PART ONE

In beloved pets, virtues are extra. My cat, for instance, has no discernable virtues. She is cranky, irrational, eats mice on the bed, and leaves muddy smears up the bathroom wall where she has boosted herself up to the top of the shower stall. However, for a useful stockdog, certain qualities are more or less required.

Here's a typical evening at my house: I rise from my chair and say conversationally, “I guess it's time to put the poultry to bed.” My dog, unable to wait for me to put my shoes on, zooms out of the dog door emitting a high pitched yelp, pelts across the deck, and waits tensely for me at the top of the hill, where the various pens are. She is illustrating one of the cardinal virtues of a stockdog, a quality I'll call volunteerism . Me! Me! I'll do it, just let me, please please please!!! I already know how!

At this time I have three different sets of poultry, but the mature hens have already put themselves to bed without assistance; chickens don't just come home to roost in a metaphorical sense. The pullets still are too small to roost with the hens, so they sleep in a wire dog crate in the hen house at night, and the ducks now have their own plywood and hardware cloth night box in the yard. These latter two are enclosed in a grazing pen during the day. It's on my list to divide this with chicken wire, but it hasn't happened yet.

The ducks are difficult, because they are stupid, panicky, and easily damaged. I open the various gates and poultry doors between their pen and their night box, and send Bonnie through the open gate to herd them through the alleyway. But the loose pullets have caught her eye and she looks about to herd them instead. I have a vision of a horrible disaster with pullets scooting everywhere and ducks freaking out and getting loose, so I scream “no, no, you stupid idiot, lie down!” in a tone which would send any normal dog running to the neighbor's house and asking to be adopted. Bonnie squinches her eyes and lies down. I go over and point her toward the ducks. “Now walk up.” She springs up with a renewed gleam, and carefully advances upon the ducks, thus illustrating another essential stockdog virtue: forgiveness. No matter what my failings as a trainer, including temper tantrums, Bonnie takes it all in stride, just as long as she gets to work. Indeed, in a non-working situation, my tone of voice would have utterly appalled her. With stock in front of her, she has already forgotten it.

I now have six ducks altogether. They are from different flocks, they haven't quite bonded as a group, and the latest additions don't know the routine yet. They all rush toward the box, but only a few actually go in. The rest bury themselves behind the box or run squawking around the pen looking for escape. Bonnie stands firm at the mouth of the alley to keep them from pouring back into their yard before I can shut the gate; she does this automatically now, because she possesses another stockdog virtue: learning from experience. Once she has done something successfully a few times, she will continue to do it that way without reminding.

I get the gate closed. My idea is to cover one side of the pen and Bonnie will cover the other, and together we will funnel the ducks into their box. This works for the ducks which have gone in several times before, but the others stand there paralyzed. I wave my hand at them but they don't move. Even though Bonnie is on a stay, she loses patience with this. Without command, she feints calmly to the left, and the ducks instantly all dive right into the box. I have seen Bonnie do this kind of thing enough that I no longer try for exact obedience when working stock. Instead I try to show her the picture of what I want, and give her some room to execute it. Maybe this is an example of two virtues: stock savvy and team spirit. Both are required. Coyotes, for example, are loaded with stock savvy, and golden retrievers love to work for you, but for different reasons they make poor stockdogs.

Next we go back to the pullet pen, to shoo the quail-sized birds into a dog crate. I crouch by the door, and Bonnie puts them in. I am particularly pleased that she can produce perfectly square flanks in such a tiny area. She could, of course, kill a pullet in one bite, but she never offers to. They can run over her feet without her snapping. Kindliness, perhaps not absolutely required, is still a lovely virtue in a stockdog. Livestock managed by such a dog learn to be trusting, while still being respectful, an ideal state of affairs.

I feel a little uneasy describing this evening, because it was one in which I didn't send Bonnie the wrong way and scatter the ducks to kingdom come, where she didn't put her paw on a pullet and make it screech, and I managed to shut the gate before the ducks flooded back through it straight over my bewildered dog. But it did happen, so let's pretend it's always that way.