|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2008 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
Dog Days:
Dispatches from Bedlam Farm by Jon Katz |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Harmony
John
Katz’s book, Dog Days:
Dispatches from Bedlam Farm, isn’t about the dogs, despite the appealing
picture on the cover. It is all about the author’s life in New Hebron, New
York, where he lives with a menagerie of animals on a farm, and the attempt
to achieve harmony with other people, with the animals and with the land. It
takes some inner harmony to be able to do that, as well. Here’s an excerpt, from
the end of Chapter 3, “Izzy,” pp. 59-63: Yet
if anybody ought to know the particular challenges and foibles of border
collies, it should be me. I’ve
lived, worked, and matched wits with them for years. Some, like Orson, have
been as troublesome and difficult as they are loving. Then there’s Rose,
thoroughly sensible and professional. Either
way, I should know better than to relax too soon. I was foolish to buy into
Izzy’s initial routine, After recovering from his neutering, and adapting with
quiet caution to his new environs, his demonic, intelligent, ferociously
independent self emerged. We
began the game of border collie chess. The first real trouble arose when he
kept showing up outside the fenced yard. First move (his): He tunneled under
a gate. My move: I rolled a boulder against the gate, blocking his exit. But
Izzy used the boulder as a launching pad that made it simple to leap over the
gate. I countered by leaning rakes and shovels outside the gate to block the
airspace. He countercountered by plowing right through them. Anthony,
working on the barn one morning, looked up to see Izzy lifting a chain latch
with his teeth. I put an additional hook on the fencepost. Since
Izzy still wasn’t thoroughly housebroken and remained prone to marking, I
crated him when I went out. His move: I came home one night from dinner and
was shocked to see that he’d demolished his crate. He’d nosed open the latch
(or perhaps I’d closed it improperly) and had somehow pushed aside the
plastic tray on the bottom of the crate; it was bent and broken. Then,
perhaps out of anxiety, he’d had diarrhea all over the crate and the floor. My
move: I drove forty-five minutes to His
actions were hard to reconcile. He had little of Orson’s ferocious
territoriality. He loved to cuddle with people, to have strangers scratch his
belly. He’d happily lie by my side for hours. But he had to be with me. This
separation stuff is often a big issue for people with dogs. A dog loves you
so much that he simply can’t stand it when you leave—a lot of us like to see
it that way. The devoted dog is so faithful to its master that life without
him is unbearable. I
grasped the dramatic potential of the Izzy-and-Katz saga: Lonely
dog living in isolation for years attaches to border collie—loving man with
sheep who has just lost his beloved canine companion. The
truth was likely more nuanced: Unsocialized rescue dog feels unsafe—even
panic-stricken—when he cannot locate the human who now feeds him. My other
dogs, who arrived as puppies, are untroubled by my comings and goings; they
know I will be back. They love me, but none of them chews things, gets into
garbage, or freaks out in his crate when I go out to dinner. So
why does Izzy? Because
re-homed dogs are apt to be more anxious, to have more behavioral problems,
to require long, patient training. Because border collies, bristling with
instinct and drive, are prone to behavioral problems when traumatized. Izzy
was not an abused dog, but neither was he grounded, trained, or socialized. My
guess was that he grew terrified when I left him alone. To attribute his
panicky behavior to great love was tempting, but probably wouldn’t help the
dog. I needed to acclimate him to my departures and returns, to train him,
which, in turn, would soothe him. I
called for an appointment with a veterinary acupuncturist in I
also took him to my regular vet for blood work and stool samples, to make
sure there wasn’t some physical or biological trigger prompting these
meltdowns. And
I steeled myself. To be patient. To be creative. To be realistic. I had been
here before. In
some ways, training and retraining Orson, I had succeeded: He had learned a
great deal, had adapted to my household and routines, loved and was loved by
many. Yet, in the most fundamental way, I’d failed; I’d lost him. So
I knew that taking on Izzy was a real commitment, a substantial one. It
wouldn’t proceed in a straight line, a simple matter of classes over hours
or weeks. It could take years of training, conditioning, and reinforcing,
meanwhile cleaning up accidents and damage, tolerating setbacks and
applauding progress. With
Izzy, a dog I now very much wanted to keep, I was in for a long haul. With
Orson, I could tell myself I didn’t know what I was in for, This time, I did. Izzy
was a complex animal, probably the most intelligent dog I’d ever had. He
watched, absorbed, remembered. The
curious thing was that he eagerly went into the crate, and often spent quiet
hours resting inside. I wasn’t sure precisely what triggered his frenzied
escape efforts, but I had the gnawing sensation it was his attachment to me.
He’d been waiting for a human for a long time, and now that he’d found one,
he meant to hang on. My move. I went
online, did some homework, and located a traveling crate approved for airline
use. Its latches were all outside his reach; the interiors were all smooth
plastic. It seemed to hold him, at least for now. The
following week, I was feeding the donkeys, feeding Jeannette a cookie,
scratching baby Jesus, when a black streak came rocketing up the pasture.
Izzy. He’d escaped the front yard, where he’d been sitting companionably with
Rose, then crawled under the pasture gate. I could see Rose watching,
nonplussed, as he made his way toward me. The
donkeys weren’t nervous around Izzy and he never bothered them. The sheep,
less trusting, moved uneasily to the farthest corner of the pasture.
Reflexively and typically, I started screaming at Izzy to lie down, but then
I caught myself. Let’s see what happens, I thought. Give him a chance. Izzy
looked at me, then up at the sheep as if noticing them for the first time. He
dropped into the border collie crouch, and started giving the sheep a lot of
eye. Good working dogs control sheep with their stares, not their teeth. The
sheep picked up on this, huddled together, and froze. Izzy crept slowly up
toward the sheep. I kept still. Without
any commands from me, he moved slowly to the left of the herd, then behind
it. Border collies who know what they’re doing, who are properly trained,
don’t run straight toward sheep. They do what’s called an “outrun,” moving
around and behind the flock so that the sheep move away from the dog, toward
the herder. By using voice commands—”come bye,” “away”—you can instruct the
dog to move the sheep to the right or left, closer or farther away. Border
collies have speed and enormous stamina; they can, if necessary, race around
in front of the sheep to stop them, The flock can be controlled that way,
moved where the herder wants them to go. Izzy,
I was surprised to see, was cool as dry ice as he moved closer. Plenty of
border collies go nuts in that situation, too aroused to control themselves,
let alone the sheep. But Izzy was going slow. The sheep were nervous but not
panicked, a good sign. As
he curved behind them, they started trotting down the hill, and he seemed
startled. It was always at this point that Orson lost it; once the sheep
moved, he couldn’t help chasing them, and herding became hunting. The sheep,
sensing this, ran for their lives. With Izzy, still using a lot of eye, they
started to run, then stopped. Izzy
looked at me, but I had no appropriate commands to offer; because we’d done
no training, he wouldn’t understand. I just pointed to the right of the flock
and said, “Izzy there.” He paused, then ran to where I was pointing. The
sheep slowed and began walking toward me, Izzy behind them. I hustled over to
open the gate of the training pen, and the sheep filed inside. “Pen!”
I shouted joyously. “This is the pen!” I called Izzy and he came right to me
and lay down next to the pen. This
was a staggering accomplishment, especially for a first attempt. Izzy had a
lot of instinct, but not aggression. He wanted to work; I had work for him to
do. It was tough to believe he’d never herded sheep before. Thrilled,
I decided we’d begin regular herding training the next morning, and continue
every day thereafter. A working dog who could effectively push sheep around
wouldn’t need to destroy crates or chase trucks, I hoped. He’d have better,
more important things to do. He could match wits with the sheep instead of
with me. And then, he could stay. Katz has
a writing style that brings readers into every situation, leaving out nothing
that that would distract from imagining what life is like on Bedlam Farm. I
could almost feel my heart rate slow down as I turned the pages of this book.
Dog
Days is written with grace about the people, the animals and the land,
and the ongoing search for harmony is a message of hope for all who are
looking for harmony in life. Steve
Hopkins, February 21, 2008 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Dog Days.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
