Friday afternoon, I took Fate out alone, left Red in the house, he was tired. I set myself – training should be happy and relaxed, although I am not always either when training a young border collie. I want to focus on Fate paying more attention to the sheep, less to me and Red. I wait until she is looking at the sheep before giving her a command, this will reinforce her focus, which is generally very good.
I took a video of this training work. I like Fate’s manner a lot. She is responsive, paying close attention to me. She is appropriate, moving to keep the sheep together, but never rushing them or charging at them. She is young, so has not yet developed a strong eye or the authority to move them.
Zelda and Susie keep trying to push her back, they are teaching her to stay out, which is good. I am trying to do the same thing.
Training for me is about one thing at a time. I stop, take a deep breath, make sure I am calm, relaxed, that I have a clear training goal in mind. In this case, it was to reinforce looking at the sheep, and also walking up slowly to them. She has made amazing progress in just a couple of months, she is teaching me a lot.
I made few mistakes today, my commands were short, clear and focused. She understood each one of them. I didn’t use too many words. Hope you enjoy it, am liking taking the videos.
I brought Fate to the Moses Farm stand in Eagle Bridge, N.Y., perhaps the best farm stand I have ever gone to. They are passionate dog lovers there, they always ask me to bring a dog to see them if I can. I brought Fate today, and it is great to see Fate’s s sweetness really emerge. She is a love dog in much the way Lenore was a love dog, only she has the activity level of the border collie. Labs are, in a way, too smart to do what border collies do.
Three people were surrounding her, she went over on her back to have her belly rub, she loves people in away that is not common to all border collies. Rose did not love people, she had little use for anyone but me and then Maria. She would not have gone near these women, or submitted to all of the cuddling and cooing that went on.
I love having a dog that loves people, the mission of dogs in my life is to bring smiles and connection and love to people. This was nice to see. We went to the pharmacy to check on Bridget – she is quite trained emotionally, she says it’s like an Irish wake in there – and then to the bookstore. Fate wiggled with delight at the sight of every living thing.
Joshua Rockwood is not one to enjoy the limelight, to look for controversy, to ask for help. It was difficult for him to ask for $16,000 to help improve his farm and get it ready for this next winter. He got the money in just a few days.
Joshua was reluctant to do it, and then surprised and humbled by the response. I told him it will probably not be the last time he needs help, he has yet to resolve the 13 counts of animal cruelty and abuse charges still pending against him, charges a lot of good people believe are false and unjust at best.
It is still surprising to me that someone like Joshua was raided by the police and had his horses virtually stolen from him. It was wrong.
Under the law, animal abuse occurs when animals die or are grievously injured due to neglect or physical harm. No one has even accused Joshua of that. But in recent years some elements of the animal rights movement have arbitrarily – and well outside history, science, or the law – redefined abuse to make it anything the new army of animal police secret informers driving by think it is. Sadly, the animal welfare organizations founded to help animals – the A.S.P.C.A. and the U.S. Humane Society have become politicized, corrupted by big money now dominated by the most extreme ideologues in the animal world.
If they come knocking at your door or your farm, as they did at Joshua’s, do not expect fairness, rationality or compassion. They are not impartial arbiters in the widening conflict over the future of animals. There is now only one side to them, as the New York carriage trade has learned, as Joshua Rockwood has learned, as thousands of others are learning all over the country.
If you have a dog, a cat or a farm, all it takes to get a police raid is someone driving by your house and deciding snow on an animals’ back is abuse. If you look hard enough on any farm, you will find something, farms are rough, chaotic, dirty and unpredictable environments.
On Joshua’s farm, they found frozen water, unheated barns, two pigs with gray matter on one of their ears, horses whose hooves were a couple of months overdue for trimming. In the modern context of the new abuse, that was more than enough to threaten Joshua’s freedom, his farm and his family, and his means of earning a living.
Hundreds of people from all over the country decided enough was enough, this was not going to stand. Joshua will, I think, prevail. There are far too many Joshua Rockwoods out there.
None of Joshua’s animals were abused or frozen or starved last winter – and it was an awful one – but with this money, he can make sure that no one can ever accuse him of that again. He is building four tire water tanks and a large Greenhouse Shelter. Both are eco-friendly, Joshua raises is animals humanely and cares about the environment. They ought to be giving him an award for the care he gives his animals, not a court date. The money will also help him improve and expand his farm. He sells healthy food to local people. If the prosecution is foolish enough to take this rice-paper think case to trial, Joshua has bigger victories ahead of him.
His are not the animals being abused. More than nine billion animals live and die on awful corporate industrial animal farms, nobody is raiding them or seizing their suffering animals.
So what is the significance of this case, of this gofundme project?
Joshua is not looking to be anybody’s hero, he wants to fuss over rotational grazing, hay his fields, live with his family in peace, run a good and healthy farm, make a living on the land, sell good and healthy food to his community. Nonetheless, he is a hero, even if he is an unwilling one. He is part of a new social awakening, a new way of understanding animals in a rational way, a new way of treating people and animals both with dignity and respect.
Joshua is part of the new farming movement in America. He has an awareness of the gravity of today’s cultural and ecological crisis. In his encyclical on climate change, Pope Francis calls upon the young, “who have a new ecological sensitivity and a generous spirit,and some of them are making admirable efforts to protect the environment.”
Joshua is what Francis calls an “ecological citizen,” his animals are pasture-fed and free range. He uses natural and soon, solar power to run his farm. He does not use chemicals or pesticides in the preparation of his food. The people who buy his meat know where it came from and how the animals have been treated. He is transparent about every aspect of his farm and food production.
Beyond that, Joshua is part of the new social awakening, now evident in the New York Carriage Horse controversy. Across the spectrum of the animal world, people are beginning to see that the notion of animal abuse has been perverted and distorted beyond reason and reality. That – tragically for animals – some elements of the animal rights movement have lost their way, become more like hate groups than animal welfare organizations. If you do not know that it is not cruel for big draft horses to pull light carriages in Central Park, then you have no business trying to decide their future.
We have begun to worship animals at the expensive of people, granted them rights that people do not have, use them to promote the hatred of people, to make it difficult, dangerous or expensive to keep animals in our every day lives. The movement that goes by the name of animals rights is driving animals away from people at an accelerating rate, removing them from the world. If the earth is at a crossroads, animals are even more so. They are vanishing from the world at a horrific rate. According to the World Wildlife Fund, half the animals species in the world have vanished since 1970. Farmers everywhere are under siege from activists and regulators who no longer understand them or the real lives of animals.
Joshua and his ordeal remind us not to be bleak or pessimistic. You can fight back. There is support and assistance. The wheel turns and turns. Farmers and animal lovers everywhere are rising up in alarm and compassion at the idea that animals cannot live with us in our every day world. They are part of the new and more mystical way to understand animals – not as piteous and abused dependents but as our partners in the joys and travails of the world.
“I am humbled by the outcry of support,” Joshua wrote on his blog this week, “and will do everything in my power to make your proud of the support you have given. As we grow and get out current legal situation behind us I will seek ways to pay you kindness forward to other aspiring farmers, and to the community as a whole. I am compiling thoughts, and ideas now. Please let me know if you have any.”
He means it. I hope to go and visit Joshua next week, I hope to help him celebrate, I expect he isn’t good at that either.
So Joshua’s tire tanks and shelters are important, his case is a kind of Lexington and Concord in the new struggle to keep animals in our world and to treat them and the people they live with decently well. One of the first skirmishes in a long and necessary conflict.
Fate sailed off into the meadow this morning – we trust her completely, we see her hopping up and down out there chasing after chipmunks and mice. She always comes back. I wasn’t sure where she was and then she popped up by a small tree. Fate is a meadow dog, she is in her element there.
I left Fate along with the sheep for awhile, and when I came out to get her, Maria had joined her, the two of them were out studying the sheep, keeping them in line. A good team.
