Talking to Animals

by Jon Katz

  It was not long before Ken and Eli pulled into the farm in a big trailer and walked Chloe out and through the pasture gate. The donkeys were wide-eyed but curious. The sheep fled to the outer pasture. Red, my savvy border collie, pretended not to even see the new arrival. Chloe meant nothing to him.

  It was not a new thing, but the old thing, a continuation of the work, of our lives. That was Simon’s message to both of us. Continue, life goes on. Finish the work.

  Before Chloe came to the farm, Maria had kneeled down with the donkeys and told them the pony was coming. She used words, feelings, images. One morning, she said she heard a very clear message from Lulu and Fanny. A phrase came right into her head: “same thing.”

  The donkeys were telling her, she said, that it was no big deal to have a horse, that it was pretty much the same thing as another donkey. It was not something to worry about, not a problem for them.

  We were skeptical of this message. People had told us the same thing when we brought Simon to be with Rocky on the farm, and it wasn’t okay, it was a nightmare. But weeks later, when Chloe came, the donkeys’ message turned out to be prophetic. It was no big deal.

  Chloe came into the pasture, chased the sheep around for a while, and then joined our little equine herd. It was the same thing: the donkeys accepted her and she accepted them.

  We had learned a lot from Rocky; if you can talk with an old blind pony, you can certainly figure out how to talk to a young and healthy one, right?

  Working with Chloe was far more challenging for Maria than working with donkeys. Our donkeys are strong-willed, as donkeys are, but they are calm and affectionate. They are always willing to talk, and they are always listening. They know my mood the second I come out of the farmhouse. If I am grumpy, they are gone; if I am happy, they wait, braying softly, hoping for a carrot.

  Ponies, we have learned, are a very different kind of animal. They are notoriously headstrong and independent. Although many people think of them as small and cute, that is not really their history or lineage. They were originally bred as work- and warhorses. They are strong and brave and difficult. They can be affectionate, and are drawn to people, but they are also restless and unpredictable.

  Chloe challenged Maria’s sense of communication more than Rocky or the donkeys did. Sometimes she wants to ride, sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she wants to go forward, sometimes she wants to go backward.

  Maria was frustrated working with Chloe at first, even angry sometimes. Her breakthrough came when she cleared her head and ego of the idea that Chloe was thwarting her. She learned to be patient, to be clear, to move her body in different ways. She called in friends who knew horses well, and they gave her tips on where to look, how to hold her body, how to give commands in a way the pony understood.

  After a few weeks, Maria began exploring different ways to listen to Chloe and talk to her. She discovered that Chloe loved to have her tail groomed; the pony stood still for it and her lips quivered with pleasure. She also loved to have her mane brushed. Maria taught her to “kiss,” to touch noses, and to “push”—to push balls and sticks around with her nose. She taught her to stand calmly while being cleaned or brushed.

  Maria would take Chloe out of the pasture and walk her around the big old trees, helping the pony to pick some apples off a tree, to walk and turn together, to listen to each other. She opened her heart to Chloe, stood with her silently so Chloe could smell and sense her. Maria imagined riding her around the perimeter of the pasture. She pictured Chloe moving in sync with her, and it began to happen.

  In various ways, Maria told Chloe that she cared for her, trusted her, that she was safe, a reliable source of food, grooming, attention, and stimulation.

  Chloe was an even greater challenge for me than she was for Maria. When I would open the pasture gate, Chloe would come rushing toward me, grabbing at the hay, sometimes knocking me off-balance.

  This was new to me—the donkeys and sheep never behaved in this way. And Chloe is big and strong; she could easily knock me or Maria over or step on our feet with her heavy hooves.

  At age sixty-eight, I am happy to do the farm chores with my wife, but also a bit more cautious and defensive than I used to be. I swatted at Chloe with one hand, tapping her on the nose. In that one moment, I dropped all of the techniques and ideas I had so laboriously been collecting, trying, and studying for fifteen years.

  Maria laughed. “Wait,” she said. “Let’s practice what you preach. Let’s do with Chloe what you always do with the dogs. Pretend she is a dog coming near the road.”

  The lightbulb came on over my head. Still, for the next few days, I left the hay carrying to Maria while I watched what she did.

  Maria carried the hay to the gate and opened it. Chloe came running up, whinnying in excitement. The horse turned and walked side by side with Maria to the hay feeder, accompanying her, sometimes running up happily ahead of her to wait at the feeder for the hay.

  “Great, great,” I said. “How did you do that?”

  Of course, I had a good idea how. Maria imagined the scene she wanted to unfold, conjured up images of Chloe walking in just that way. She cleared her own head. She didn’t go into the situation expecting conflict or discipline, or showing fear or hesitation, as I had. She was calm, confident, and clear. She showed these feelings to Chloe and focused on the horse’s excitement, not her overeagerness.

  Maria projected trust, looked toward the feeder, moved steadily toward it. And you could almost see Chloe catch on: Oh, I see, this is how we are going to do this. I will get the hay, it will be over there, and we will have a good time walking there together.

  And from the pony’s point of view, what could be better? Fresh hay in the cold, her human carrying it, the two of them walking to the feeder. Every day, the same time in the same way. Trust it, Maria said to Chloe, and so she did.

  Chloe and the horses of Blue Star speak to Maria often. They tell her about myths and images, feelings and fears, joys and triumphs. They inform her art, nourish her spirit, show her the way to strength and patience and love.

  I was more of a skeptic, at least initially. For months before Chloe came, I wondered why we were getting a horse. Did we need one? Could we handle another equine?

  I can no longer imagine living without our horse. Chloe has strengthened our connection to the world of animals. She adds her voice to the chorus of horses who speak to all of us, who need all of us. Together, I believe people and animals can help heal the world, just as humans and animals built it together. That is what the horses are telling me, every single day.

  In the spring of 2016, I watched Maria teach Chloe how to kiss. She held up a piece of carrot, said “kiss,” and stuck her nose out in front of the pony. Chloe figured out in a flash that if she touched noses with Maria, she’d get a carrot or a cookie.

  I wondered at the simplicity of this, this big creature happy to kiss a human on command for a cookie, or just for fun. Every morning of my life now, I get dressed and walk out to the pasture gate. Sometimes I have a carrot, sometimes not.

  “Good morning,” I say, “kiss!” And I stick my head over the gate. Chloe comes trotting up to me and kisses me on the nose. I have never found a better way to start my day.

  11

  Fate

  My newest dog, Fate, is on the opposite end of the dog spectrum from Lucky, my first dog, the dog that began my journey with animals.

  Lucky was a mongrel born in a box in a tenement basement in Providence, Rhode Island. Fate is a purebred border collie whose mother and father came from Wales and whose breeder is one of the most respected border collie breeders in America.

  If Fate and Lucky are at opposite ends of the spectrum, so am I, decades away from that frightened little boy who got up early on a freezing-cold day to get his first dog.

  Look what you started, Lucky, and look what Fate has wrought.

  In the winter of 2015, we lost three animals we dearly loved: Simon, the donkey, who was rescued fro
m an Upstate New York farm by the New York State Police; Lenore, a loving Lab who kept love alive for me when I most needed it; and Frieda, the hell dog, who protected Maria every minute and kept every man except for me far away from her.

  But this is the miraculous thing about dogs and other animals: unlike people, you can get another one. It sounds a bit cold, but it is the truth, a profound element in the human–animal bond. If you live with animals, you will know death, life, loss, love, and rebirth. We lost Lenore, Rocky, and Simon. Then there was Red.

  My border collie, Red, had come from an amazing breeder named Karen Thompson, who lives in Virginia and owns and runs Thompson’s Border Collies. Red is a wonderful dog, sweet and trustworthy, and a great worker. After some fruitless months looking online and talking to rescue groups, I emailed Karen and said Maria and I were looking for a dog.

  She answered me immediately. As fate would have it, she said, there was a puppy suddenly available. She sent a photograph. The puppy had one black eye; the other was bright blue—the Merle gene. She looked like a pirate, full of herself, clearly a rascal and a handful.

  Maria and I both at once said, yes, this is our dog. A couple of weeks later, we drove down to Virginia to pick her up and bring her home.

  Just as Chloe challenged Maria to test her work in communications, so Fate would challenge mine. I misunderstood Karen when I first spoke with her about the puppy. When she said “as fate would have it,” I thought she meant the dog’s name was Fate. It wasn’t, but it is now.

  Fate comes from a high-octane herding line. I have never had a more explosive or energetic dog. For the first four or five months of her life, she never stopped moving, not for a minute, from the second she woke up until she rushed into her crate and collapsed at night.

  Even by border collie standards, she is a perpetually busy dog, looking for work, stalking the sheep, chasing Red around the room, tossing her toys into the chair, emptying the wastebaskets in the house and piling the contents up on the floor, hiding her toys and bones under sofas and in big holes dug in the yard.

  Fate is the kind of dog you can wreck in a minute, she is so intense and aware. It is very easy to damage a young and high-speed border collie. They are so sensitive and obsessive that the wrong voice, the wrong movement, or vented anger, frustration, or confusion can alter the way they work for life. If you are too loud, or train too soon, or too late, or go too quickly or slowly, they can easily be ruined as herding dogs. We’ve all seen crazy border collies running around in circles, chasing balls and Frisbees all day as their humans desperately try to occupy them and tire them out. That was a lifestyle I wished to spare Fate.

  Fate was too intense to train much at first. She was so full of instinct and drive that she could barely hear me, let alone respond. She tore off after the chickens, scouring the grass for chicken droppings. She went from room to room, looking in the wastebaskets for tissues to chew. Out in the pasture, near sheep, she could not even hear me when I shouted commands to her. When she heard the pasture gate open, she exploded forward, ignoring repeated commands to lie down and stay.

  When she came into the house, she jumped up on me or any other person she saw. She leapt onto chairs, into laps. Sometimes she overshot my chair, bounced into walls, knocked over lamps.

  Once she realized there was food on the counters, she would leap straight up into the air and try to snatch it on the fly.

  I understood the value of crates. We had several in the house, and when she got too crazy, she went inside one of them. She also slept in them.

  This dog, I immediately grasped, would either be one of the greatest dogs I ever had, or a rolling disaster. Border collies like this are often too much to handle for many people. When I saw how intense and frantic she was, I wondered if I could handle it. But I also saw the possibilities. Here was a living laboratory for my ideas and techniques about talking to animals. Training a young puppy so full of herself and with herding lines to work with stock is, to me, one of the greatest challenges in any line of work. When young border collies get near sheep, they are transformed. They enter a kind of trance, racing in frantic circles, tongues on the ground, panting and pausing to eat as many sheep droppings as they can find. They shake and tremble; they hear and see nothing beyond the sheep in front of them.

  There are so many things they must learn: First, they must herd the sheep with a herder, not by themselves. Second, herding sheep is not a marathon race, a high-speed dog equivalent of a video game, which is what the inside of a border collie puppy’s head often looks like, I believe. They must move the sheep but not run them, control them but not outpace them or panic them or harm them, all the while fighting belligerent rams, protective ewes, clueless lambs, heat, cold, ticks and bugs, barbed wire and groundhog holes, rocks and bushes and thorns. And of course, humans, who are often distant, distracted, confused, or inconsistent.

  Many of us have seen those beautiful videos of superbly trained Irish and New Zealand dogs rushing up and down faraway hills, responding instantly to the whistles and hand signals of their humans. That’s like comparing those diaper ads with cooing babies to the real lives of mothers and fathers with newborn infants. One is not recognizable to the other.

  Training a dog like Fate is not simple, pretty, or easy. It is complicated, messy, unpredictable, and exhausting. It requires continuous repetition, patience almost beyond the ability of someone like me. It demands clear goals and a focused mind.

  Taking care of sheep with herding dogs is something human beings have been doing since the beginning of recorded history. Despite its challenges, it does not ever feel alien. To me it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

  Still, I never trained a dog as explosive or intense or as young as Fate. Red came to me almost fully trained. Rose and I worked together seamlessly. She was a fierce, hardworking, and intuitive farm dog, and we just figured it out together. As wonderful a dog as she was, she was not from the same pure working stock as Fate. Many if not most border collies bred in America are bred as show dogs or pets. They can be intense and energetic, but they are not the real thing.

  Fate is the real thing, as was Red, who was bred in Northern Ireland. Border collie purists (or snobs, as I sometimes call them) are terrified that people like me will choose these show dogs and will not buy farms and sheep for them.

  The purists were almost universally horrified when I wrote A Dog Year about my blundering efforts to figure out how to deal with Orson. And many were outraged when I ended up euthanizing him after he turned aggressive and bit several people, one in the neck. I do not regret putting Orson down, as much as I loved him. It was, for me, the beginning of a true understanding of the importance of talking to animals. But since his death, I have taken especially seriously the responsibility of living with border collies. Every one of them has lived on a farm, worked with sheep just about every day of their lives. They all had work to do, paths to run on, fields to explore, woods to race through, people to be with all day, cars to ride in, contact with all kinds of loving people.

  Still, Fate represented the biggest training challenge I had yet faced. I could have found an expert to help me work with her, but I wanted to train her myself, for many reasons. For example, I never do well with formal instruction. I never had a single class in school or college (I dropped out) that I liked. I never felt close to a single teacher. I know that was my own issue, not a defect of the educational system. But still, it made me edgy.

  For all of his flaws and contradictions, I am a disciple of Henry David Thoreau. I embrace the idea of making my own mistakes, learning from them, making my own decisions, standing in my own truth.

  I wanted to communicate with this dog, teach her the ancient art of sheepherding, train her to live safely and lovingly with us, show her how to rest and be calm. And once in a while, to be comfortable doing nothing at all.

  I wanted to be the teacher I never had, and I wanted to begin a dialogue with her that would enrich both of our lives.<
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  She was just eight weeks old when she first came into our house. She looked up at me sitting in my living room chair, came charging toward me, leapt into the air, and went sailing right over me, crashing into the wall, knocking over a lamp, bouncing to the floor.

  Okay, I said to myself, the journey begins. I started practicing what I call “intuitive training,” derived from my own instinct and intuition rather than from the books, videos, and dogmatic philosophies of others.

  When I live with an animal, or seek to get to know one, or train one, or talk to one, I ask this first: What is its nature? What is the soul of this dog, this donkey, this ewe, this cat?

  Like us, each animal is unique. Fate’s nature is intensely reactive, energetic, curious. She is almost seething with impulse—to run, to chase, to chew, to move, to work. She is the most athletic and agile dog I have ever had. She can run for miles, leap five or six feet into the air. She flips objects high into the sky and chases them, prowls the house for things to find, move, and pick up. She is a problem solver and puzzle solver, as working dogs are.

  Fate misses nothing, is curious about everything. She has all the traits of the working dog—she eats donkey, sheep, and chicken droppings when aroused, is so excited around sheep that she can barely hear me or any human voice for that matter. She is drawn to people and energized by them, jumping up on every single person she meets, often repeatedly. At times, she is beyond reach or command.

  My task was to understand this remarkable creature, to learn how to break through and communicate with her, and discover these instincts and channel them in a positive way. I needed to vary her activities so she would not become obsessed or addictive, to show her how to be calm when Maria and I worked or when we were in the house. I had to slow her down around sheep.

  It takes a long time to teach a young border collie how to herd sheep properly and productively, so I decided to waste no time. Technically you are not supposed to start training border collies with sheep until they are at least six months old. My intuition told me that this would not be the case for Fate. I began working with her three days after she arrived, the minute I saw her discover the sheep and try to dig her way under the fence to get to them.