
If you read my last newsletter you may recall my first 2
Border collie friends Gwynty and Bess way before Baavet was even a glint in my
eye! When Bess died we took a break from
our Careers and Border collies and did a “Gap year” with a bike trip, that’s
bicycle trip around New Zealand and Australia, calling into Malaysia and India
on the way.
On our return from our “Gap year trip” we set to building a
house on the acre of land I had lived on in a mobile home for 18 years. We just had a briccy and a carpenter to build
a 2 bed roomed bungalow which is a short story in itself of the sort of current media “self build” generation. We went
on to sell this detached house, in Warwickshire and we were able to buy a 36
acre farm in North Wales where my love affair with Border Collies started
again.
This is what we now call Baavet land which has grown to
become 85 acres. It has never been an economically viable farm, hence over the
years diversifying into other things, like adventure activities, self catering
holidays and eventually Baavet. But you
can’t have a farm without a Border collie, can you? Well I can’t.
Gwen’s Story
We went to the local dog shelter, just to look; but of
course we came away with a Border collie. She was about 9 months old and she
had been found walking the streets of Porthmadog but was probably from a local
farm.
She was sick in the
car on the way home but we thought it was just her being travel sick. But on
her second night with us she was passing blood so rushed to the vets in the
middle of the night, and our vet was 17 miles away (such is living in rural
North Wales). She was so ill we had to leave her there. She was diagnosed with Parvo virus, with only
a fifty/ fifty chance of survival. We
waited for a week before finding out that she had survived. This was the first
of many of her 9 lives; she proved to be a tough old boot!
She survived, but over
the following months when we thought we would enjoy the company of a new young dog
on our farm and take her out for walks on the mountain, we found instead that
we had a very neurotic dog on our hands. She would hide in a cardboard box in
the house and she didn’t want to go out. We couldn’t put her on a lead because
she would roll on her back and whimper. She was terrified of our van. If there
were loud bags, anything that resembled gunfire or fireworks, she would run
home or just run! And she didn’t really
like me; in fact she was scared of all men. I even talked in a high pitched voice
and we laughed a lot, she really responded well to laughing! Don’t we all? We
tried puppy training and finally phoned a dog psychiatrist for help.
Obviously some
nasty things must have happened to her before she came to us. Lesley applied
tons of TLC but then took the dog psychiatrists’ advice, and dragged her along
the ground on the lead until she finally got up and walked. Then and only then
did things get better.
So we had our farm
dog, she would now go on a lead and we could take her into the hills, but we
had given up hope of training her to work sheep.
However despite all
of her problems there was something very positive about Gwen that I didn’t
mention; she was incredibly obedient as long as she wasn’t frightened, and I
could stop her on a sixpence (for those who don’t know, that’s a very small
coin in old money!)
A farmer friend of
mine once told me you only get one really good sheep dog in your life and as an
example of this he went on to tell me about his special dog. And this is a true
story!
This farmer, Will
is his name, had a very, very special dog. After a couple of years training, if
he wanted the sheep rounded up, he would take it out to the foot of the hills
and say ‘off you go’, and he would leave the dog to go on its own, meanwhile he
would go home and have a cup of tea while he waited for the dog to come back
with the flock.
Eventually as time
went by the dog got so good at this that Will didn’t even need to go out with
the dog he just opened the farm door and said “off you go, get the sheep” and
off the dog would go! And come back
later with the sheep in tow.
We had had Gwen for
over a year and she had never really taken any notice of sheep, in fact she
would try to avoid them out on the mountain. If there was a sheep in front of
us Gwen would stop and wait for the sheep to move before going on.
Then one day we
were coming down from the mountains in our van, with Gwen in the back, when we
met a group of farmers gathering sheep. We were forced to stop with sheep all
around us. The farmers were whistling and shouting their dogs. At this point
Gwen became very excited dashing up and down the back of the van and jumping up
and down at the window. This was really quite strange but not really strange if
you know anything about Border collies. They don’t all make good sheep dogs;
you can’t just make any dog be a working sheep dog. That may sound strange but
what you need is a “keen dog”, a dog that immediately wants to get at the sheep
on pure instinct, you then use that raw keenness and train them to work with
you.
I immediately
recognised that Gwen was just showing her raw keenness in the van at the sound
of farmers whistling and sheep milling around.
A couple of days
later I went down to the village to a farmer I knew, Robin the Milk. (That’s
because he delivers milk!) Yes, everyone has a nickname in
The next day I took
Gwen, the once very neurotic dog that hadn’t bothered with sheep, down to his
farm. We walked out with his dog into a very large field with a large number of
sheep in it. Robin whistled instructions to his dog which shot off to round up
the sheep. I had Gwen on a lead but she was straining to go out to the sheep. Robin
got his dog to move the sheep this way and then that around the field,
whistling and shouting instructions to the dog all the time. Gwen was getting
frantic. “Can I let her go” I said.
“Okay,” said Robin which was very good of him
because normally a new dog would just run straight at the sheep and scatter
them all over the place and cause havoc.
But Gwen didn’t do that, instead she just fell in alongside Robin’s dog
and shadowed its every move. As Robin shouted commands his dog moved first left
then right moving the sheep around the field and Gwen just followed its every
move like a shadow.
Then after a while,
and quite suddenly, she did something even more amazing, instead of shadowing
Robin’s dog it was as if she said to herself,
“Oh I get the hang
of this” and she took up the correct position a second dog takes when 2 trained
dogs work together.
The dogs will work
opposite each other either side of the flock and keep the sheep between them. It’s called the brace position.
I was amazed and
shocked. She had had no training and there she was working the sheep in tandem
with another trained dog. Robin continued to work the dogs and the sheep around
the field for some time before calling his dog back and Gwen came too…. I was
thrilled.
I went home to
Lesley with the good news. but she didn’t believe me. So I said “Okay we will
go back tomorrow and show you”
So we did and Gwen
performed just the same. But Lesley said, “She isn’t working the sheep she is
just copying the other dog”.
Of course she was
copying the other dog! But what a fast learner! And from that day to this she
has worked sheep without any formal training. In fact it’s me that lets her
down because I get my ‘comeby’s’ and ‘away’s’
mixed up so when we were working the sheep she would turn and give me a
dirty look as if to say “Okay which way do you want me to go!”
But the other trick
she had was turning her sheep dog skills on and off. She could move among sheep
and completely ignore them unless I give her a command at which point she would
have a complete character change and become a highly focused sheep dog.
So the old farmers
tale that says you may have many dogs in your life but you only really get one
great dog, perhaps Gwen was that once in a life time special sheepdog dog.
But that was just
the beginning of 16 wonderful years of adventures with Gwen. I have spent some time dealing with Gwen’s
problems because I know they are very common when trying to rehome a collie, or
any dog for that matter, and I just want
to give those who try some hope that things can turn out well and that they
will reward you forever.
However we did have
one big problem but not of her making, she developed epilepsy which took some
time for us to control. We tried special healthy diet; she was put on Phenobarbital
by a vet but this was so strong and it had nasty side effects, it left her
quite disabled. As a result we didn’t dare take her abroad and we couldn’t
leave her with anyone if we wanted to go away, that is until one day we had a
couple of adventure activity clients for the weekend. (We were running Outdoor
adventure activities as an extra activity from the farm at the time). As with
many people who met Gwen, one of the guys fell in love with her and threatened
to kidnap her and take her back home with him.
So I jokingly said
“Well you can come and look after her for a couple of weeks if you want”
“Fine,” he said I
will and bring my wife who also suffers from epilepsy”
And they came and
we had our first holiday abroad for some years.
The fits became
more frequent as time went by and it was so distressing for her as well as us.
When she came out of the fit she didn’t know where she was. Then she started
fitting and not coming around this was usually late at night. On several
occasions we raced through the night to the emergency vet because she had to be
knocked out to stop the fitting. On one occasion we happened to meet a new young
vet who asked if we had tried potassium bromide which had no side effects. We
hadn’t. He said it was an old method of controlling epilepsy and it didn’t work
on all dogs, but luckily for us, and Gwen, it worked for many years. So much
so, that we felt confident in taking her abroad and also leaving her with other
people if we wanted to fly abroad to go climbing.
By this time we had
renovated some barns into self catering and amongst our visitors was a family
with 3 children. They enjoyed the farm and the area so much they became regular
visitors. The youngest girl, Charlotte,
who was about 10 when they first came, also fell in love with Gwen and would
send Xmas cards to her. And guess what; later on she would come with her Mum,
Rita and they would come to look after Gwen for us if we went on holiday. This
was a long standing friendship with the family to this day.
So Gwen was great
on the farm with sheep; she was great with visitors and she loved our adventure
activities; and she loved being out on the mountains.
One of the
activities we took people on was underground exploration of old slate caverns.
She loved this and seemed quite happy in the dark. However there was one
difficult section I didn’t take her through because it involved climbing and
tight squeezes. So I would take her a different way and leave her in a tunnel
with a torch, tell her to stay, and then I went back to the group and completed
the difficult section and met up with Gwen later. Now if any in the group were
unhappy at this difficult section I would leave them in a large cavern with
Gwen while I took the rest through and end up way above Gwen and her party. I
would shout down to tell Gwen to bring them zig zaging up a long slope. I could
tell her to stop and wait for her protégés as she led them up the slope, she
was that good. Whatever activity we did we never had to worry about her she was
always there.
She was excellent
at knowing exactly where she was out on our treks and walks and if we had gone
a new way but then crossed a path we had been on before she would know where
she was. In fact I have to admit sometimes when I had groups out on the
mountain and if a mist came down and I wasn’t sure which way to go rather than
get a map out I would often just quietly say which way Gwen?
I also ran basic navigation courses and of
course Gwen was always there and she knew all the routes we took. No one on the
courses ever twigged the dog knew the way and you could just follow the dog!
There were so many
stories of her exploits, it needs a small book!
But as always the
wonderful journey had to end. She managed to get to 16 when the medication for
the epilepsy no longer worked and the vets were unable to stop her fitting. So
we had to make that terrible decision at the vets to stop her trauma and put
her to sleep. But then your own trauma starts as the heartbreak sets in. We
took her home from the vet determined to bury her on the farm.
There was a terrible storm, as though nature
were grieving too, in heavy rain and wind we dug her grave in the orchard. But
we hit a big stone, but it was too late and difficult to dig elsewhere, so we
struggled to get the stone out as the rain lashed down. We then placed her on
her own very special Italian leather Baavet doggy duvet and carefully covered
her over. The large stone became her headstone.
And then the storm suddenly
finished and nature became quiet again.
We were distraught
and sometimes you wonder, is it worth the pain, but then you remember the great
times along the way and we still had Moss...... and that’s another story.
Thanks for reading
Roger Payne