Session Two

So concludes Session Two (Sunday, October 12, 2008) of obedience training at Lollypop Farm, our first with our dog.
We were skeptical at first, and prepared to dive.

A little philosophy of dog-ownership here:
The standard philosophy is the dog is supposed to be subservient to the owners.
We don’t look at it that way. A number of factors are at play:
—1) Our dogs are rescue dogs, often abused or from broken homes. Killian was from an abused background; Sabrina a broken home.
Killian was a special case.
I could have continued the put-downs, and jailed him in a crate.
But I didn’t.
I let him be himself, and pull like a monster.
He loved it.
Sure; I could have intimidated Killian. He’d had a hard life already.
The fact he loved it was reward in itself.
It’s what made him a smiler.
Shortly after we got him, he yanked the leash right outta my hand at the so-called elitist country-club.
I thought he was lost forever, but after about 20 minutes, here comes Killian up the road — “Where ya been, boss?”
No back wall for that dog. No prison either!
—2) One of the owners is a stroke-survivor, with compromised ability to communicate.
And it’s the pack-leader, which means I’m not very good at communicating pleasure and approval to a dog.
So I compensate by allowing the dog to be itself — behavior that wouldn’t pass muster with a dog-trainer.
And what do I get? A smiler.
Scarlett is like that, a refugee from a puppy-mill.
Kept in a kennel and more-or-less avoided. —Never could hunt; that’s endemic to the breed.
So okay; jail her in a crate, or let her be herself?
I let her be herself, and she loves it.

So the question is was this dog-obedience trainer gonna want me to intimidate the dog?
If so, we’re divin’.
I get a happier dog if I let her be herself.

We arrived at the class about 20 minutes early, so I decided to take Scarlett for a walk, if she had to do anything.
Lollypop borders the long-abandoned right-of-way of the Rochester, Syracuse & Eastern interurban line.
It’s been turned into a hiking-trail; a wide double-track right-of-way with a three-foot-wide path of centered crusher-run.
We hiked about a half-mile; past Lollypop’s horse-fields on one side, and backyards on the other.
Inside I was surprised to find a dog happy to please the pack-leader. —I was expecting inattention; but got an obedient dog instead.
Despite being an utterly wacko Irish-Setter (ya don’t tell them what to do; especially if they see a critter), Scarlett was probably the best dog of all eight.
Other dogs were wiggling all over, hot to meet each other.
But I had a dog that loved to please me.

“Lollypop Farm” is the Rochester-area (Monroe County) Humane Society.

Our current dog is “Scarlett;” a rescue Irish-Setter. She’s four-plus, and is our sixth Irish-Setter. Our previous rescue Irish-Setter was “Killian.”

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton (“BOW-tin” as in “OW”) Park, a woodsy park where I run and we walk our dog. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it. We are residents of one of those towns.

RE: “No back wall for that dog........” —My all-knowing, blowhard brother-from-Boston, the macho ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, is a pet-hater. Pets are supposed to worship him, and if they don’t he puts them out behind the back wall of his house, where they freeze to death in the north wind.

I had a stroke October 26, 1993, and it slightly compromised my speech.

An “interurban” was a special railroad designed to move passengers in outlying areas. It used self-propelled cars often powered electrically by overhead trolley-wire, but usually the cars were bigger than regular city trolley-cars. —The Rochester, Syracuse & Eastern was more than the ordinary interurban line, since it was double-track. Most interurbans were single-track. The RS&E could run much faster, but it never went beyond Syracuse.