The Education of Will Read online

  A good dog manages sheep by finding just the right distance and pace to move the sheep by intimidating but not frightening them. Too close or too fast and the sheep will either dash away in a panic or turn and fight. Too far away or too cautious and the sheep lose respect for the dog and ignore or attack it. This distance between dog and sheep—the sweet spot that allows your dog to take control of the sheep without overwhelming them—is called the “balance point,” and it’s the goal of all shepherds who value the welfare of their sheep. The right distance between dog and sheep varies—flighty sheep require dogs to work far away, while “heavy” ones, less responsive to a dog’s presence, need a dog to work much closer. Sheep are only one of the variables; different dogs work the same sheep at different distances. Some dogs have more presence, more natural power, that somehow takes over the flock’s psyche and moves it away without creating a panic. Less confident dogs need to get closer, sometimes weaving back and forth in an attempt to use movement to push the sheep, instead of the calm, steady confidence that defines a great sheepdog.

  Starting a young dog on sheep is not for the faint of heart. You are balancing three sets of fears: the sheep’s, your dog’s, and your own. At some point, you just have to take off the leash and let the universe decide what happens next. That was part of why Willie and I were at Peg’s. She had appropriate sheep and an appropriate enclosure, and she had a lot more experience than I did with starting young dogs. It had been almost fifteen years since I had introduced a young dog to sheep. Part of doing a good job is knowing when to interfere, which requires the reaction time of a soccer goalie. The other part is knowing when to stay out of the way. That’s even harder.

  Willie was clearly keen to work but frightened to get too close to the sheep. For several sessions, I had to gently take hold of his collar and ease him between the sheep and the fence to teach him that it was safe to push between them. Rather than walking up in the stalking posture of a hunting lion, as confident border collies do, Willie preferred to run back and forth behind the sheep, using movement to urge the sheep to me. He also liked to bust in on the sheep before circling to the back, a regressive return to the behavior he had tried at the fence when he was younger. He didn’t bite or chase; instead, he just charged forward with his eyes sparkling and sent the sheep scrambling in all directions like balls breaking on a pool table.

  Clearly, he enjoyed the game: Eeee-ha! Look at ’em scramble! So after a few freebies that all youngsters are allowed in order to keep them keen, I got between him and the sheep and walked toward him, pushing him back from the sheep and letting him circle the sheep again at a correct distance. Every sheepdog needs to learn that there are rules to the game, just like kids learn that hitting the pitcher with a bat is not playing baseball. But if you follow the rules, you get to keep working—something a good border collie wants more than all the treats in a pet store combined.

  We began working together at home, and slowly, gradually, Willie gained confidence. He stopped busting in on the sheep and began to trust his ability to move the flock without dashing back and forth. He was incredibly easy to work, responsive and obedient and quick to stop when asked. Too much so, in some ways. After I’d trained with him at the farm for several months, one of the country’s top trainers, Alasdair MacRae, watched Willie work at one of his clinics and said that his obedient nature was the flip side of his hesitation to put pressure on the sheep. My job was to encourage him to walk steadily and consistently, maintaining “contact” with the flock. “Don’t worry too much about pace yet,” Alasdair said. “Just keep him moving straight on and let him get comfortable with the feeling of putting some pressure on the sheep.” That’s what we did. Willie began to show me what it was like to face one’s fears head-on, his head and tail in a stalking posture, his eyes focused, the sheep grudgingly trotting around the pasture day after day, the redstart warblers for whom the farm is named singing, Red red red red REDSTART! all around us.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When I was twenty-eight, my first marriage ended and I moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Two years later, I was flat broke and miserable. One Thursday I took a day off work to sit in a puddle of misery on the floor of my tiny lakeside apartment. Here I was, almost thirty, with no money and no hope for a future in my present job as an administrative assistant at a nonprofit that advocated for alcohol and other drug abuse agencies. I’d already been a volunteer worker at a stable, a salesgirl in a clothing boutique, a glorified secretary at a television studio, a checkout clerk, an unofficial Teacher Corps member, a statistical typist, a counselor for troubled adolescents, and for one ridiculous and dimly remembered night, a go-go girl hired to dance at a private party.

  I wasn’t crazy about my job at the nonprofit, but I did enjoy organizing our annual conference. During my last year there, I was also responsible for presenting a talk on the importance of including women in treatment plans for alcoholics. (At the time, “alcoholics” were always assumed to be male, and treatment plans assumed the clientele would be exclusively male. Women were more often given tranquilizers than diagnosed with alcoholism.) An hour before my presentation, with me nervous about the talk and already managing dozens of conference details, the director asked if I could fill in at a meeting and take notes.

  Now? Really? Of course I said yes. I walked into a conference room with fifteen men sitting around a table. I sat down, and the director said his name and asked others to introduce themselves. That man to his left introduced himself, then turned to the next person to do the same.

  My heart sped up as the participants introduced themselves around the table. Soon it would be my turn to speak. My hands began to shake, and it became increasingly difficult to write the names of the attendees. All my life I had been terrified of talking in front of people. My throat closed up and my mind went blank whenever people turned and looked at me expectantly. I even took up needlework in my twenties so that I could avoid eye contact when surrounded by my first husband’s colleagues.

  The introductions around the table were getting closer to me. I practiced in my head what I would say: “I’m Patricia McConnell, and I’m the administrative assistant.”

  I needn’t have worried. The man to my right said his piece and then turned his head in my direction. As I was opening my mouth to say my name, the man to my left spoke over me. It hadn’t occurred to him that I would introduce myself. As the recording secretary and the only woman in the group, I wasn’t expected to have a voice. As I sat in stunned silence, my face hot with humiliation, the introductions continued around the table.

  I would like to tell you that I began my career solely because of a deep-seated passion for animals. It’s true that this was my primary motivation. But underneath my love of animals, I was motivated by something else. After years of feeling like I had no voice, I wanted to be the one with something to say, even though I was afraid to do so. Everyone needs a voice and needs to be listened to. Including dogs. Maybe I could give them that. Maybe I could give it to myself.

  • • • • •

  I was thirty years old when I entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a freshman in 1978. I didn’t go back to school expecting to work with aggressive dogs but focused on studying the behavior of all animals. I got a bachelor of science in zoology, then worked for two years with cotton-top tamarins, a squirrel-sized, terminally cute monkey with Einstein-like hair and a lust for mealworms. Soon after, I went to graduate school to continue learning about animal behavior.

  My research in graduate school began with an undergraduate honors thesis, required for my zoology degree in my senior year. I needed a topic and an adviser and was referred to Professor Jeffrey Baylis as an expert in animal behavior. I wanted to study communication between people and animals and thought I might write about research on using visual symbols to communicate with dolphins.

  “Not a lot of dolphins in Wisconsin,” Baylis said dismissively. My heart fell; I thought I’d come up with a great idea. He went
on, “Why don’t you study a natural form of communication between species and look at the signals that shepherds give to their working dogs while they manage their flocks of sheep?” Baylis knew about this nuanced communication because he’d spent time in Montana, where vast flocks of sheep dot the countryside.

  What a stupid idea, I thought as I drove home after our meeting. Where the hell was I going to find a sheepdog trainer in Wisconsin, the land of the dairy cow? I thought I’d have a better chance of finding dolphins swimming in Lake Michigan than people who managed a flock with working sheepdogs.

  Sometimes it is wonderful to be wrong. By the next day, I had discovered that one of the country’s top sheepdog trainers, Jack Knox, lived just an hour away from me. He had come from England a few years before and brought a century of sheepherding wisdom with him. I drove up to meet him and his dogs a few days later.

  Jack introduced me to a couple of his dogs, then led me to a lush, expansive pasture with sheep grazing four or five hundred yards away. Jan, his petite all-black border collie, trotted by his side. The three of us stopped as a red-tailed hawk circled overhead, calling out in its hoarse, dinosaurian voice as it rode the currents. Jack whispered something, so quietly I didn’t hear what, and Jan instantly streaked away to our left as if propelled by a force too strong to be contained in her tight little body. She ran in a huge half circle around to the back of the flock, shrinking into a tiny black dot as she got farther away. Once behind the sheep, she lowered her head and crept toward them like a cat stalking a mouse.

  Slowly, carefully, she eased the flock to us, never letting up on the pressure but never pushing so hard that she scared the sheep into a panicked run. She lay down once the sheep were deposited at our feet, but she never wavered in her laserlike focus on one member of the flock. “She’s watching the lead ewe,” Jack explained. “A good dog evaluates the entire flock as she runs around them, turning her head to look at them every twenty yards or so. By the time she’s behind them, she’s figured out where they want to go once they start moving, and which one is the flock leader. That’s part of the dog’s job, to ‘read the sheep,’ because they do it much better than we do. Our job as handlers is to tell the dog where we want the sheep to go—sometimes into the barn for safety from coyotes, sometimes into a new pasture. In sheepdog competitions, the dog and handler work as a team to move the sheep through a complicated course.”

  Oh, my. What I had just seen left me smitten, gob-smacked, falling down the rabbit hole. The complex communication between sheep and dog and handler was riveting, and beyond anything I had dreamed of in my desire to study communication between two different species. As if that weren’t enough, the setting was stunning. The dogs’ contrasting colors popped out from the green background as if designed by a graphic artist. Watching the dogs work was like stepping inside a calendar of scenic Ireland, pages flipped to the month of May.

  I couldn’t get enough of seeing Jack work the older dogs and train the young ones, and often drove up to his farm to take notes on visual communication between dog and sheep and the acoustic communication from handler to dog. The verbal and whistle signals from the handlers to the dogs have to be clear and concise, because the dogs’ eyes must be fixated on the sheep to maintain control. Even better, because one of “my species” was human, I could ask the handler the meaning of the signal or what he wanted the dog to do after he called or whistled.

  I traveled to a sheepdog trial in Tucson, Arizona, where I recorded the whistle signals used by fourteen handlers to maneuver their dogs around the course; then I came home and measured every possible parameter I could manage. I sorted all the sonograms (think “pictures of sound”) into categories: “Walk Up” and “Lie Down” to encourage or discourage forward movement, “Come Bye” and “Away to Me” to circle clockwise or counterclockwise around the flock.

  Once I looked at the whistles as pictures, I saw that all the Walk Up whistles were similar—short, rapidly repeated notes. All of the Lie Down signals were similar, too, but looked like opposites of Walk Up—single notes, often long continuous ones that dropped down at the end. You could randomly pull out one of the whistles that changed a dog’s movement (start versus stop) and immediately know what it told the dog to do.

  It made sense that so many whistles sounded alike. Whistles are passed on from handler to handler, and they might have been examples of what biologists call “cultural transmission”—or behavior passed on through teaching and learning rather than through the genetic code. But if that was true, why did the directional signals vary so much? If signals were learned and used like words in a language, why were some shared by all the handlers and some not?

  That question pulled me back to graduate school. I had loved my two years of working with cotton-top tamarins, but my heart remained with the dogs.

  One day I was pondering why some whistles followed a pattern and others didn’t while riding a sweet Arabian gelding through the woods. The wind came up, and my horse began to fuss at the strange smells, throwing up his head, trotting in jagged sideways steps instead of his usual smooth walk. “Whoaaaaa,” I said, extending the word into a long continuous note. He stopped, and I saw what I had said as a picture in my mind, just like the pictures of the whistles that handlers use to slow down their dogs. Without thinking, I clicked to him to begin to move forward, using the same short repeated notes that handlers use to speed up their dogs.

  I suspect that the clouds didn’t part and the angels didn’t actually sing, but the moment when I linked the sounds of sheepdog handlers and horseback riders was one that a scientist may be lucky enough to get once or twice in her life. Eureka! Immediately, I saw the pattern: short repeated notes to speed animals up, long continuous ones to soothe or to slow. The more I thought about it, the more examples I could recall of signals to domestic animals following the same pattern. “Pup pup pup,” we call to encourage a young dog to us. “E-a-a-a-a-sy,” we say to a frightened horse. But why? Is it because we humans tend to use sounds that reflect what we want, either because we’re primates and make such sounds naturally—think of the “hoo hoo hoo” of an excited chimpanzee—or might we link certain sounds with an expected outcome because it’s more effective?

  That is the question I went back to graduate school to answer: Are certain types of sounds better than others at getting animals to speed up or slow down, or do we use similar sounds because of tradition? If the former is true, then people all over the world should use similar sounds to encourage their animals to move forward or stop moving, no matter what language they speak or what animal they are working with. Thus began three years of recording more than a hundred animal handlers, from as many fields as I could find, including people working with sheep, sled and protection dogs, and race, dressage, rodeo, and working cattle horses. I even managed to record a variety of handlers “talking” to cats, domestic fowl (“How do you call your chickens back to the roost?”), water buffalo, camels, and llamas. I was able to record handlers speaking in seventeen languages, including Navajos speeding up their horses and Korean cat owners calling to their cats.

  For my first fieldwork I traveled to Texas to record Spanish-speaking jockeys at a racetrack in Texas between Dallas and Fort Worth. In Dallas, I picked up my rental car and drove to the track to meet up with the trainer. I was curious to see the track: My images of racetracks were formed by watching the Triple Crown—the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont, bustling with horses sparkling like massive animated jewels, stables nicer than most of the places I’d lived as a young adult, and walking paths lined with carefully tended roses and carnations.

  But this track fit none of those images. I turned in on a dirt road and parked between crumbling wooden structures so decrepit that I expected them to collapse in front of me. I hefted a heavy reel-to-reel Uher tape recorder over my shoulder, hung my camera over the other, and began to look for the man who had agreed to meet with me. It was hot, quiet, and dusty. Not a bird was singing, but I cou
ld hear faint music coming from one of the stalls in a stable block. I walked toward it, told my heart to stop pounding against my chest, and poked my head into the darkness of an unlighted stall.

  “Hello?” I squeaked. “I’m looking for Roger. Is he here?”

  Three dimly lit figures leaped to their feet. Two disappeared behind some hay bales, grabbing unidentifiable objects that had been sitting in front of them. The remaining one stared back at me in shock; I’m not sure which of us was more frightened. I seemed to be walking into a dystopian movie scene in which life as I knew it had come to an end. Things weren’t so good from his perspective, either. Here was a stranger with a tape recorder and a camera in what, I later learned, was a drug-infested den of iniquity that had been closed down by the racing authorities.

  I managed to repeat my question. “Is Roger here?”

  “No, not here,” he said, and disappeared into the back of the stall.

  I continued to wander around, never finding Roger, but another trainer took pity on me and did what he could to help me. “Trisha,” he said after I explained why I was there, “you should not be here. There’ve been three murders here in the last few months. Very dangerous here.”

  Oh. I explained how far I had come and how important it was for me to record horse handlers who used a language other than English. “Well, then, come back tomorrow, when Marco is here. He’s a good guy. He knows everybody, and he’ll help you out.”

  Marco was as friendly and accommodating as described. He spent the day driving me to a variety of horse farms and training stables. He translated and explained, managed fractious horses, and enabled a treasure chest of recordings of Spanish speakers working with their horses. I ignored the fat, oblong packages of dried herbs he slid to the trainers when he arrived, and I graciously declined his offer of a joint the size of a cigar. I also declined his invitation to stop and watch the sunset over a nearby lake on our way home. “Really, Marco, you’ve been great, but I have to get back to analyze the recordings.”