There's this chronic tension, if you have a loose-eyed type of dog. Maybe if I lived in some farther reach of nowhere, a place where nobody ever saw or commented upon my dog, and I never saw anyone else's either, I wouldn't feel this way, but what I think of as Border Collie Culture is difficult to escape in regular civilization, if you are doing anything much with stockdogs.

This is a partially but not wholly invented-by-me culture, made up of people who endlessly pursue the dream of the Perfect Trial Dog. As an outsider to both, I see parallels with another culture (one they generally utterly despise, by the way), that which pursues the dream of the Perfect Show Dog. In both cases, dogs can be surprisingly disposable, once another dog better fitted for the Dream comes along. You can't keep them all, so the least dreamlike dogs must make way for new prospects.

The goal is winning, of course, but more than that, it's a kind of holy quest for the most extremely perfect of its kind, in this case, the perfect trial run. For such a run, you need the most talented dogs in the world, dogs that are bred to a nearly miraculous refinement of purpose.

I have been on a few holy quests in my life, and have found I am not really suited for them. Which is fortunate, because I don't have a dog which is going to carry me to any pinnacle of stockdog achievement. No Aussie is going to do that for anyone, least of all for me. The idea that a stockdog can be valuable without being a Border Collie or equivalent is hard for quite a few people who own Border Collies to understand. I imagine if I spent all my time with those people, I would find it hard to understand myself. I'd start thinking of my dog the way they think of theirs: ranked against the image of the Perfect Stockdog. And she would inevitably fail that test. For example the outrun.

At the AHBA trial I ran Bonnie in a couple of weeks ago, there was a young Australian Cattle Dog (we call them heelers around here), who demonstrated two kinds of gather: his built outrun, which was wide and pretty, and his obviously innate one, which was straight up the middle. Whenever he wasn't caught in time, he would go bowling. He hadn't the slightest apparent inclination to go around his stock, but I imagine that in a year or two, one wouldn't be able to guess it from his trial work.

Bonnie's natural outrun is an improvement on that dog's: it actually goes around the stock. But just barely. I spend a lot of time working on this "problem", but the truth is, at home a perfect pear-shaped outrun would be a total waste of energy. Her goats stand there and wait to be pushed, no matter where she comes at them from.

Built outruns are like most manmade stockdog behaviors: they tend to fall apart under stress. That's why Border Collie people say, if you want a great outrun, go buy one. Like all stockdogs, Bonnie is at her most useful when she is being her natural self. She will quietly gather her own stock and bring them from out of sight, through three gates and down a quarter mile of road and up a hill into another pasture without a single command from me. This is Bonnie being an ordinary farm dog. If I only meant Bonnie to be useful to me around my own property, I would never need another herding lesson.

But no, I am ambitious, at least a little. I would like to learn how to train my dog better. As soon as the word "better" is spoken, the tension begins. Because that is shorthand for so my dog will act more like a Border Collie. "You have all the moves, really," George told me at my last lesson, "you just need a better dog. If you had a Border Collie, you could progress really rapidly. It's your dog who's holding you back."

Earlier in my life, this remark would have really thrown me. Like anyone else I have a strong tendency to believe people whom I am paying to tell me things. The advantage of life experience is that I don't always, any more. Instead I asked myself silently, "Holding me back from what? Having fun with my dog? Doing farm chores? And I'm supposed to dump my useful, loyal best friend so I can win more difficult trials? And this would be why, exactly?"

George explained that those people who ditched their original breed, Aussies, for Border Collies, did so because they wanted to compete at the highest level. "I got tired of my Finals-winning Aussie and I getting beaten by some mediocre handler with a Border Collie," he said.

This is surely very understandable. As it is understandable that he would want me to aspire to the same things he aspires to. I have had many mentors, from medieval Italian literature to fiction writing to horse training to classical voice to organic farming, and in every case, they hoped I would keep striving for what they loved and knew. That's their job.

I guess I am resistant to being molded. Or born to be a failure. I never became a professor or a famous writer or a singer or actually much of anything very describable, although lack of talent wasn't necessarily why. Everyone is given just so much time. What do you want to spend it doing? On an online Aussie discussion board, on the subject of picking pups, Norm Andrews said (he might have been quoting), "Making the right decision is not as important as spending a lifetime working to make the decision you have made, right."

Another way of saying that would be, "love what you have, because life is about learning, not accomplishment."