Sorry about that last interruption of thought but that post had been pressing on my mind and if there is a better example of direct as well as passive exploitation than a factory farm… well I doubt it exists. I guess I have to justify why I’m even concerned about my relationship with a dog. It seems meaningless and trite after the image of baby chickens being fed into a meat grinder alive. The point is, I think it’s important for me to understand how I relate to animals and the land, and the relationship in question is really the only one of its kind I have. I don’t have chickens. Maybe if I did I’d think a meat grinder to good for them. I’ve met a few roosters that come to mind. My first employer had one that would hide around the shed in the garden and leap out and spur your calf and then run like mad in the other direction. There were worse fates coming to mind for that chicken than an industrial factory. But a dog is what I have and it’s a good place to start an examination of self so there I am. I think of it like a parent giving a child a gold fish. If you can be responsible keep this fish alive then maybe you can have the team of Clydesdale beer wagon horses you’ve been asking for. If you can treat your dog right by its nature then maybe you can do right by a chicken or a cow or a farm.
The last of the three requirements of dogs, after food and companionship, is good work. The semantics of this can be argued I’m sure. What is good? What is work? What is dog? But that’s just the human mind trying to justify a lack of the same. In the end a dog knows what good work is. It feels it. It’s wired for it.
There are two levels to this. On the first, a dog just wants to do something: run, jump, spin, hump, chase their tails, and sniff their bums. They’re not necessarily in that sequence but they could be, or they could be in a simultaneous jubilee of dogness. We might call this playing but I don’t think the dog really differentiates on its matters of existence. These things are good work.
The second level in my opinion is the higher level. It is very apparent that of all the things she could be doing my dog nearly always wants to be involved in what I’m doing. She could be romping at the ranch in a field of gum drops, among rows of bacon plants, chasing slow retarded rabbits, and hanging with her favorite labrador retriever but as soon as I step out to the truck she’d be right there wanting to know if she can help. (Maybe with bacon growing out of the ground she might walk over very slowly while stuffing her mouth full of greasy goodness but that only happens in dog dreams. It’s falling from the sky in my dreams.)
The question then is can she help? The honest answer is… no. I throw her in because she wants to come but it’s not because I need her. She’s of no practical use to me. I’m not herding cows or sheep, or trailering a cantankerous bull, all of which, given proper training I’m sure she would be amazing at. Some of you may be saying, here’s the angry man, here’s the exploiter again. You may be right. This may all just be a way to justify my mindset but hear me out and then tell me.
Does a dog have to be useful to have its nature fulfilled, to be nurtured? No. But if a dog’s need is companionship and good work then doesn’t it seem realistic to assume it should work with me? Shouldn’t it be a valued part of what I’m doing? There is a profound connection when you work with someone for a common purpose. It’s no different with a dog. I think dogs were meant to be useful and they know that. We seem to have forgotten that.
We were hunting pheasants on the highline near Medicine Lake a few years ago. My hunting partner, Mr. Clark, originated from that area and had lots of family around there so we had access to a few thousand acres stuffed full of ring necks. That country’s a huge bird haven and so it gets a fair amount of pressure from hunters opening weekend. We didn’t have a dog with us so we’d break brush and hope they didn’t stick to tight or flush to far out. It was fun and we had decent luck, knocking down a few roosters but we could have done better.
About halfway through opening day we noticed an English Pointer working the brush in a shallow draw about a hundred yards off the road. There was no one with it. The dog was fanatical, hunting hard. When it got close we called it over and roped it up and through it in the back of the truck. Still no one around. Out in that country, if there’s a hunter within 10 miles you’ll see him. There’s no trees, no hills, no towns. There’s nothing but big open land full of brush and draws and birds. We checked the dog’s tags and made some phone calls, waited around for a bit to see if anyone showed up looking for their dog and then went back to hunting.
I’d struck on a brilliant idea. Hell, as long as we’re hauling the dog around, we might as well hunt it. Next good spot we through the Pointer out, got our guns and realized he was already gone, hunting like mad a couple hundred yards down the draw and running hard. Long story is, that dog was thereafter dubbed the Bastard and I fell in love with the knucklehead. After running him down and carrying him back to the truck we left him at the house and finished out our day.
It snowed hard the next morning, putting a foot on the ground by lunch. The pheasants weren’t going to be flying that day. We decided to take Bastard with us and put him on a long tether to keep him close. What ensued was some of the best pheasant hunting of my existence.
That dog had a phenomenal nose. The first time he went on point I just stood there unable to respond. I can’t describe working with a dog like that. In a blinding snow storm he would work a hedge row back and forth, back and forth, with an almost fanatical drive and then suddenly freeze solid, tail up, paw tucked and nose pointed right at a white pile of nothing, till you walked through it and a rooster exploded from underneath. That dog was a basket case. His only thought was birds and he went after them like a crack addict. I had to put a foot on the tether when he went on point otherwise he would yank the shotgun near out of my hand when the bird would fly. He was a terrible retriever, chewing the hell out of the birds if he got them and if he got off the rope he was flat gone. Despite all these moments of utter stupidity, he played my soul like an Appalachian fiddle player.
We finally did get in contact with the owner and he said he didn’t want the dog. It had run off one too many times. I brought him home and tried to finagle my way into keeping him but in the end I had to give him to a friend of a friend who I knew would hunt him a lot. The first time we found that dog I’d said I figured that he would hunt himself to death. I got a call a couple months later that he’d twisted his guts on a hunt and died. I’d been right about that crazy dog we called Bastard.
All dogs have this instinct to do something useful whether it’s ratting, birding, herding, or guarding. Some are well trained and some are wild cards shooting from the hip. I’m pretty sure mine has some cow dog in her cause she herds my brother’s lab and herds the boys and would herd me if I’d let her. She would have made an outstanding ranch dog. She can run the hills nonstop and she’s smart as a whip, but she’s a city mutt and short on good work. There’s not much I can do about that except just let her run with me when I’m out and about and make sure she keeps the boys in check. I’ve thought about teaching her to hunt rabbits because she’s good at running them when we’re walking the sage flats near my parents place. Maybe that will be a project this year. I’ve just got to keep from shooting her. That would bum the family out. It’s true that teaching an old dog a new trick isn’t the most productive of things I can think of doing, but then again, productivity is the shit that makes grinding up baby chickens seem like a reasonable thing to do so there you go.
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