The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

by Jon Katz

  Away from sheep, however, our troubles persisted.

  AT SOME POINT IN THE SUCCESSFUL TRAINING OF A SHEEPDOG, the dog and herder understand that they are doing this work together, a team working in harmony. That’s the beauty of sheepherding; that’s what had happened with Rose and me almost from the first day. While Homer loved to be around sheep, we struggled to do it together, to stay in sync. The sheep excited him so much that our training problems seemed to worsen. Out in the pasture, he paid even less attention.

  Carolyn had pointed out many times that my “good” dog had problems. When I called his name, Homer often didn’t respond. It took three or four shouts to get him to focus on even basic commands. It sometimes seemed almost as if I were invisible to him. Looking back with distress, I now understood that that was precisely how I’d trained him to behave.

  Yet it was easy to overlook these problems most of the time, because we had such nice experiences together. I drove to Sandy Hook some weekends and beamed while Homer diligently herded the Atlantic waves for hours. He brought me to herding. And in those moments when I crated Orson or left him outside, Homer and I could almost furtively play and cuddle.

  Unlike Orson, Homer was not a dog who would fight for attention or affection. Paula was his champion, his safe place. At night, while she read or watched TV in her favorite chair, Homer crept alongside and hunkered down. They were sweet moments, but also sad, with the aura of a dog seeking comfort and protection, not pleasure. At readings, while Orson barked and scouted for biscuits and stuck his paw and head in everybody’s lap, Homer was often dozing quietly behind the podium.

  Without really acknowledging it, I had given up on the idea that this would change. The notion that Homer was off in his own world was quietly becoming ingrained in all of us.

  ONE REASON I DECIDED TO GET ANOTHER PUPPY WAS TO GIVE Homer a playmate. Orson didn’t really play much; he just wanted to be with me. He needed to learn to be calm, to see a crate as a safe place of rest, and to relearn every obedience command there was. Rose, I reasoned, could lighten Homer’s load, give him a companion to play with and his own submissive dog to push around while Orson got more time to hang around with me. Everybody would be happy.

  It was—as Carolyn had warned me—a mistake, at least for Homer. I was getting another dog before I had resolved the problems with one I had, a common and classic blunder. Carolyn had urged me to set aside three months to train Homer for an hour each day, working on name recognition and basic obedience, generally strengthening our relationship. She believed any dog could be trained through its problems.

  Though I did eventually undertake more intensive training with him, I’d also increased the pressure on this docile creature by falling for the easy and pleasurable solution—get a puppy. And this puppy was not about to take orders from her elder brothers. Rose dragged Homer all over the yard by his ruff, trying to induce him to play. Sometimes when he did, Orson—now possessive of this new female as well as of me—would jump in and intimidate him into stopping.

  Rose was an extraordinary dog—smart as a whip, confident, possessed of boundless energy and instinct. Training her was almost irresistible, pure joy, free of all the distractions, errors, and irritations that plagued my work with Homer. She seemed to soak up work and responsibility, looking for tasks to do, taking them on. She had little interest in meeting people or cuddling—she even found mealtimes an almost annoying intrusion into her work. But she had an intense interest in any job. Was my infatuation with her yet another obstacle for Homer, another thing to come between us?

  Despite my idea that I was getting Rose in part for Homer, she wound up connecting with Orson more. She was completely unfazed by his neediness and intensity, ignoring him or just dashing out of reach. Now poor Homer found himself with two dominant dogs to take his toys, filch his food, and muscle him away from me.

  At some point I’d begun to enter the murky area where the boundary between the human’s issues and the dog’s troubles blur. I became increasingly annoyed with Homer, his avoidance, his lagging, his sniffing at every bush and tree, and, yes, his rejection.

  I found myself scolding him, urging him to hurry up on walks, to pay attention. “C’mon, c’mon,” I’d hiss in a voice I never used with any of my other dogs. “Let’s go, let’s get going.”

  Orson caused vastly more problems—still—but I found his antics endearing, almost appealing. The more of a nightmare he was, the closer we drew. And our training was paying off; he’d grown calmer, saner, more responsive. We were working well together. Rose didn’t need any urging to work with me; she seemed to live for it. Homer was different: he was withdrawing, and his withdrawal tested my patience, which probably made him withdraw further.

  Many people advised me to stop worrying about Homer. “Look, he’s just a dog, and he’s living a better life than 99.9 percent of the dogs on the planet. Life doesn’t have to be perfect, even for dogs. You do the best you can, and he’s fine.”

  For a number of reasons, that doesn’t work for me. Does that philosophy really serve the dog, or is it designed to make the human feel better? My duty went deeper than that, I thought. The day I took on this dog, I accepted responsibility for his care. I hadn’t done right by him.

  AS THE EMOTIONAL INTENSITY BETWEEN PEOPLE AND DOGS continues to grow, this notion has taken hold in many sectors of the dog world: once you acquire a dog, it’s yours forever.

  To give it to another home or, God forbid, a shelter is a breach of faith, even an act of cold-hearted betrayal. As we’ve come to see dogs more as members of our families and less as wonderful animals, notions that they’re human-like have grown. You’d never give a child away; how could you relinquish a dog?

  Yet I often saw and met dogs I believed would be happier elsewhere. Some simply couldn’t cope with other pets, or didn’t relate to their owners, or didn’t have room to run. Some needed to work. Others were violent or aggressive and needed more isolation. Some bit passersby and deliverymen, terrified neighbors, or attacked smaller dogs. In this country alone, more than 400,000 a year bit children seriously enough to require hospital treatment.

  Such animals, through no fault of their own, were causing conflict of many kinds. Sometimes their owners got sued. Houses were wrecked, insurance got canceled, police were called. Or the dogs ended up on antidepressants and other powerful medications, or confined by electronic collars. When I suggested that such a dog might simply be happier in a different environment, the answer was almost always the same: “Oh, I could never give her up. She couldn’t live without me. I’ll never quit on her.”

  My own sense of canine ethics is different. Our responsibility to these creatures is clear and powerful: we have to speak for them and protect them, since they have no voices. Turning our heads from their problems, binding them to us for life because we can, isn’t, to my mind, necessarily loving. It’s an abrogation of responsibility. My job is to make my dogs as happy and comfortable as is reasonable and possible. If I can’t manage that, then it’s my responsibility to help them find better lives. To do otherwise, it seems to me, is the crueler path.

  I had messed up in so many ways. There simply are few dogs better than Homer in disposition or breeding. He was beautiful, good-hearted, and bright. He did seem to me less grounded than Orson or Rose, more easily undone. Things they could ignore—claps of thunder, cars backfiring, my losing my temper—rattled Homer, sent him retreating to his crate or scurrying into another room.

  Was he happy? I wasn’t sure. Was he as happy as he deserved to be? I didn’t think so. Was he getting the attention he craved? Did he feel calm and safe? No.

  I found it particularly chilling when a psychiatrist friend who has studied human-animal attachment offered an observation based on my laments about Homer: “You sound exactly the way you describe your father talking to you when you were a boy. It’s almost as if your father’s voice is coming out of your mouth.” There could be few more disturbing words for me to hear. But she wa
s right.

  You can’t live with Orson without shouting once in a while, and I make no apologies for that. He scarcely notices. Rose has been the kind of dog I never want to yell at, one who has benefited from my many previous screwups. But Homer upset me in a particular way, not through spectacular disasters—as when Orson went flying through our lovely leaded-glass window—but from more mundane and everyday annoyances: the way he walked (haltingly), ate (reluctantly), obeyed (intermittently). He didn’t seem mine, somehow, and it amazed me to realize that I probably annoyed my father for many of the same reasons. My father and I had been estranged since I was eleven. He was continually frustrated with my sister and me, criticizing her for being overweight and difficult, exhorting me to become more athletic and confident. Impatient and judgmental, he alternately branded me a quitter or a sissy. Although he lived into his eighties, the two of us could never patch up our damaged relationship, overcome the anger we felt.

  It was into this minefield—some of the most tortured parts of my past—that poor Homer had wandered. My friend was telling a shattering but obvious truth: somehow Homer had become me, and I my father, a nightmare straight out of attachment theory.

  On some level I’d concluded Homer wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t as adventurous as the other two dogs, nor as resilient. He didn’t walk as fast, react as quickly, herd competently.

  Poor guy, I thought. No wonder he slept in another room.

  Ruminating over how to help him, I heard from a friend in Vermont that the gamekeeper of a forest preserve was looking for a border collie to help with its small flock of resident sheep. I knew the preserve and had often walked there with my dogs; in fact, Homer loved to run there. The gamekeeper had her own house on the grounds. Homer would be an only dog with sheep in his backyard, sheep that merely needed to be moved once or twice a day from one pasture to the other. Beyond the farmstead were thousands of acres of forests and streams. A steady trickle of hikers and tourists would keep any sociable dog happy.

  I was going back and forth between New Jersey and Bedlam at this point in early fall, readying the grounds, waiting for and then welcoming our own flock. From New Jersey, I called the gamekeeper for the first of what turned out to be a dozen conversations. She would love to have Homer she said; he was just what she was looking for. She’d keep him by her side all day, every day.

  I can only describe the next few days as a sort of dog-related breakdown. The Homer situation had unleashed old demons. I couldn’t bear the thought of giving him up but wasn’t sure I could justify keeping him. All sorts of ghosts popped up—my father, the frightened kid I had been, the one who himself often felt abandoned.

  Lots of people, I knew, would be shocked if I sent him off to another home. That was his appealing face on the cover of my first dog book, A Dog Year. He and Orson and I had just spent months traveling the country on a book tour. Yet I couldn’t shake the impulse that I needed to do something for him. Sometimes, I thought, you love a dog by letting him go.

  I told the gamekeeper I’d drive up the next day to leave Homer with her for perhaps two weeks; then we’d see what happened. She was thrilled. And I could picture him cavorting in the woods, chasing sheep whenever he wanted. He’d be free of my impatience and the bad job I’d done training and protecting him. He’d get to start over with a new human, one-on-one.

  But two things derailed this plan. First, Paula came into my study in tears. “You can’t give Homer away,” she said. “This is too fast. We need to talk more about it. Maybe there’s something else we can try. He loves us and we love him.”

  Paula kept some distance from the canine part of my life. She loved our dogs but left the walking and herding to me. Unless I was out of town, dog care was my thing, not hers. But she cherished Homer.

  That same morning, my friend Ray Smith checked in. I’d met Ray and his wife, Joanne, at a reading in Vermont; we’d become instant friends. While I was trekking upstate to look at the farm and make preparations, Ray and Joanne had generously lent me their guest cabin. Dog lovers with their own sheep and a border collie, transplants from a Connecticut suburb, we had lots to talk about.

  Ray, a landscape architect, was the kind of friend who dispensed advice rarely, but when he did it counted all the more. I’d e-mailed my plans for Homer and he sensed something disturbed and impulsive about the way I was pursuing it.

  “Jon, I normally don’t interfere in other people’s decisions,” he said on the phone. “But I feel I have to tell you that this doesn’t feel right to me. I’m afraid you’ll regret this if you do it so quickly. You don’t even know this person you’re bringing Homer to; you haven’t even met her. I can picture how you’ll feel dropping him off and driving away.”

  Paula’s reaction and Ray’s counsel pulled me up short. I called the gamekeeper, with whom I’d now had hours of discussion, to cancel the meeting. I’m sure she thought me quite mad. Actually, she was right. But people I trusted were warning me that I was being precipitous.

  A few weeks later, when I called to update the gamekeeper, I learned that she’d quit her job at the preserve and gone elsewhere. My heart nearly dropped through my stomach. I owed Ray Smith a lot; so does Homer.

  The next call was to Carolyn, who suggested a tough, daily regimen to repair our relationship. She wanted me to say Homer’s name a hundred times a day while offering food. She wanted me—using more food—to work through a series of other grounding exercises that encourage a dog to pay attention, to see his name and commands as positive, and to experience training as a source of good things rather than yelling and disapproval.

  If I could make and reinforce eye contact, convey clarity in language, keep our training positive and rewarding, then over time, Homer and I might forge a new partnership.

  So every morning for two months—first in New Jersey and then on the farm—I got up before dawn to take Homer outside alone for an hour, working through these exercises. Then I put him inside and trained Rose. Then I took all three dogs for the first—though certainly not the last—walk of the day. It was exhausting. Over time, Orson was getting steadily calmer and Rose enthusiastically obedient. But Homer didn’t seem to change much, at least not yet.

  One of my strategies for Homer was to start plotting activities for just the two of us. We began to leave Rose and Orson behind several times a day, something I should have done much earlier: at dawn, when we trained; then late morning, when we went out to chase balls and Frisbees; and again in the late afternoon, when I began what I called the school-bus ritual. It was a neat idea, better than I first realized.

  Homer loved school buses, mostly because kids came pouring off of them, and he loved kids. He was especially fond of one of our neighbors, Max, a sweet ten-year-old with a shy but easygoing nature. In a funny way, he was much like Homer, which is perhaps why the two connected. Homer adored Max from the first, and vice versa, so I thought it would be nice for him to greet Max at the bus stop.

  At 3:30 P.M. the bus pulled up to the corner across from our house and a gaggle of kids came thundering out. Homer waited, and then went into his patented wriggle when Max disembarked; Max beamed and looked for Homer, knelt down to say hello, gave him a hug. Then Max and Homer would walk the half-block to his house.

  By the third day, all I had to say was “Let’s go see Max” and Homer would go nuts, as happy as if there were sheep outside. The other schoolkids loved Homer, too, and he was nearly drunk with joy from all the attention. The first day or two, he looked nervously around, perhaps waiting for Orson to appear and order him away. But he soon realized that greeting Max’s bus was his daily task, his moment, another form of work but without competition from his siblings or scolding and criticism from me. There was no part of this task that Homer could fail at, and it was delightful to see these two guys fall in love.

  It occurred to me, after only a few days, that this was the kind of relationship Homer would thrive on, and the kind I couldn’t provide.

  Max’s family
was dog-starved. He had a younger sister, Eva. His mother, Sharon, an education specialist, worked at home. His father, Hank, a magazine editor, worked grueling hours in the city but was at home several days during the week. Everybody in the family wanted a dog and talked incessantly about taking one to soccer games and playing with one in the backyard.

  In fact, Max asked if Homer could come over and play. So one sunny afternoon, shortly before I was due to head back to Hebron semipermanently, I brought Homer to Max’s house. I sat on the back porch with Hank, who sensed that there was more to this encounter than an interspecies playdate, but I didn’t tell him what was on my mind.

  In a week or two I would head north for the winter for good. I didn’t plan on coming back till after our lambs were born; Paula was arranging her schedule so that she could come upstate several times. Whatever was going to happen with Homer had to happen soon or else wait for months.

  I wanted, mindful of the Vermont disaster, to be careful this time. I needed to talk to Paula. She had come to see that Homer was struggling in our household but hated the idea of giving him up. And I had to think it through myself. Homer and I had been through a lot; he was like a limb or organ, an integral part of my life.

  Sitting on the porch, Hank said only how much they all loved Homer, and what a great dog he was. In the yard in front of me, Max and Homer were lying down face-to-face. Max was throwing a ball over Homer’s shoulder; he’d rush to grab the ball, lope back to Max, and slurp his nose.

  Homer was having a blast, running in circles, tearing around the yard, smooching Max in between. I’m sure Hank noticed that I was affected by the sight, although I didn’t say why. The reason was that I’d rarely seen Homer so uncomplicatedly happy.

  The next few days unraveled me. I knew where this was heading, yet it brought up awful pain and anger, much of it having nothing to do with Homer. The experience of being criticized, abandoned, frightened—all feelings I was thinking about subjecting Homer to or already had—resurfaced in me. I couldn’t sleep. Not even Paula could quite grasp what was happening to me.