Ch. 20: Some Sheep Dogs

Breaking a sheep-dog--The shepherd buys a pup--His training--He
refuses to work--He chases a swallow and is put to death--The
shepherd's remorse--Bob, the sheep-dog--How he was bitten by an
adder--Period of the dog's receptivity--Tramp, the sheep-dog--Roaming
lost about the country--A rage of hunger--Sheep-killing dogs--Dogs
running wild--Anecdotes--A Russian sheep-dog--Caleb parts with Tramp

To Caleb the proper training of a dog was a matter of the very first
importance. A man, he considered, must have not only a fair amount of
intelligence, but also experience, and an even temper, and a little
sympathy as well, to sum up the animal in hand--its special aptitudes,
its limitations, its disposition, and that something in addition, which
he called a "kink," and would probably have described as its
idiosyncrasy if he had known the word. There was as much individual
difference among dogs as there is in boys; but if the breed was right,
and you went the right way about it, you could hardly fail to get a good
servant. If a dog was not properly broken, if its trainer had not made
the most of it, he was not a "good shepherd": he lacked the
intelligence--"understanding" was his word--or else the knowledge or
patience or persistence to do his part. It was, however, possible for
the best shepherd to make mistakes, and one of the greatest to be made,
which was not uncommon, was to embark on the long and laborious business
of training an animal of mixed blood--a sheep-dog with a taint of
terrier, retriever, or some other unsuitable breed in him. In discussing
this subject with other shepherds I generally found that those who were
in perfect agreement with Caleb on this point were men who were somewhat
like him in character, and who regarded their work with the sheep as so
important that it must be done thoroughly in every detail and in the
best way. One of the best shepherds I know, who is sixty years old and
has been on the same downland sheep-farm all his life, assures me that
he has never had and never would have a dog which was trained by
another. But the shepherd of the ordinary kind says that he doesn't care
much about the animal's parentage, or that he doesn't trouble to inquire
into its pedigree: he breaks the animal, and finds that he does pretty
well, even when he has some strange blood in him; finally, that all dogs
have faults and you must put up with them. Caleb would say of such a man
that he was not a "good shepherd." One of his saddest memories was of a
dog which he bought and broke without having made the necessary
inquiries about its parentage.

It happened that a shepherd of the village, who had taken a place at a
distant farm, was anxious to dispose of a litter