Donald McCaig is an American author who, like me, has had an unorthodox career. He earned a university degree in philosophy. Perhaps that explains why he started out in the advertising business on Madison Ave., then quit to move to a large farm in Virginia to raise sheep and devote himself to Border Collies. His biography says he has completed postgraduate studies in ‘shepherding and sheepdogs’. Who knew you could go to school to learn those things? And where do I sign up???
Between training his dogs and raising his sheep, McCaig has written over a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, and even a slim volume of poetry. His Civil War novels (‘Jacob’s Ladder’, ‘Canaan’) have won multiple prizes and awards. His fictional works include a sequel to Gone With The Wind, told from the perspective of Rhett Butler and written with the blessing of the estate of Margaret Mitchell. He has fictionalized his love of Border Collies in two other novels, ’Nop’s Trials’ and ‘Nop’s Hope’.
What interests me in his writing are his real life stories of his life with Border Collies, and his thoughts and views on dogs in general and especially people’s attitudes towards them. I first came across McCaig in the early 1990s when I read “Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland For A Border Collie”.
I was enthralled. I dreamt that some day, somehow I would enter into that world.
By the time Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies
While the title suggests the book is mostly about Luke and June, the two Border Collies McCaig is trialling, aside from the chapter on June having puppies, Luke and June play more of a supporting than a starring role. The overarching story is McCaig’s attempt to qualify with at least one of those dogs to participate in the World Sheepdog Trials in Wales.
As interesting as that story is for the insights it gives to the world of sheepdog trials, the chapters containing anecdotes about McCaig’s dogs, the characters he has met in his travels and especially essays about dog training methods are what made the book particularly compelling for me.
After the first chapter, I almost put this book down. I opened it, expecting the same measured, intelligent prose style of ‘Eminent Dogs’. Instead, to my shock, McCaig seemed to have devolved into a good ole boy, Texas redneck. Okay, he does wear a cowboy hat and looks the part but if I wanted that kind of thing, I’d have read W’s autobiography. The prose was dumbed down, and full of ‘aw shucks, yee haw’ type slang, maybe because that first chapter was set in Texas and full of “characters’.
I persevered, and was ultimately glad I did.
This book is contains a myriad of interesting facts. Why, for example, do we make dogs heel at our left side? Turns out the guy who first instituted a comprehensive system of dog training was a Prussian military officer and police dog trainer. The dog heeled on the left because the officer carried his pistol on his right hip. And like sheep, we’ve been doing it ever since.
McCaig devotes separate chapters to his visits with dog trainers who espouse different methods, starting with what I’ll call the traditional methods of training (choke/slip collars for corrections for example), and moving on to the modern positive reinforcement only school.
Which, by the way, how are all those dogs trained with the ‘never say no to the dog method’ not fat as ticks from all the food rewards?
McCaig starts off with great scepticism about a trainer of drug sniffing dogs who has perfected training with the electric collar. After informing himself, and partaking in the training course, he eventually concludes that, done correctly, it too has a place for training certain dogs to learn to do – or perhaps more critically not to do – certain very important things.
On the subject of dog training, McCaig and I are in perfect agreement:
“The dog trainer’s expectations, communicated lucidly and consistently, trump methodology, and despite very different methods, Pat Miller [positive only training] Tony Ancheta [traditional] and Behsha Doan (electric collar) are brilliant lucid trainers.”
In other words, the trainer’s communication with and commitment to the dog is paramount. Not every dog responds to every type of training. Consistency, perseverance, patience and clarity are the essential components to dog training. Too many people expect brilliant results without doing the work. Too many people think there is only one correct way to train a dog.
Negative and positive reward systems have been duelling almost as long as dogs have been trained. McCaig finds that some proponents of one system or another are like religious fanatics.
McCaig arranges to speak with the man who first coined the phrase ‘separation anxiety’ and got vets prescribing Prozac and equivalent sedatives for this and for other behavioural problems. McCaig clearly found this fellow to be seated firmly in the fanatics section.
He doesn’t much care for fanatics.
McCaig asked to see the behaviourist working with dogs. Our author’s palpable dislike of the pedant grows more evident when the good doctor sharply informs him that he doesn’t have a dog. He’s an expert in dog behaviour, not, he sneers, a dog trainer.
He informs McCaig pedantically that some Border Collies can comprehend 600 words.
“Yes,” thinks McCaig. “But 600 words doesn’t make a dog Shakespeare and Shakespeare couldn’t tree a bear.”
Although it was Shakespeare who famously gave the stage direction: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” The script is silent as to whether a dog was involved.
I wish I could write that well. What a masterful summing up of the differences between our two species, while at the same time honouring the abilities of both.
Stanley Coren wrote the hugely successful book “The Intelligence of Dogs”. McCaig says simply “[Coren] equates a dog breed’s generic IQ with its ability to win AKC obedience trials. Sigh.”
Who can be surprised that this sheepdog man, whose dogs routinely disappear from view over the hill for an hour and come back with a hundred sheep in an orderly bunch, finds the automaton like performances of your average trained dog at an obedience trial to be a pretty poor indicator of intelligence.
He throw similar shade at the AKC sheepdog trials. In McCaig’s opinion, such “faux trials” are designed so owners can win prizes and put “herding titles” in their dogs. Quotation marks are McCaig’s.
The real trials are all about working dogs, who can do a job whether the weather is good or bad, the sheep bad tempered or kindly, the terrain easy or full of blind spots and who do the job regardless of whether they can hear their handler’s calls and whistles.
Whistles are used for commands because they are “less emotional and more precise”. When McCaig had a tooth removed, June couldn’t understand his whistles.
McCaig patiently explains sheep dog trials to us. They are incredibly difficult and unforgiving.
In 2001, 2002 and 2003, not one dog finished the course at the National Finals.
The dog who won was the one who lost the fewest points before he ran out of time. (You start with a given number of points from each judge, and can only lose those points, not gain any.) Points are actually deducted for giving a command on the outrun, because a Border Collie is supposed to instinctively run out to where the sheep are. He can’t go too close, or curve away from the sheep too far. But all of that is on the dog alone.
As McCaig tells us: “Border Collies instinctively gather and fetch sheep; they must be trained to drive them away.” Once the sheep are fetched by the dog to the handler, dog and hander must perform a series of manoeuvres involving getting the sheep through a gate, driving them into a pen, and separating a couple of sheep from the flock.
“Here, the handler must give the dog commands. If he did not, the dog would gather the sheep all up again and bring them back to the handler.”
Not only are no two courses identical, no two runs during the same trial are under identical circumstances. You may run your dog in the morning when it’s cool. My dog may have to run in the late afternoon when it’s hot and the sheep are cranky from having been chivvied around all day by a succession of dogs. There may be little noise from the nearby road in the middle of the day, but at rush hour, the dog can’t hear a thing 100 yards out because of the traffic noise.
It’s not fair. But it is designed to simulate real life working conditions, and those aren’t fair either. The dog must finish her work without her master’s commands if it comes to it. The dog must have confidence and the intelligence to think for herself.
The Obedience Trial equivalent of a sheep dog trial would be to do the off leash heeling test through a busy downtown intersection, and the long downs in the middle of a circus of cats and squirrels, partially without commands being given.
This book actually inspired me to attend the Sheepdog Trials in Kingston Ontario, a huge show that is mentioned with approval by McCaig. What a great way to spend a day. I have to thank Donald McCaig for making the proceedings even remotely intelligible to me.
Nearly thirty years after I first read Donald McCaig on Border Collies and sheepdog trials, I still find his stories compelling and his observations on training, trainers and the world of dogs in general to be instructive and humorous. Have a go. You may not always agree with him, but he’s never less than absorbing.