The Dogs of Bedlam Farm : An Adventure with Sixteen Sheep, Three Dogs, Two Donkeys, and Me

by Jon Katz

  OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS, FROM THE FIRST, BOUNDED BY DOGS. I visited Laurie almost weekly and spent long stretches on the phone, talking her through some of the innumerable crises that beset her household. Yet she never asked a single question about my wife, my daughter, or my work beyond my life with dogs. She never volunteered anything about herself that didnt relate to her dogs, either, unless I asked. These visits were always both compelling and troubling. They inspired-no, required-me to look more deeply into my own evolving ideas about dogs. Writing about dogs for some years now, experiencing intense ups and downs with a complex and troubled dog, talking almost daily to dog lovers on the street, at parks, and online, the more disquieting implications of dog love were something I still hadnt really come to terms with. One thing Laurie and the other Dog People understood was the depth of my feeling for my dogs, the sense of overwhelming affection that came over me-and them-at certain moments. I can hardly describe how much Orson had come to mean to me, and with Laurie, I didnt have to. She understood, too, that pain is often the genesis of dog love. Though I write about the intense interactions between people and their dogs, I had a sense that I was ducking the truth. I value self-awareness; the psychoanalysis I underwent for most of a decade was one of the more penetrating adventures of my adult life. So what was I hiding from? If dogs are often a vehicle through which we reenact powerful needs and dramas in our lives, as I believe, then what were mine? This is the dark side of dog love, the part that sappy dog-story spinners, trainers, and breeders and rescue people never mention. I cant blame them; I dont want to talk about it either. But part of my upstate sojourn was a search; Bedlam Farm was an intense, round-the-clock laboratory in which to explore the roots of my love for dogs, why I needed them, and whether I had crossed some boundary into unhealthiness. Like many of the Dog People, part of Lauries dog love seemed to flow from a growing conviction that vets and dog-food companies were engaged in a greedy conspiracy that threatened dogs welfare. The Net had fueled this view: much of her information about canine health came from Internet mailing lists suggesting miraculous alternatives to traditional veterinary care. Laurie had grown almost paranoid about commercial foods and medicines, refused to give her dogs their recommended shots, wouldnt feed them kibble or canned food. Vets were useful only in dire emergencies-broken bones, savage bites. Otherwise, Laurie and her friends firmly believed in herbal remedies and holistic diets. Many of her dogs would be dead, she told me, if not for the alternative approaches the Dog People shared. This was a significant difference. The vets Ive met are serious, sympathetic, highly skilled, and quite dedicated despite their professions grueling hours, emotional intensity, and relatively low pay and status. I rely on their counsel and have rarely regretted it. My dogs have always thrived on store-bought kibble, and Im not interested in baking them organic treats. I understand that all companies are interested in the bottom line, yet Im hard-pressed to believe that its in the economic interests of pet-food manufacturers to poison dogs. Laurie-again, like many Dog People I knew-had fantasies about eventually running some dog-related business that would enable her to buy more land, thus have still more dogs. She dreamed of hundreds of remote acres with hundreds of dogs, a literal sanctuary where they could all live out their lives with room to run and no end of loving care. I doubted shed find that mythical place, and I think she doubted it, too, but the fantasy kept her going. Perhaps one day she could underwrite the plan by marketing her organic biscuits nationwide. For now, she baked them at home for friends. (Without preservatives, they had to be consumed quickly or frozen.) It didnt surprise me that Laurie identified with the complex and mercurial Orson, because he was something of a rescue, although Ive become uncomfortable with that term, overused as it is. She saw the same thing I did in this dog: a great and loving heart that had every right to be angry and hard, but wasnt. Her own life, past and present, was difficult, a litany of abuse, bad luck, and hard times. Like Orson, though, she had made a choice; she had chosen to love. Like him, she could easily have been bitter and resentful; instead, however battered, she had chosen a caring life. There was something stirring in that. But she had also made a fateful decision: she had largely abandoned humans, even the idea of human companionship. I had a choice, she said simply. I chose dogs. They saved me. I didnt want to make that choice. Laurie was in her early fifties. Ten years earlier, shed finally summoned the strength to end a nightmarish marriage that capped a brutally difficult childhood. A nurse by training, shed worked for years in hospitals around Philadelphia, until she wearied of bureaucracies and suffering; her work with humans had proved less rewarding than her work with dogs. Shed waited for her three children to grow up and scatter around the country, then scavenged everything shed been saving for years and moved upstate into her charmless but affordably low-maintenance split-level. She struck me as sad; yet she insisted she was finally happy. Shed been swallowed up by dog love, and judging from her e-mail-she got hundreds of messages a day from her various lists-she was far from alone. I hated to think what her life might have been like without dogs. She barely knew any nondog people any longer, nor would she have much to say to them. She rarely read a paper and had little time for TV, although she often had Animal Planet on as she tended to her brood. Yet she read every book about dogs that she could afford, and, as she put it, many that I cant. There was even a Dog Person economy. Laurie bartered goods and services-housepainting, dog-sitting, plumbing, and maintenance, sometimes even food-with other Dog People living nearby. When somebody gets sick, one of us takes care of their dogs. If theres a frozen pipe, we all come and clean up. We grow vegetables and share them. We buy our food together at co-ops. Its the only way we can live. Only Dog People could truly understand other Dog People. Most people-including her own children and grandchildren-didnt feel comfortable visiting, so they didnt. And I understand it, I do, Laurie admitted. Who wants a dozen dogs, some of them out of their minds, around little kids? My house is smelly. I have allergies-I know how bad the hair is-so Im on medication all year. Its not a good thing, but I accept it. Its the price, and you know what? Ill live with it. Her statement stuck with me. I was also paying a price for this dog adventure. It was costing lots of money, much more than I expected. It sometimes got lonely and strange. I missed my wife and daughter constantly. The responsibility of caring for so many animals weighed on me, and there was never time enough to do all the things that needed doing. The border collies required plenty of care in their own right-exercise, feeding, training, grooming. With Rose, I had a rare chance to train a great new dog right, to show real patience, tolerance, affection; I was determined not to screw it up. But I was also doubtful. The reality of middle age had hit me hard at the farm. My knees ached; my bad ankle throbbed continuously; my skin cracked and bled as the weather turned. I was almost always cold or wet, bitten by bugs or choking on dust from hay; I wore Band-Aids all over to cover blisters, welts, cuts, and burns. I dreaded the arrival of true winter. Even five years earlier, country life wouldnt have felt so hard. Now, many times it seemed beyond me. It took almost three hours just to drive to the nearest supermarket, shop, return, and unpack everything. Sometimes it was easier to just stand at the kitchen counter with a bowl of cold cereal for dinner. When I crawled into bed, I had to remember to take off my glasses before I lay down, otherwise theyd still be on my face in the morning. How did real farmers survive, I kept asking myself. How did Laurie? Strenuous as I was finding it to care for the sheep and donkeys, overseeing eleven screwed-up dogs was probably no simpler. Yet she saw herself as having traded misery for nirvana. I miss my kids . . . a lot, Laurie confessed once. But at the same time, I see them as part of my past, to be honest. Some people would be horrified. I mean, I am a mother. But the dogs are my kids now. Shed moved upstate because her old working-class row house didnt have much of a yard and she wanted to be able to take in the dogs from hell, as she put it, the dogs that nobody else could handle. They truly needed her, calling on every nurturing gene in her body, and that was enoug
h. She haunted local vets offices and shelters and trawled Internet mailing lists looking for sick, abandoned, and abused dogs. When she found them, she took them in, loved them, fostered them, fed them special diets, and tried to find them homes-sort of. Some of her dogs were far beyond adoption, and she knew it. But she and her friends maintained an unwavering no-kill policy. No dog Laurie took in would ever be put down, no matter what it did. If she couldnt retrain or re-home a dog, Laurie kept it. Shed steeled herself to accept these gains and losses. Some dogs died of health problems, one or two escaped, and every now and then one got killed by another. Yet she couldnt, it seemed, be busier, more engaged, or more fulfilled. She was wedded to her dogs for life, for richer but mostly for poorer, in sickness and in health. I WAS CONSCIOUS FROM THE BEGINNING, OF COURSE, THAT SHE reminded me of my sister. Jane is two years older than I am. We have loved each other all our lives, but we were especially close when we were young, thrown together in tough times. Our family was falling apart and she was descending into a life marked by pain, emotional troubles, and crisis. My parents, like most, did the best they could, but not nearly enough. As her life spiraled into a series of breakdowns, obsessions, and addictions, we mutually recognized that it had simply become too painful for us to talk to or see each other. When I moved to the farm, I hadnt seen Jane in more than a decade and might not have recognized her if Id run into her on the street. We hadnt even spoken much by phone in years. She had only seen my daughter a handful of times, though each reminded me of the other in their humor and intelligence. Witnessing her near-destruction, her struggles to care for her children, her collapsed marriage, her valiant but unsuccessful effort to become a doctor, her complete immersion in serial obsessions from punk rock to Catholicism and now dogs-plus my own estrangement from the person Id been closest to-was the tragedy of my life. Watching her disintegrate was something Ive never figured out how to surmount. Id seriously considered all the enduring cliches-forgive your parents, let the past go, move on with your life. But I never could, not completely. My fruitless efforts to get Jane help left me troubled, isolated, estranged from almost all authority-familial, religious, educational. I suffer, of course, from many of the same ills that have afflicted her-anxiety, depression, anger. Although she had in many ways moved beyond that awful drama, I never fully have. In my mid-fifties, I doubt I ever will. I feel that loss-the loss of my sister, the destruction of our family-every day. It surfaces in the way I relate to my own daughter, in the way I respond to other children, in every encounter with siblings who move through life loving and worrying about one another. For lucky people, family is the one thing you can always count on. For Jane and me, it was the thing you never could. With time and a great deal of effort and help, Ive begun to write a different family story for myself. But even as I struggled to do that, I could never fully escape the one I was born into. As Jane began to recover and put a life together, I was vaguely aware that shed become deeply enmeshed in dog rescue. My life had taken a somewhat similar turn, also relatively late in life. I had published ten books before I thought to write about dogs; Jane was well into her forties before she got her first rescue dog. But her involvement had grown considerably more consuming. When Jane did communicate with me from time to time, it was to e-mail me pictures of her latest dog or to relate anothers humorous adventure. She told story after story about a dog behaving adorably or idiosyncratically. Those stories always felt oddly discordant, given our own now-distant relationship. Rarely did she ask about my family or my work. But I understood that this was what allowed her to survive, and her being alive at all was a miracle. And so it was left, for years. Jane lived somewhat like Laurie, happiest in the company of other Dog People, somehow rebuilding or reworking her own mangled life through the lives of sick, needy creatures. She loved them powerfully, creating special diets, soothing them through grievous illnesses, enfolding them in love and attention. You didnt have to be a shrink to notice that she was giving her dogs the kind of life shed never been given herself. But if she sensed the connection, she didnt want to talk about it. This was the happiest shed felt in years. Why pick at it? Its why I didnt go and get a gun and shoot somebody, she told me once. We all get by the best we can. This is how I get by. She spoke so passionately about her dogs that it sometimes made me uncomfortable, even resentful. Had she moved past all her pain to lose herself in dog love, while I refused to forgive the world for what had happened to her? We barely spoke, yet she had unlimited time and affection for strange dogs that werent even hers. Shed never suggested coming to see me, but routinely drove hundreds of miles to pick up some Newfoundland with heart disease. Shed never shown much concern about my problems, yet there wasnt a troubled mutt she wouldnt open her home and heart to. This was unfair. I knew my sister loved me. I knew she was doing the best she could. I even knew dogs were saving her life. Like Laurie, she took in the lost causes of the dog world-the biters, the misanthropes, the crippled. As she had moved away from me, she had moved toward them. I missed Jane, as I sometimes ached for Paula and Emma. Our family crises had taken her from me, and I had let her go; now, after shed survived, dogs were keeping her away all over again. People often told me how dogs presented a wonderful way for humans to connect with other humans. I wondered. Often, I feared that dogs were a way for humans to leave other humans behind. Like Laurie, Jane had left a husband and kids behind. Like Laurie, she missed her children and wished they were part of her life, but was prepared to live with the possibility that they never would be. When my sister talked about her dogs, she became animated and chatty, describing their histories and misadventures. But when the conversation drifted away from dogs, she grew restless. She didnt seem to grasp that I was less interested in her dogs than in her. Youve got to see Pudge, she told me several times. Youve got to meet them all. I didnt really want to meet them. When we began talking regularly again after years of near-silence, just after Id moved to the farm in the fall, she told me how eager she was to drive to Hebron with her dogs. My heart sank at the thought of my intense border collies with her herd of Newfies and others. I was nearly overwhelmed struggling to care for the dogs and sheep and donkeys. If there were one more animal spewing waste on the farm, I sometimes thought, it would sink and so would I. How could my sister not sense my fatigue, even panic? But it seemed inconceivable to her to go anywhere without bringing eight or nine dogs. I loved my own dogs dearly, and my work now centered on writing about dogs. But I dont want them to occupy so central a role. My wife and daughter, friends and books are more important to me. I dont want to see dogs the same way I see people; I dont want dogs to replace or supplant them. There are some holes even dogs cant fill. To me, dogs offer a chance to keep working at the issues that prevent me from attaching to other human beings-impatience, judgmentalism, intolerance, anger. I hope dogs lead me toward, not away from, people. One reason I hope they help me to become a better human is so that I can apply those lessons to life with humans. But in my initial discouragement over this aspect of my relationship with my sister, Id forgotten that relationships can change, and that change takes effort. Id also almost forgotten what I loved about my sister in the first place. Over the next few months, her sensitivity, humor, and raw intelligence led us into an ongoing conversation-though only on the telephone-about our lives and the place dogs had taken up in them. When she got laid off from the software-development job shed had for many years, I urged her to consider moving out of the Boston area, to a place with some land-like Laurie, whom I told Jane about. Jane, too, could have room for her dogs, a cheaper and therefore less stressful life, and the kind of community shed been seeking much of her life. She could perhaps even make a living from working with dogs, as Laurie and her friends were more or less managing to do. It wouldnt be easy. Life in rural areas could be discouragingly harsh, as I was learning. But it was possible, and this was the perfect time to consider a move. We also began to talk about human-animal attachment, something Id been studying for some years now. She seemed to me to be rewo
rking earlier traumas through her dogs, I told her; to some degree, I probably was also. But I confessed that her perspective concerned me, that dog love might have thrown off the balance in her life. If she really wanted to connect more with humans, as she claimed, then shouldnt she consider how caring for numerous sick and troubled rescue dogs, which hemmed her in, might make that more difficult? Didnt she realize, for example, that I felt overwhelmed at times on the farm? That showing up with a van full of Newfoundlands wasnt a way for us to reunite? Repeatedly, Jane had offered to come help me on the farm. Yet her suggestion didnt seem real to me, tied as she was to her dogs. This was an astonishing conversation to be having with my sister. During her worst troubles, it wasnt possible to talk with her. Now, she was listening intently, groping toward change, welcoming my interest. It was a hallmark of our family life that no one ever helped anyone solve anything. Bringing your problems to the family just made things worse, sparking guilt, hysteria, or recrimination. So I was amazed when Jane called me one night and quietly told me that she was buying a house on three acres in upstate New York, several hours west of Hebron. Shed found the place online through another dog person. A woman who had as many dogs as she did would sell the house-already marked by scents and stains-only to another dog person. Theyd talked on the phone, and Jane had made the long drive to look at the house. Dog People from adjoining towns and farms-women much like her, with similar pasts and similar packs of dogs-came to meet her, tell her about the area, introduce their dogs. I realized when we sat down to dinner, Jane told me, that it had been so long since anyone had invited me to dinner that I couldnt remember the last time. She couldnt see my eyes tearing. These people, these dog people, they were my new community, my friends. I felt completely at home there. And the new house, perfect for her dogs, opened onto a lake, was surrounded by woods, and had a roomy fenced yard. Jane further surprised me a few weeks later when she called to say that shed decided to find new homes for two of her smaller charges that were aggressive with other dogs and difficult to care for. She had thought a lot about our talks. Dogs were the center of her life now, she said; that was true, and she wanted to keep it that way. But you dont see that dogs are the reason we are talking, she pointed out. Taking care of these dogs has opened me up, forced me out of myself. I have lots of work to do, still, but the dogs arent taking me away from people. They are bringing me to people like you, and maybe one day back to my kids as well. If I can learn how to love and care for them, then maybe I can bring that to my other relationships. Still, she agreed that it had grown too difficult to care properly for nine or ten dogs, too hard to maintain balance. Over the next months, she intended to relinquish a couple of others. Life in a new place with five Newfoundlands would be plenty interesting enough. When she told her shocked comrade in dog rescue that some of the dogs needed to go back, her friend chided her for letting the dogs down. Sorry, Jane said. I love the dogs, but I come first. I thought it was one of the healthiest things shed ever said, and I was overjoyed to hear it and to have played any role in her decision. It spoke to the power of dog love, of the need to find perspective and fit it into our lives without drowning in it. SOME PEOPLE ACQUIRE DOGS FOR THE SIMPLEST, MOST UTILITARIAN reasons-to hunt birds, to guard warehouses. But people who see their dogs as integral, vital parts of their families often feel that way for reasons buried deep within their own histories. People whove been hurt, who know suffering and helplessness, whove felt powerless in their own lives, are drawn to these dependent animals, who they believe love them unconditionally. Caring for dogs, feeding them, healing their wounds, is somehow healing for people, too. Dog love is powerful stuff. Dogs are voiceless, so we are free to project any sort of thought and emotion on them. They are helpless, so they touch our innate and visceral need to nurture-which can arise because we were nurtured and know how to do it, or because we werent and are drawn to the chance to rewrite our pasts. We think we can make the world a perfect place for at least one creature. Beyond that, we perceive dogs as being unwaveringly loyal and devoted. We rarely perceive other people as that dependable, so we are grateful. Dogs give back, provide attention, affection, and comfort. But sometimes, people can come through for you, too. It was miraculous for me to finally be able to help my sister, even a little. I would come see her, I promised, when she moved into her new place on the lake.