I dunno. I just watch to see if there are ice fishermen and tracks, if there's snow on the ice. And it had been bloody damned cold for a while.

At the end of training, after the trail had aged in the stiff wind for several hours** and I prepared to run it with Rosie, I did start to wish I had made myself a set of these guys. Wondered whether the snowshoes that more safely distributed my weight would also trap me underwater with their drag. Happy thoughts!

Strange that a claustrophobe such as yours truly can cheerfully negotiate cave crawls so tight that one must exhale before pushing forward a few inches, but the thought of all that cold water under my feet was intrusive and gave me serious wiggums. When I'm frustrated about some weird fear or obscure superstition that has a dog hung up, and wishing I could figure out what was going on in his furry brain, it pays to remember that I can't even fully delve my own tangled neurons and force them to make sense. Or even explain why they don't make sense.

My goal for the task was to present Rosie with a trail where there was absolutely no terrain or vegetation to hold the scent.

Of course, there's no avoiding the fact of the ski tracks and their visual cue. If there had been lots of falling snow or hard-blowing powdery snow, they might be filled in after some hours of aging, but there wasn't. So PC started out in a tramped out trail used by ice fishermen and then diverged from it when it turned more northerly. The older, more traveled trail was downwind of his, so it did present a little challenge at the divergence -- the ridges of the sled tracks held as much scent as PC's ski tracks, and significantly more scent than the smooth snow just downind of them. Rosie did great on that.

PC bushwhacked through a dense pine plantation on the east shore, and then cut back to the other side and up through some fairly thick woods to finish. Nice short trailing task with an interesting technical challenge. Also, I used a small keychain multi-tool that had been sitting out for a scent article, so that was a nice challenge. Should have been. Rosie has mad scent-article skillz, so it didn't faze her a bit.

When Rosie finds something challenging or somehow unsatisfactory about a trail she -- and I know this will come as a shock to those who have met her -- talks about it.

Bitches about it, at rhythmic intervals, all the while working her fuzzy butt off.

The smooth going afforded by the lake ice allowed me to capture this on the video setting of my regular camera, which happened to be secreted within my fleece layers.

Video starts around 2/3 of the way across the ice on the return leg.



So here's my question, for all who read this post today, the day it is posted, or tomorrow, Tuesday, which are the last two days you can vote for Cole and help him win big money for National English Shepherd Rescue --

If a snarky, loudmouthed little bitch (and her dog, too) can track across a lake -- the scary cold lake -- to make a video for you to watch, then can you take a few seconds to register, a few seconds to click, and a few minutes to harass your friends to vote for Cole and help more dogs in need make it out alive?

We're down to the wire here. Vote tallies do not seem high enough to launch him into the finals unless we have an exponential surge today and tomorrow. So vote for Cole. We're not asking you to walk on water.
_____________

* Okay peanut gallery, smart guys, tell us why the water is pinky-purple on the map. (Yes this is one I always pose to my map & compass students.)

** We don't make our subjects sit at the end of the trail while it ages. PC did several training tasks in areas west and north of his trail during this period, then returned to a hiding spot at the end of it when it was time for us to run it.

Don't Look Back

Just remember to Vote For Cole and Campaign for Cole today.

The Four Puppies of the Poopocalypse

Why only three puppies? Because in all photos of three puppies, puppy #4 is attempting to murder me via tripping.

I have always insisted that it would take a pistol held to my head to persuade me to deliberately breed a winter litter.

I leave it to you to define the brand of insanity that had me declaring "No problem! I'll take 'em!" when someone else "allowed" a winter litter to come into the world, then decided that they were too much unprofitable trouble and it would be the dog pound's problem now.

Since the fuzzbutts were apparently born in a hole under a corn crib around Thanksgiving time, they came to me well-acclimated to the normal winter cold. They could spend plenty of daylight time in the three-sided pole-building and its attached outdoor play yard, processing their anthelmintic and pooping out all the little gut friends they brought with them in a place where the critters would freeze immediately. Nice place for the spot-on flea treatment to do its work, too.

Now, notsomuch. About twenty minutes playing outside is their limit since it turned relentlessly, bitterly cold Thursday night.

While I sanitize the basement pen, they profane the kitchen. Then we reverse the procedure. They do hit the newspapers 90% of the time, but there is still constant clean up. Nothing like seeing a brilliant lil' pup half wake up from her nap, toddle over to the newspaper, carefully make her deposit, and then walk right through it on her way to go run circles around the kitchen table.

Oh, also, we no longer take a dead-tree paper. The nice people at the newstand in town gave me a decent stack, as did the clerk at the gas station, but supplies are getting low. Help!*

They sure are cute on their walkies, though. Experienced puppy-aunt, GSD Sophia, comes with us now, and they all play hound-pack and coyote, whether Sophia wants to or not. I think she experiences it much like this. This gives Momma Hope a break from the kids. She chooses to use her Me time walking at my heel. A true ES velcro dog.

I bet you all would love to break the cabin fever with video footage of adorable ES fuzzbutts romping in a winter wonderland.

And I would love to show it to you. Really I would.

But we're still lacking momentum in the quest to help young Cole win $10,000 for National English Shepherd Rescue.

You know -- the guys who made it possible to for Momma Hope and her babies to get out of the dog pound alive? The folks footing the bills and finding the adopters? The leanest, most talented, focused, and effective breed rescue group on the planet? The ones who brought us a living, loving, laughing Cole instead of "This one fails his 'temperament test,' pass the needle?"

Those guys?

Or, you know, we could let HSUS or ASPCA or Best Friends -- with their massive mailing lists, social media machines, full-time PR departments, and zombie armies -- use the $10K for some more teevee ads or private airplane fuel.

So you want to know the secret chili ingredient, you want adorable puppy video -- then make it happen.

Vote for Cole today, tomorrow, Monday and Tuesday -- once a day, every day. Everyone in your house.

And campaign for Cole on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, message boards, email lists, and by email-bombing your friends. Do it now. Every day lost is another day that the people you haven't browbeaten can't cast their votes.

Because Cole can't win the beauty contest and help more of his relatives unless he first at least places in the popularity contest.

________

*FOB (Friend o' the blog) Gina Spadafori has suggested a bumper sticker: "Save Our Newspapers -- Because It's Hard To Raise Puppies Without Them"

Word.

Can we Hope to Change the voting tally?

Cole is not getting nearly enough votes in what we here at Brandywine Bone & Breakfast think of as the Vacuum Cleaners for English Shepherds Sweepstakes.

Please don't make the nice people in the Bissell marketing department choose between a selection of eyeless cats when all is said and done. Because sure, we love our animals no matter what their handicap, but fact is, advertising models are not supposed to make the viewer jump back and shriek "Gaaah! What happened to him?!"

The sneaky spying statcounter tells me that lots of you blog readers aren't taking a few seconds and going to the Bissell site to vote for Cole.

I guess you are not only uninterested in yesterday's Secret Ingredient, but you don't want to see photos and video of effing adorable English shepherd puppies, either.

Adorable English shepherd puppies whose vet bills are not being covered by The Rescue Fairy.

Remember, it's Chicago-style voting -- early and often. Vote for Cole every day.

More important, get your friends, co-workers, and family to vote for Cole. Tweet him, Facebook him, have your Grandma post him on MySpace, email-bomb your contacts. Get him into the finals, and he'll do the rest. Don't just vote for Cole -- I'm asking you to Campaign for Cole.

In case you haven't grokked the pattern, this is Raised by Wolves' version of a PBS pledge week. Except we're not asking for any money, just a few seconds of your time. And I promise you, I can be just as annoying as Nina Totenberg with a travel mug.

Chili, Interrupted

Everyone who has tasted it wants to know how to make my chili.

Seriously. Everyone.

So here it is, almost, as you shall see.

You start the night before with a couple-three pounds of dried small red chili beans, or half and half the small red chili beans and pink beans.

Don't use kidney beans, and whatever you do, don't even try using canned beans. Dried small red chili beans, and/or pink beans. Most supermarkets have them in the section with Mexican foods if they aren't with all the other dried beans. I buy them at the East End Food Co-op or one of the stores in Pittsburgh's Strip that sell Mexican foods or bulk dry goods.

You rinse the dust off of 'em, pick out any little rocks. (How do the rocks get into the beans? Seriously, how? I never have this problem when I dry beans at home.) Then put them in a great big stockpot and soak overnight in cold water.



Before you go to bed, and before midnight, you get online, go to the Bissell MVP contest website, and vote for Cole.

Next day, pour out the soaking water, rinse the beans well, and refill the pot. Bring the pot to a boil and then simmer for maybe half an hour. Pour out the boiling water, rinse well again, add fresh water, and bring the beans back to a boil, then simmer.


When the beans are just done -- just about the texture that you want in your finished chili -- discard the second pot of boil water and rinse one last time.

Seriously -- two changes of water, both discarded, you won't regret it, because these beans will taste good and will not give you gas. They will not get any softer after you add the acid ingredients (tomatoes, tomato paste, wine).


Take a break, get online, and go vote for Cole, because you can vote once every day, and really, you ought to, oughtn't you?

While the beans are cooking, get out your biggest frying pan. Chop up three or four medium storage onions, chop or press about four or five big garlic cloves, and fry them up until the onions are wilted and a little bit brown.


I usually use peanut oil for frying, but this time I used lard. Yeah, lard. Because I serve the chili at parties and to guests a lot, and a fair number of people have peanut allergies. Nobody has a lard allergy. If you are making the veggie version, duh, don't use lard. Also, skip the next bit.

While the onions are frying, cut up about three pounds of beef or venison. This time I used chuck roast. Venison is better, but not everyone will eat it, so this batch is all beef. Cube the meat about the size of a die -- much smaller than for stew. (This is easier if the meat is partly frozen.)

Remove the puppy from your shoelace. Wash your hands. Use soap!


Put the onions aside. Brown the cubed meat.

Put the browned, cubed meat aside with the onions. Brown about three pounds of ground beef or venison.

Why, you ask, do you not brown the onions and all the meat together? Good question. Because I've got some big-ass frying pans, but none big enough to cook all that stuff in one go.

Throw the meat and onions in with the the rinsed, cooked beans. At this point I divide everything in half and start a second stock pot, because leftovers are everything with this chili, and there's no point making a small batch. Two big stockpots full make enough for a couple of dinners plus about five quarts of frozen or canned chili for later.

If you don't have two big stockpots, then just use half as much of everything.

Now add a quart or two of beef stock. (Use vegetable stock or miso if you are making the veggie version.) I use either homemade beef stock or this stuff,


which is not cheap hydrolyzed fake stuff, but real concentrated beef stock. For this batch I used some of each because I used up the last of the homemade.

Step carefully around the obstruction that limits access to both sink and stove.


Put the pot with the beans and stock back on the flame (low heat) and start throwing in the rest of the stuff --

Coupla big cans of tomatoes (crushed, chopped, whole -- doesn't matter)
Coupla small cans of tomato paste

Stop and observe the adorableness.


Get those pots up to a firm simmer.

Add the mystery ingredient.

The very important secret ingredient that makes it all hang together.

The one you just don't expect.

And I'm not going to tell you.

Unless Cole makes the finals in the damned vacuum cleaner contest. If he makes the finals and advances to possibly win big bucks for National English Shepherd Rescue, then I will come back and revise this post and reveal the secret ingredient.

So if you want to know, you will not only vote for Cole yourself, you will mail-bomb everyone you know, tweet, facebook harass, and blog to get them to vote for Cole so that your chili will also have that mysterious and authentic richness and body.

Cook this for a while, maybe a half-hour, hour. Stir from time to time. Remove food critic from field of play.


Wash hands. Use soap.

Now add about half a bottle of red wine or a bottle or two of dark beer. Either is good. Use more if the chili is a bit dry. If you run out of wine or beer, add more stock as needed. And start adding the spices:

Throw in the chili powder, cayenne, black pepper, white pepper (I was out of it this time), red pepper flakes, and cumin. Amounts up to you. Each pot gets at least a tablespoon of chili powder, lesser amounts of the other spices.



If you are making the veggie version, this is the time to add a cup or two of textured vegetable protein (TVP). Yeah, it sounds godawful. It isn't. It is a passable imitation of ground beef, texture-wise. Devoted meat-eaters like my vegetarian chili, and some vegetarians think I am trying to trick them. Don't overdo the TVP -- it really blows up when it gets wet.

My chili comes out moderately hot. I don't salt until about ten minutes before serving. Hot sauce is available at the table for those who want a hotter chili.

Serve with cornbread or stoned wheat crackers and any good beer.




Let the leftovers mellow in the pot in the fridge overnight. The next morning, get up, vote for Cole, and then portion it out into quart-sized containers. This chili freezes well. I will can it in a pressure-canner to save freezer space. Freezing is easier.

VOTE FOR COLE

It's Bissell vacuum contest time again.

We are in week two of voting for finalists. The weekly finalists will be eligible to win big cash prizes for the animal shelter or rescue of their owners' choice.

This year my candidate is Cole, and as always, my choice of charities is National English Shepherd Rescue.

The grand prize for the winning charity is $10,000. Barely a drop for giant animal charities that use their mailing lists to campaign; what is that, two new bespoke suits for Wayne Pacelle? But $10,000 goes a very long way for a small, lean, focused all-volunteer organization that always puts the animals first.

English shepherds that make the finals have a history of winning -- cute faces, and the kind of hair that says "You need a new vacuum cleaner" -- but they have to make the finals.

Click on the link and go right to Cole's voting page. Yes, you have to register to vote -- but I promise you, Bissell has never sent me any spam in over two years.

If you have to search for some reason, make sure it is Cole the black-and-white English shepherd, Entrant #17534, not some other Cole. That's the exact picture above.

Cole's story, in brief, for those who are not regular readers of this blog --

Cole was only about four weeks old when he was pulled from in or under a freezing trailer on his abuser's property in the dead of a Montana winter. Along with more than 200 of his relatives, he spent the next eight months as criminal evidence in the prosecution of his former owner. Cole grew up in dog jail for a crime someone else had committed. Fortunately, he was cared for by dedicated and loving volunteers. Unfortunately, a talented young English shepherd cannot properly develop his mind while confined behind walls. By the time he was released from custody, he was a very troubled young fellow. He came to Brandywine Farm to foster, so that he could shed his pathological aggression and find a mission in life.

Turns out, Cole's mission in life was to stay at Brandywine Farm and learn two careers -- invaluable farm dog, and search and rescue partner.

Cole is now in training to be my sixth SAR partner; he should join the ranks of Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group's operational dogs some time in late 2011.

Many human beings made personal sacrifices and took risks to save Cole and his entire extended family; he seems determined to pay that back in spades.

Forward forward forward! Share on Facebook! Tweet it! Blogger friends -- do me a solid, would ya? And vote every day this week. You can vote once each day, every day, until next Tuesday.

Vote for Cole!