The sheep seemed a little nonplussed at the sudden appearance of Fate and Red in the Pole Barn this afternoon. The two appeared in the farm dog seminar Red was conducting out in the pasture. Nobody moved, even with the donkeys running interference.
More than anything else, I think, I want dogs I live with to love people and to love their lives. I have a winner with Fate, who seems to love everyone she meets, and melts and wriggles with joy at the prospect of loving them. At the Cambridge Farmer’s Market, she made a friend with a young woman sitting in one of the booths, she jumped up onto her lap and the two of them hugged and kissed. This lifts my heart, even more than the grace and ballet of a great herding dog. This is the point of dogs.
I see all sorts of messages streaming through the digital universe about Father’s Day, most of them wishing fathers a happy day, some selling stuff, some claiming being a father is the best job they ever had, many being congratulated by children and friends and relatives for being Father’s on this day. It’s always been interesting to see that on Mother’s Day, the restaurants are jammed with kids and their moms, but on Father’s Day, nobody seems to know quite what to do with their Dads. You can always get a seat at a restauratan.
I hesitate a bit at some of these messages, the celebratory tone, the word from Fatherland is not so black and white, clear or simple. It is hard to be a good dad, I never had one, was not always a great one myself, and know very few who don’t think they could have or should have done better.
Father’s Day is a day of humility for me, of reflection. I try every year to love my Dad and understand him, and as I veer towards my seventh decade, I am being to accept the reality of this, and to let it go. My father did the best he could, as I have, and I suspect almost every father on the earth does. But I bow my head on father’s day, I see the work I need to do to be the human being I wish to be.
At some points in human history, it was clear what being a good dad meant. Sometimes it was being a protector, sometimes a navigator, sometimes a pathfinder, sometimes just a provider. Our world is changing, we are in the last waning days of the Patriarchy, I hope it collapses completely before men finish their work ravaging and pillaging and destroying the earth. No one ever told me what being a father meant, like most fathers, I groped and guessed my way through it. Much of the time, I guessed wrong. I struggled at times to accept the person my child was, rather than to push her into being the child I wanted her to be.
Now, I have learned something. I wouldn’t do that to a dog.
I, for one, am not sure what it means to be a good Dad, and never have been. It is important job, for sure, but I am loathe to congratulate myself for being a father. The role of men in the world, in the workplace, at home, is being challenged, is changing, and I think that is good and long over due thing.
This is where I have landed: What I want is for my daughter to be happy. If she is, I have done my work as a father. Beyond that, it is her business.
We fathers have screwed up the planet pretty good, we and our brothers and sons are responsible for almost all of the violence, war, environmental degradation, oblivious political leadership, greed and destruction that men have visited on the earth and it’s children. Have we left our sons and daughters a good and peaceful and loving world?
I always defined fatherhood as raising a child who could love, make friends, do good work and no harm, and be content in the world. In that context, I have been a good father, my wonderful daughter Emma is all of those things.
But when I look at all of the self-congratulation back-patting I see online and in the media on Father’s Day, I must confess to wincing, to feeling abashed, humbled and a bit regretful. It isn’t that being a father isn’t important, it is perhaps the most important thing I have ever done.
I just realize in retrospect that I knew little about it, or how to do it, and at some of the key points in my child’s life, I was either not there or too messed up to be of use. I don’t mean to be downer, but that is the truth of it, and I have learned not to lie to myself or others. I can’t really celebrate that record. On Father’s day, I remember the two children I lost in the early days of my marriage, I think of them and love them and regret that I never saw them live long enough to really be in the world.
And of course, I think of Emma. My daughter is very much in the world, happily married, engaged in work she loves, in the center of a powerful community of friends that have often been her real and most cherished family.
I am sober and reflective on Father’s Day, and I can’t join in too much of the cheering. I talked to my daughter today, and I said none of the things I was really feeling, I didn’t wish to rain that down on her, she has moved along with her life, I am moving alone with mine. If anything, the animals I live with have benefited from my lessons of fatherhood. I am learning to be patient, to listen, to wait and to love. One way or another, fathers learn something about love.
I wish all of the other fathers a great and meaningful day. I wish we fathers did better. I look at the fathers in Washington, at the father’s on TV, on cable news, I look at the fathers arguing on Facebook and promoting guns and hatred and division, the ones with power and armies to command, the ones on Wall Street, I think of my friend Paul and his two daughters, I look at the father’s who fill the jails and raise tortured sons who kill people, and who commit most of the crimes and who, everywhere, violate the canons of real fatherhood and harm other people.
I give thanks to Pope Francis, he gives me hope for men, he is not afraid to love, to give up wealth and power, to trade in his velvet slippers, to love Mother Earth, to think of the helpless and the poor, to speak the truth to the many other fathers who want to hear it. He is a Father, in so many senses of the word. I want to feel about my self as a father the way I feel about him.
So when it comes to Father’s Day, I am humbled and subdued, perhaps a bit mournful. I don’t feel too celebratory or self-congratulatory. I hope to use my remaining time on the world to work for a better world for my daughter and her new husband and their children and for the children of all the other fathers in the world. When we can tell our sons and daughters that we have made a better world than the one we grew up in, that will be a Father’s Day worth celebrating.
And I hope to be a good father.
Another breakthrough for Fate today, I took her into the pasture off leash and without Red. She walked up to the barn, stared at the sheep, walked out the barn, lay down and watched the donkeys and the pony. She came in and sat next to me, said hello to Maria. She ate some sheep and donkey droppings – this is natural to dogs with intense drive at first – she decided she was more comfortable just outside of the pole barn where the sheep were.
Fate made a bunch of good decisions in the pasture. She did not go crazy or run at the sheep, she was calm and receptive. This is important work for her. She respected the donkeys and kept a slight distance from them. She came out when called. She was in the pasture for about a half an hour, I was thrilled with her comportment, judgement and responsiveness. She’s going to be a great dog. She is a farm dog now.
A lot of people are asking me how I am training Fate to live on a farm with dogs, chickens, sheep, donkeys, a horse and barn cats. It’s a good and timely question, it involves, patience, trust, and a willingness to take some careful and moderate risks. It also depends on getting a good and grounded dog and knowing him or well.
We have decided that Fate, essentially Maria’s dog, will be farm dog. She will not be a herding trial dog, but she will be able to gather sheep, move them from one place to another, control them and keep them in place appropriately and professionally. This means she will be around our free-range chickens, who pop up everywhere, ewes and lambs, including wethers, two guard donkeys and a 20-year-old pony. It also means she will be around two barn cats, who sleep in and around the porch and in the barns, hunt in the pastures, and come into the house in the bitter cold.
So I have begun training her to be around other animals. Some rules:
– Dogs need to understand who lives on the farm and who doesn’t. Over time, dogs like border collies will live easily with – even protect – animals who they know live her, so the first thing is to walk the puppies around the chickens on a leash every day. Chickens quickly grasp when dogs are on leashes, and will go about their business. If the dog barks and lunges at the chickens, I correct them softly – “lie down” or a “leave it,” or “get away” command.
– We need to know our dogs. Pit Bulls respond one way to chickens, border collies another, Labs yet another and Chows and terriers another. Border collies have a lot of chase and herd drive, but they have had most of the final stages of prey drive – run and kill, bred out of them. This is why it makes me crazy when politically-correct kennels name all their dogs “American Kennel Breed” in order to make dogs like Pit Bulls more adoptable. It is fine to get a Pit Bull if you know the breed and take the necessary precautions. Border collies will rarely attack and kill a chicken. But they have to be familiarr with it, be around it, have their drive re-directed to sheep or agility or some other activity.
– So far, Fate supports my notion that dogs must be given the opportunity to succeed and then praised and reinforced for it, not yelled at leashed up, pulled and kept away from life on the farm. This week, I began letting Fate off-leash around the chickens. She ran after one or two – border collie puppies are movement addicts – and I corrected her quickly and sharply, and either threw the ball or took her to sheep. She has stopped looking at them, chasing after them, bothering them. If she goes into a crouch near the chickens, I correct her immediately and take her away. This is not happening any longer. But you have to be willing to take some risks. If the dog is never free near the chickens, they can never learn to leave them alone or ignore them. You just have to pick the time, close your eyes, and be close by. Fate has got it, she is safe around the chickens.
– Big animals. Next I’ve introduced her to the equines. For the first two weeks, the donkeys and pony and Fate got to know each other only on the other side of the fence. They could see one another, sniff one another, get used to each other. Grounded farm dogs do well with equines, but only if they are introduced gradually and intelligently. A horse or donkey can stomp a dog to death in a flash. This week, I’ve been bringing Fate into the pasture off-leash for the first time, the donkeys and the pony have all come up to sniff her and now they accept one another and are easy together. She is figuring out how close to get to them.
Again, there is a point – after thorough acclimation – where you have to let them work it out. Savvy working dogs will figure out how to live together, but some breeds are not savvy farm dogs. This cannot be done with every dog, all dogs, like all people, are different. You have to be careful and thoughtful and not push a dog into situations that excite you but are not natural for the dog. Every dog is not a herding dog, every dog is not a farm dog.
– We are moving into a new phase with Fate, trusting her and allowing her to succeed. She is walking off-leash, from the house to car, on our walks in the woods, out to the pasture. She comes when called. I am letting her eat poop in the pasture, it is natural and she will grow out of it if left alone.
– Perspective and discipline. I do not allow any of my dogs to chase anything but sheep. No chickens, cats, lambs, deer, turkeys, and even the sheep can only be approached calmly and on command. Chasing chickens is not herding, it is not farm work, it simply another kind of abuse – to the chickens, and to the dog, who needs to know better.
Fate needs the freedom to make decisions, develop her own instinct and judgement, I cannot protect her from every situation on a farm. Sometimes, she will get butted and run over, sometimes snorted at or chased by a donkey. It is part of the real life of real animals, especially the life of the farm dog. Trial dogs are different, they do different things. I have never had a farm animal injure one of my border collies, I have always allowed my dogs the opportunity to make decisions, develop their instincts, grow smarter and succeed. Hope that helps. I’ll keep writing about it.
My idea is you get the dog you need and the dog you want. Choose it carefully, know it well, be patient and wait for the behavior you want and call it a lot of good names.
