Day two of the Ginger Ale box gallery brought some new elements. The pinhole photograph of a ferris wheel I bought in New York City, the small vase of flowers, the donkey in the far right, the hanging red bauble, the glass on the upper left. Maria moves around like a cat, I never see her place or remove things from the windowsills and spaces here, but they are always changing.
She is an art fairy.
Our new Ginger Ale Gallery is taking shape, I love it already.
Did I mess up training Fate and fail to help her develop a herding eye, rather than learn to love racing around the sheep. The sheep have no respect for Fate as a herding dog, and the situation was complex for me. We never meant for Fate to be a working dog, she seemed so keen I thought I should try working with her.
I tell people all the time that I am a writer, not a dog trainer, but the line is sometimes confusing. I have trained a lot of dogs, including four border collies, and have always had great success, but Fate is the first one who just didn’t develop into a dog who wanted to control sheep or could.
Red reminds me that there is training, and then, there is training. He is on another level, I will not likely see his kind again.
Could Fate’s idiosyncratic herding personality be my fault? Absolutely.
I came to believe – and still believe – that Fate does not have the “eye-stalk” necessary to intimidate and control sheep. Could I be wrong? Sure. She comes from a great breeder and a great of working dogs from Wales.
Dr. Karen Thompson, the breeder who gave me Red and Fate, told me she thought, watching the early videos, that Fate was running too much and stalking too little. I think this is almost certainly true, and I have enormous respect for Karen, she knows what she is doing. It would be stupid not to listen to her.
Ideally, young border collies should be trained in a small pen or space so they can’t run in circles, they have to develop their eye.
Karen says you never knows for sure with puppies, but that might be why Fate prefers to run around the sheep rather than herd them. She got into the habit, and I let her, and with border collies, two times is an addiction. It’s very possible she was so busy having fun running she was too distracted to focus on controlling.
The other possibility is that she is one of the 20 per cent of border collie pups who don’t have the eye-stalk, according to what I have read. My inclination would be to go with Karen, I trust her completely.
On the one hand, I feel badly if I messed up the training of this remarkable dog. On the other, we ended up with precisely the dog we wanted – an active, energetic and loving pet who is Maria’s dog and who spends her days with her. We could not be happier with Fate or with the kind of dog she is, she has an active and very happy and loving life here.
Life is funny sometimes, it worked out the way we wanted without our quite realizing it.
The other factor that Karen raised – she is honest always – is age. I am 69 years old, and quite healthy, but my legs do not move as quickly as legs often need to move when training a young border collie. I often found that Fate was moving so quickly and so far ahead of me that it was very difficult to train her or be there when I needed to be right there. Ideally, we should have moved from a small pen to a small pasture to the real thing, in stages.
We aren’t set up for that.
I never quite figured out how to do that, or perhaps I just gave up on it. In any case, Karen and I both agreed that an adult dog with herding experience would be a wise move for the next dog. We will need one. Karen knows the dog will have the best possible home.
We live in a culture where mistakes are considered fatal flaws and crimes, often subject to ridicule or assault.
I have learned no to see it that way. Our country would be better and safer if our leaders could admit to making mistakes and learning from them.
I make a lot of mistakes, and I work hard to understand them and take responsibility for them. And to admit to them, and in public. There is no grace in pretending to be perfect. Mistakes make me smarter and stronger, there is not a human being alive who has not made some.
Karen said she wasn’t sure about the training of Fate. And to be honest, there is no way of knowing for sure.
But I think she is right, I feel it in my gut. She is a good friend for telling me the truth.
Mistakes can teach us or sink us, depending on how we react to them. I hate to make mistakes, but I also recognize them as a gift. There is no better way on the earth to learn than to make mistakes, and to have the kind of life where mistakes are inevitable, a symbol of life, growth, and change.
There is something empowering about standing up in the world and saying out loud, “yes, I made a mistake.”
And then let go of it.
I plan to make many more mistakes. I hope I have the grace to own up to them and to have good people around me who will tell me the truth when I do.
Red has been doing therapy work for some time, yet today feels like a big day for him. We are going to an assisted care facility nearby to explore the idea of visiting the people there regularly, I think this would be a great place for us to focus Red’s work. This comes at a time when I am scaling back on Red’s active work sheepherding, he seems to be slowing down, perhaps because of his arthritis.
He can still come out into the pasture and move a bit, but no more hard running. I am ramping up his therapy work, as he loves to work and is a remarkable and intuitive therapy dog. The work we have done with veterans – I decided to keep this work private – has been deeply moving and helpful.
We will continue to work with returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq as requested.
So a new chapter for Red, and Maria and I took him out into the yard to give him a good brushing. It feels like a big day for Red, I said to Maria this morning. Yes, she said, it is. We’ll see how it goes.
Chickens love corn in almost any form, but they especially loved a fresh corn cob plucked from our Three Sisters Garden. Our corn is healthy and strong, but not as tasty as the corn from the Moses Farmstand down the road. So we are giving some of it to the pony and donkeys (nothing, absolutely nothing is wasted around here) and some of to the hens, who were absolutely delighted. Next time, butter and salt.
