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.

From all of us at Brandywine Farm

Auspex

Once in a California Sierra
I was swooped down upon when I was small,
And measured, but not taken after all,
By a great eagle bird in all its terror.

Such auspices are very hard to read.
My parents when I ran to them averred
I was rejected by the royal bird
As one who would not make a Ganymede.

Not find a barkeep unto Jove in me?
I have remained resentful to this day
When any but myself presumed to say
That there was anything I couldn't be.

-- Robert Frost

I am pleased to learn from this video that French for "Oh, shit!" is "Oh, shit!"

At least in Quebec it is.

Billy, did Grampa ever tell you about the time he was briefly abducted by an eagle?

Update 12-19-12
Alas, it appears that the exclamation unbelievable is probably spot-on.

Well-done, though.


And always nice to find an excuse for a little Big Bob Frost.

Perfect Circles

About a dozen years ago, I started fostering dogs who needed help getting adopted.

My first fosters were "cage break" dogs from Animal Friends in Pittsburgh.  I wanted to volunteer in a way that exploited my ability to train, and it was a bit too far to schlepp into town every day to work with the critters in the kennel.  Plus, I could see how frustrating it would be to teach a dog manners at the kennel gate, break him of jumping up, introduce him to the mutual pleasures of a loose leash -- and then have another volunteer undo every bit of it on his next walk of the day.  Penelope unraveling her weaving everydamned night, except for no good purpose.  More like the rowdy suitors breaking in and pulling the weft in their drunken revels.

Over a short period of time, the rules applied to volunteer dog-walkers became more restrictive. Dogs were not to be corrected. Someone might see it and get all butthurt. The poor goggies. Lost their homes and now some old meanie is making them do stuff.

The foster coordinators -- there were several in serial during this period -- and a couple other animal-care personnel understood that the party line about cookies and unicorns and fairy farts was not going to work on a lot of the dogs there, so they were -- unofficially, mind, never on paper -- absolutely good with sending dogs out of the facility to actually learn something.

So I started doing two-week (sometimes longer) cage breaks for the thugs -- mostly big, stupid, rude adolescent males with no clue about boundaries and manners.  Just about immediately, I started getting the cases that were otherwise going to be the subjects of a meeting of the euthanasia committee. In a couple weeks of living in a home and being held to account for their actions in a constructive way, they'd shed the kennel-induced anxiety, learn proper dog-manners from Lilly, Mel and Pip, get good and tired out, learn some basic obedience, be housebroken or re-housebroken, and generally start being real live dogs. I also once took in two little starved feral hoarder survivors, tamed and trained and fattened them up until they were real live dogs.  I'd write up a detailed, careful evaluation of each dog, with recommendations for the kind of home he was suited for and followup for his adopter.

Then I'd return him to the kennel and never hear of him again. Never knew whether the adoption counselors did dick-all with the reports.  Not so much as a phone call or a post-it note in my volunteer cubby telling me that my foster had been adopted.   But I could be sure that, before each dog left the kennel again, an army of soft-hearted and rule-hobbled volunteers re-taught him to drag a human down the sidewalk while gagging into the collar, climb and claw a person's body in "greeting," fence-fight with each dog in the kennel row, and play keepaway instead of fetch in the play yard.

Not much job satisfaction in that. And despite being larded up with t-shirts and tote bags, job satisfaction is really all that a volunteer gets for her trouble.

My first foster dog, ever. Shelter called him Karbo, which I don't think is even a name.
No idea where he went. He'd be about 13 now. Since he was evidently part Doberman, I doubt he's still among the quick. Would have been nice to know, though.

I offered a free private lesson for each of "my" dogs' adopters, with a nice certificate that I included with the dog's write-up. Never had one contact me.

I found out that the adopters never got the nice certificate. Because the official policy was, Animal Friends did not recommend trainers who were not "all positive."  By which they meant, they only endorsed those who mouthed the politically-correct mantras of behaviorist delusion. Didn't matter what the person actually did with the dog, mattered what she said she did, and which magic words were employed. Notorious dog-beaters such as myself were reserved for the role of git 'er done, but we were to enter and leave by the servants' door and expect no credit for actually, you know, training the dog.  I was never to expect a referral from Animal Friends, not even for a dog I had spent weeks training in my own home who was now in danger of being returned by his adopter -- not even when I offered to do it for free.

The PTB at this shelter genuinely imagined a regimen of rehabilitative savage beatings when the dog was out of sight, and they were okay with that, as long as nobody knew and the horrid but highly-effective dog-beaters stayed in black ops mode

So, obviously, fuck that.

Rudy (far right) was my last shelter foster. He was a perfect dog once removed from the screaming kennel.
About ten minutes after he came into my house, I vowed that he'd never go back to a cage.
Pip, Mel, and Lilly thought he was swell.
My friend and colleague Jack adopted him, and he became Jack's unlikely SAR dog and constant companion.
Jack outlived Rudy by only a couple years.
I miss them both. I'm glad they were, and are, together.

Then came Tyler.

Tyler was an English shepherd, or English shepherd-y farm collie, at a pound in central Ohio. He'd been a stray, and was a long-termer there when he came to the attention of the English shepherd community. His time was just about up at the pound; he'd only lasted as long as he did because the staff adored him; he dodged a scheduled date with the needle at least once.

Someone from Michigan decided she wanted him, but not enough to drive three hours to get him. The breed discussion lists and the rescue transport lists made it happen.

The same day he arrived, Tyler experienced something he had never known before -- a complete stranger trying to yank a comb through his densely-matted coat.  It no doubt hurt like hell, and surprised him even more than it hurt.


So he snapped at the comb.


And was promptly and persistently declared vicious, "dominant," and an edgy, challenging dog.  According to this first adopter, a vet and a trainer proclaimed this about him.


She wouldn't drive him back to the pound, either, so he stayed a spell with a border collie rescue before catching a lift back to central Ohio.


And I drove out to pick up my first Anger Foster.


That's when I'm so pissed about the idiotic mishandling of a dog, and the bullshit spun by the dog's owners, or a pound, or best of all a "behaviorist," that I foster the dog to spite the jackasses and prove them wrong.


It generally works out pretty well. Many of my favorite fosters have been Anger Fosters.


The one whose owners invented neurological issues to justify the craziness they caused. The one returned to the pound for "viciousness" -- not according to the owners, but according to the child welfare bureaucrat who had manhandled a crying foster child in front of him and found out -- without being injured in any way -- why you don't do that when an English shepherd is on duty. The one secretly dumped at the Pittsburgh dog pound by the vulgar-rich owners when we weren't quite fast enough at finding a foster home for him and they couldn't be bothered to take him when they moved. The one presented (with five relatives) at the pound for death the next morning by the puppymiller who knew the gas chamber schedule and didn't want competition for sales. The one proclaimed incorrigible by the nationally-famous behaviorist. And, of course, every one of my Operation New Beginnings houseguests, the canine crime victims.


I gave Tyler a few days to settle in, then muzzled him and started gentle grooming on his matted coat.

He reflex-snapped at the comb (not me, the damned comb) once, as I expected. I corrected him firmly, a bit dramatically for the oh shit effect, and on we went.  Discussion over. Never repeated.

Took four or five days of short sessions to get his mats combed out and the worst of them amputated; ever after, he'd lie comatose on the patio while I groomed him. Nails, too.

He was polite and willing -- if initially pig-ignorant -- from the first, and quickly integrated into our dog pack. Pip enjoyed having a young guy to play with and push around and show the ropes. I enjoyed having time to really work with him (not that he needed much), and the knowledge that an army of dog walkers were not going to undo his training before he could be adopted.

I could never get a great shot of Tyler's face with the camera I had then.
He was too dark, with dark eyes.
Photos don't do him justice.

In a couple months, I was asking for this vicious dog to be placed in a home with children.

So he was.

He went to live with Deanna and her husband and three boys and his foster sister Pip's half-brother Indy.

Yes, English shepherd-land is a very small place. It's not that huge a coincidence.

And there, he was a "perfect dog" for them. Deanna's words.

Tyler's story -- the real story, not his misfortunes before coming to me, not the events that befell a dog-in-waiting at a foster home -- doesn't belong to me. His real story is the story of his life with his real family.  And it was pretty uneventful, which suits most dogs -- it certainly suited gentle, unassuming Tyler. Dogs mostly prefer not to live in interesting times, and Tyler had known enough drama.

Unfortunately, Tyler's real life was also short. He passed away in December, aged perhaps 11. That's very young for an English shepherd or farm collie.

I knew this because Deanna made a point to get in touch and tell me, because she knew I'd care.

There's one satisfaction that is denied to those of us who place dogs with families through rescue -- the canine circle of life. As a breeder, I can look forward to seeing Pip live on in her grandpuppies, great-grandpuppies, and on and on.  We have the satisfaction and burden of knowing that our breeding decisions now will determine what kind of dogs will be helping to raise children, wrangle stock, and seek the lost long after we have joined our own shepherds on the Big Hill. 

Our rescues are neutered. Their genetic stories end with them.  Their circles, their pond ripples, must emanate from their lives with their people, not the lives that biologically derive from theirs.

This summer, Tyler's family was ready for another dog.

Another perfect dog.

"Oh!" I told Lady's adoption coordinator when she told me that Deanna had applied for her, "Yes! That's the one -- that's perfect.  And she will get to go to a home with kids, too!"

Forgetting that the "kids" who were ten and eight and five in 2002 are now young men.

No matter. They are all still at home. They will all still be Hollee's (her new name) boys. And Dog willing, she could be the shepherd who closes one more circle, the one who looks over the first grandbabies. (No pressure, boys.  Take your time.)  If not -- even if so -- there will be another shepherd looking for a family some day, who can take over for her or help her.  Maybe he will first bide a spell at Brandywine Farm, while the genetic and cultural descendants of Pip and Mel and Lilly help him get on his feet and ready for his real life.

Going home.