The trials of teaching a working dog

“Don’t they make dogs that do this?!”

It was a war cry born of complete frustration during the many times that Loren and I ended up chasing our livestock around a field/up a road/out of the neighbor’s vegetable patch. And of course there are dogs for that very purpose, and so we got ourselves one.

Piper, a red and white border collie, bounded into our humble abode last May, bringing with her the first of much mud, poo, and bits of half eaten, unidentifiable organic matter. Since then, she has stopped hurtling around for about half a second.

Border collies, as we had read in the research we did about the breed before we got her, require a lot of mental stimulation. “How hard can it be to entertain a dog?” we shrugged. Well, quite, as it turns out, when it’s possible that your dog has an IQ higher than you do. It became common for Loren and I to have her favorite squirrel toy dropped on our heads at 5 a.m. before a pair of eyes with unnaturally dilated pupils peeked over the duvet. “Oh, you’re awake!! We can play now, yes? How about now? Now?” It was inevitable then, that one morning whilst at work, I got an e-mail stating that Piper had gotten bored and had set about systematically destroying the house, starting with the couch, moving onto my new shoes via a few electronics cords, and finishing with a wall.

We needed to keep her occupied, and as the idea of getting her in the first place was to herd livestock, we found a trainer and started lessons. Ostensibly, she would just pick it up and after a few lessons we would never have to chase sheep around Puget Island again, and that would be it. I had visions of the gentlemen farmers in flat caps, rolled up shirt sleeves and tweeds back home in England, standing in sunny, daisy-swept fields, calmly instructing their dogs from the sidelines, then going for a pint and a ham and cheese sandwich. It is, needless to say, a lot harder, colder and wetter than it looks, and we had not anticipated Ian the Trainer, who can shout loudly and extensively for long periods of time without tiring and left me­­ feeling a little like a naughty seven-year-old.

I hated it. I hated standing in a soggy, freezing field in the middle of Oregon; I hated that my dog wouldn’t listen to me and just wanted to bite sheep and eat poo, and I hated being yelled at.

I would like nothing more than to say it was a very humbling experience and I came away with a greater life lesson out of it that I can pass on to my grandchildren, but frankly I didn’t; it was just cold and wet and very frustrating. So I did the only thing a rational adult can do in this situation: I sulked. But, unusually for me, I did keep at it and eventually it started to make more sense, Piper started to learn and actually paid attention to me, and Ian stopped yelling, albeit briefly. I even started to enjoy it, when it was going, better if not necessarily right.

Then we went for a holiday in England over Christmas and left Piper with Ian. When we came back, she was a different dog, almost literally. She had instigated a kennel break, gotten in with the dashing Joe Kidd and was now with puppy: six to be exact. I’ll admit to a bit of a warm feeling initially, before complete and utter terror took over. I went into panic mode. I read all the websites I could find, with their horrendously graphic pictures of what could go wrong. I put together an extensive collection of everything we might need. Thankfully, when the time came I didn’t need most of it; they just…arrived. I woke up and there was a puppy. Two even arrived at once while I was in the shower. It was all over in three hours.

Probably against better judgment, we are keeping two. It’s very much like having a couple of small, furry drunk people in my house, but they keep each other occupied, primarily it seems by biting each other, which I like much better than them biting me. Of course, we did learn a lot from Piper: I’ve given up hoping that there will be toilet paper when and where I need it and that it won’t be festooned all over my bedroom; I’ve hidden all my shoes and books; and I know not to walk around in bare feet without looking where I’m going first.

We won’t repair the hole Piper chewed in the wall just yet as we know we'll probably end up doing it all over again in a couple of months anyway.