A Good Dog

by Jon Katz

  We were outwardly different—rural and urban, men and women, old and young, doctors and farmers. We never talked about politics, work, or the outside world. Few of us brought spouses or kids along. These were dramas that involved just us and our dogs. We shared horror stories and triumphs; we argued incessantly about food and vets, leashes, litters and training. What worked? What had we learned that might be useful to others? How far were we prepared to go?

  One morning at breakfast, I surprised myself by suddenly asking: “How many of you come from troubled families?” Every hand went up. We didn’t pursue the topic, yet it was occurring to me—along with the other things I was starting to understand out there—that the emotional geography between people and their dogs was complicated and intriguing.

  Faith and commitment kept us all coming back to Carolyn’s fields—sometimes wiltingly hot, sometimes icy and bitter—to work hour after hour, week after week, with our dogs. Some of them would come running happily when their owners called. (Mine wouldn’t.) Some would skillfully and instinctively herd sheep. (Not mine.)

  But none of us were inclined to give up on our dogs. If anything, my love for Devon deepened as we struggled to work together and figure each other out. We attended weekly sessions, weekend sessions, and special weeklong training camps. We took the sheep out again and again.

  I never managed to learn long division, but I couldn’t soak up enough dog stuff. From the first, Carolyn had challenged my notion of Devon as a rebellious adolescent, pointing out how stressed, confused, and aroused he was by all my bumbling gesticulation, yelling, and ignorance. I’d come to understand that training him was less about his obedience than about my ability to become a better human, less angry and demanding, more patient and clear.

  I saw that there were many successes, but also lots of failures. In some cases, Carolyn could find a simple key to turning a dog around. Many dogs left the farm in a few days, their problems markedly eased.

  But sometimes it took years. Sometimes it never happened. People ran out of money, time, or emotional energy. Dogs disappeared, or were given away, or, in extreme cases, put down. Still, how hard we worked. We were generous, praising others’ dogs, cheering one another on, rooting for dogs and people to make it. Devon and I had joined a tribe.

  The training began to take up a good chunk of my life, Devon and Homer and I whizzing back and forth along I-80. It took more than an hour just to reach the farm from our house, and training sessions took the better part of an afternoon or evening.

  I had one measurable goal: that Devon win at least one herding ribbon before we were done. I didn’t really care about the trophy, but passing a beginner’s trial was something of a benchmark, a test of what I could learn and teach, of how much I could change. And I wanted Devon to be—and feel like—a winner, just once. Then, in my canine fantasy, we would retire to the normal life of a human and his beloved pet.

  Away from Raspberry Ridge, my months with Devon remained tumultuous. He broke through a leaded-glass window when a UPS man came onto the front porch. He took off after dogs, cats, and wildlife. He somehow learned to open the door of our refrigerator, lifting containers of chicken and turkey burgers, neatly consuming the contents, and hiding the packaging strategically around the house, under the sofa or behind a chair.

  One morning, out doing errands, I bought a sandwich for Paula at the neighborhood deli. Devon came along for the ride, as usual. After picking up the sandwich and stashing it in the car, I made stops at the hardware store and post office. Back at the house, I discovered the sandwich was intact—except for the ham, which had vanished.

  Our walks were dramas. For years, my Labs and I had ambled through the neighborhood, Julius and Stanley pausing to greet their many admirers and sniff the occasional bush, while I used our strolls to think about my writing. The dogs required little vigilance.

  Devon, however, would wait until I wasn’t paying attention, then pop the leash from my hand and tear into backyards to snatch food from barbecue grills, herd terrified lap dogs, or run down squirrels.

  Gradually, our house became a minimum-security canine facility. Child locks appeared on the refrigerator and cupboard doors, Plexiglas panels over the leaded glass, bungee cords across the closets. Peace finally came, to a degree, when I bought some dog crates and put Devon inside one whenever I left the house.

  It was hard to stay angry, anyway. He was extraordinarily loving. In the car, he loved to ride with his head on my shoulder, as if navigating. While I worked, he curled up at my feet.

  He was always watching and studying me, aware of my every move, insistent on being only inches away. Yet our many moments of attachment and affection were punctuated by recurring outbursts of demonic behavior.

  His first year with me provided nearly a lifetime of dog experiences. My Labs, Julius and Stanley, both died, Stanley of heart disease, Jules of cancer. Homer was my attempt to fill that void. But by year’s end, I was starting to wonder whether I could live a peaceful, happy existence with Devon.

  My first attempt to win Devon a herding-trial ribbon did not go well. Stirred up even more than usual by the crowd, the other dogs, the competitive tension, he managed to knock over the judge. The panicked sheep busted through the corral gate and ran for their lives. “Thank you,” said the judge—code for “Get lost, you are disqualified.” I was also reprimanded for giving improper commands, like “Get those fucking sheep”—considered unsuitable for family sporting events. We regrouped and decided, despite our mortifying debut, to try again at the next trial, six months later.

  It was during one of our innumerable and largely unsuccessful efforts to get Devon to lie down around sheep and stay calm that Carolyn noticed something: Whenever I gave Devon a command by name, he reacted by wincing, panting, cringing, or blinking—all signs of canine stress.

  Devon didn’t take to training sessions, even when undertaken with food or with that chirpy voice many trainers recommend and I hate. Some obedience-trained dogs, Carolyn said, associate training with unpleasantness, and Devon looked like one of them. Training made him anxious, as if he expected something bad to happen to him.

  What about changing his name? “Let’s start over,” she suggested. “Then you can train him in a more positive way, without any baggage.”

  It seemed a strange idea. Change my dog’s name? Wouldn’t that just confuse him?

  “Not at all,” Carolyn said, pointing out that millions of rescue dogs were happily re-homed and renamed every year.

  I didn’t really see Devon as an “abused” or rescued dog. I thought the term overused, I told her, often an excuse for people who didn’t train their dogs, preferring to regard them instead as piteous, helpless creatures.

  Devon wasn’t piteous, I argued. He was ferociously independent, athletic, bright, and intense. Though he’d had his share of trouble, I didn’t want to think of him (or myself) as crippled or pathetic.

  “Look, he shows every sign of stress when you talk to him,” Carolyn replied. “Most of that is probably what happened to him before you got him. Some of it you and your big mouth and your impatience and anger. It all comes through to him; he’s not a stupid dog. Let’s begin again.”

  In fact, she was so high on the idea, she suggested it to the owners of a sheltie, shepherd, Bouvier, and border collie who were also at the farm for training that weekend. They all instantly shook their heads; it just struck them as extreme. But Carolyn was nothing if not an outside-the-box thinker, a quality I respected.

  Why not change his name? Devon had always sounded a bit Martha Stewarty to me, anyway.

  What should I call him instead? I’ve always admired Orson Welles, partly because he seemed another example of sadly unfulfilled potential.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go for it. How long will it take?”

  Not long, Carolyn said, smiling, reaching for her meatball pouch. Devon knew exactly what this pouch was and always focused when her hand neared it. I’d gotten one like it, attac
hed to my belt, usually stuffed with liver treats. Devon was staying much closer to me on walks these days.

  Carolyn and I took out our pouches on a breezy, beautiful spring day, and as the wind ruffled the meadow and her sheep grazed peacefully, we took turns standing over this intensely focused and suddenly quite happy dog, taking turns saying Orson, and popping a meatball or a liver treat into his waiting mouth.

  We only had to empty her pouch and mine once to make the switch. Within twenty minutes, his name was Orson. He answered to it, made eye contact when I said it, and more significantly, associated it with nothing but good stuff.

  If I kept my voice normal and cheerful when I said his name, there was no wincing, flattened ears, or averted eyes. Suddenly, training was about meatballs and liver treats, not about anger, disappointment, stress, or failure.

  I can’t claim he became a well-behaved dog in that pasture, but he began to be a different one. He looked at me more readily when I spoke his name, came when I called him, walked more closely by my side. Training began to be something he seemed pleased about and wanted to do, rather than something that made him cower and skulk.

  His name became a good thing, something likely to bring reward and praise, not punishment and recrimination. It was an opportunity for me, too, to make good on my promise to do better by him.

  So he became a dog called Orson.

  In the fall, I entered Orson in a beginner’s herding trial conducted under American Kennel Club auspices at Raspberry Ridge. The judges flew in from all over the country, and entrants and their dogs assembled from everywhere.

  The beginner’s protocol was fairly simple. You and your leashed dog entered a small fenced ring—perhaps seventy-five feet long and twenty-five feet wide—with traffic-type cones at either end. Unleashed, the dog had to lie down and then, at your command, go behind the five sheep in the pen and move them to the other end. After you and the dog had steered the sheep the length of the ring and around the cones three times, the dog had to lie down and stay; then you leashed him up and left the pen.

  The trick was to get the dog to lie down and stay while you headed for the first cone. The dog had to be still, but the human had to keep moving, since dog and sheep had no idea where to go otherwise and couldn’t get into a natural rhythm.

  Beginner’s trials were looser, less formal than other trial levels. Judges, if they were in a good mood, would cut you some slack. Or so I hoped.

  Sheep can read dogs quite well, and when they see crazy ones, they move quickly. This was one of the big problems in working with Orson—the minute you walked through a gate, the sheep took one look and started running. That got him excited, and moving too quickly. Then I would start yelling, and things would deteriorate from there.

  Still, I’d mailed in applications for both my border collies. Homer, less antsy, had a reasonable shot at fulfilling his herding destiny, at least at this introductory level. Orson was always a question mark, but I thought we’d take another shot. A ribbon—if we earned one—would be emblematic of my love for him, a recognition of the hard work Carolyn and I and Orson had been doing.

  Even with a grounded dog, herding sheep is a tough thing to do. With a dog like Orson, it would be a milestone for both of us.

  Homer, scheduled for the first trial day, had, true to form, acquitted himself fairly well. We’d gone through our paces quietly. I had trouble getting him to lie down, and he’d missed one of the cones on the third pass, but he was unaggressive and eager to please. I swear he actually seemed proud when he got his green-and-white ribbon that meant he was a qualified, though novice, herding dog.

  But I was nervous on the second morning, when Orson’s trial was scheduled. About a hundred people and thirty or forty dogs had gathered around the ring.

  Orson normally would have gotten distracted and overexcited being around so many people and dogs, but he was relatively calm. In a funny way, he really did seem reinvented, or perhaps reincarnated, after his name change. He was less tense. My communications with him had changed, too, and were less fraught. Since “Orson” was free of unhappy associations, he paid more attention to me, responded more quickly, and seemed to even enjoy our training sessions and the rain of treats that often accompanied them. It wasn’t so much that he had become a different dog but that the dog Orson really was had begun to emerge. I had more confidence that he would listen; he had more confidence that he could succeed.

  But this would be a trickier and much more public test, with no treats allowed. We entered the gate, Orson on a leather lead, my number, 261, affixed to my shoulder with an elastic band. The judge nodded, and took a good look at Orson. “Pretty dog,” he said.

  “Lie down,” I said, quietly, to Orson. He did. Then he stood up. Then he lay down. We went through this two or three times, until I lightly flicked his butt with my fingertips and said, “Hey! Lie down!” The judge smiled. Unlike Homer, Orson didn’t seem at ease in the ring, but at least he wasn’t out of control. So far, reasonably good. Then I told him to stay, went out to the sheep, and, since my voice often aroused him, used a hand command to tell him to come toward me. He took off like a rocket and headed for the sheep. Remembering Carolyn’s injunction to keep moving, I scrambled from one orange cone down to the other, hooves and paws clopping behind me. The sheep whizzed past, followed by Orson-on-the-run.

  “Yo,” I yelled, and he turned and stopped. “Down.” To my surprise, he dropped. Then I ran to the opposite cone, turned, said, “Okay, you’re free,” and dashed back toward the first cone, then around again. The sheep were shuttling along, though I thought I saw Orson bearing in on one of them.

  “Orson,” I said, holding up my hand. “Stay!” He looked at me, then at the sheep, then at me—and he stayed. I came around, slipped the lead back on him, and headed for the gate.

  It was not an elegant performance—the judge was struggling to keep from laughing—but it seemed to me that we had done it: had lain down, stayed, moved the sheep three times, lain down, stayed, left. And nobody, human or animal, had gotten injured. Still, it was hardly textbook herding. I wasn’t sure it qualified as herding at all. I had seen judges fail more-polished dogs for lesser infractions.

  This judge said nothing, so I didn’t know until after all the entrants had finished how we’d fared.

  When the results were announced, the judge said “261” and handed me another green-and-white ribbon. Orson, too, had passed the beginner’s test. He was a herder, sort of. I gave him a big hug, and he gave me a sloppy slurp. He seemed happy to get away from the trial ring.

  Carolyn came running up, gave me a squeeze and critiqued my performance. I’d moved the wrong way and too slowly, she said, but not bad. On to the intermediate trials, she said.

  I told her, thankfully, that this was the first thing I’d ever won. It was definitely my first victory together with Orson, who was enjoying pats and praise from the spectators. Yet I, too, was happy to get away.

  Afterward, I put Orson on a long leash and we took Carolyn’s sheep out for some grazing. We climbed the rise overlooking the far pasture, and the sheep spread out to eat. From my backpack I took a plastic bowl and some bottled water. I poured him some and drank some myself, then gave him a biscuit while I ate a cookie.

  Orson sighed, and stretched out next to me, his head resting on my thigh. He paid no attention to the sheep, who crunched steadily ahead of us. He was soon asleep, and at peace.

  I didn’t see as much of Carolyn or Raspberry Ridge after that trial weekend. Carolyn saw herding trials as important yardsticks of training progress, especially for working dogs, but I didn’t like trialing, and I don’t think Orson did, either. He tensed up when he saw gates and fences and crowds of anxious people with dogs by their sides. Name change or not, he knew potential trouble when he saw it.

  Besides, trials can sometimes inject an unappealing element into the relationship between human and dog. People like me tend not to simply enjoy the experience; we want to win. When we lose—su
re to happen eventually—how can our disappointment and frustration not be apparent, especially to dogs, who read us skillfully?

  I liked Carolyn’s ideas about positive-reinforcement training, yet I was growing increasingly resistant to particular philosophies for training dogs. No single idea seemed appropriate for Orson and me. My own frailties kept me from being positive and patient enough, for example. Yet I was curious about the process. I was coming to have my own training approaches and wanted to explore them on my own.

  Besides, I’d been bitten by another bug, once I realized how much I loved working on Carolyn’s farm. I owned a tiny cabin in upstate New York and was hearing a great deal about the dairy farmers going under all around. Real estate in Washington County was still remarkably affordable. Why not pursue my ideas up there, on my own farm, with my own sheep, battered truck, fences, barns, and dogs?

  I came up with several reasons why I should get my own small farm. Our cabin was too small for Paula to work in, with little space for my daughter or her friends. The property, with just two steeply sloping acres, was too small for sheep, too. And the cabin was geographically so cut off from the nearby town that I hardly knew anyone around me. I hadn’t found lasting community in New Jersey or most of the other places we’d lived, but I still hoped for it. Perhaps up there.

  Besides, on our own farm Orson could learn to herd, could have all the space even a demented border collie could want, could be far from school buses and sirens. He would, at last, learn to make sense of the world.

  Winston

  CHAPTER TWO

  Orson and Winston

  A little over two years after Orson arrived at Newark Airport, he and I were standing by a sprawling old farmhouse in the tiny hamlet of West Hebron, New York. This time I’d really done it. I’d bought a farm.

  I will be a long time sorting through the process that led from there to here, but it went something like this: Orson’s arrival in my life challenged me in any number of ways. To keep him, to do right by him, I began sheepherding with Carolyn Wilki.