The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Using Sheepdogs to Train Hollywood

July 10th, 2006

Drop whatever you’re doing and read the article “Happiness Is Three Sheep and a Dog” from the New York Times.

Not only does the article title express my personal vision of happiness (though I might go for five sheep and two dogs—the more animals, the merrier), but it also gives us hope for Hollywood. Janna Duncan, a trainer for fifteen years, has taken her sheepherding classes on the road to Malibu, and movie execs, directors, and their offspring have enrolled themselves and their canines.

The dogs do get trained in how to herd sheep, but their owners learn how to be patient, hopefully slightly less self-centered people. They have to be calm and give clear commands in order for their dogs to know what to do and obey.

As pretty much everyone who knows me is aware, I adore sheepdogs (particularly Shetland Sheepdogs, the breed with which I grew up). Sheepdogs of all breeds tend to be highly intelligent, agile, and potentially neurotic if they don’t have something to engage their minds. Oh. Kinda like me.

Many people don’t understand the personality of sheepdogs before acquiring one as a household pet. So a lot of sheepdogs (especially border collies, who have all the above qualities multiplied times ten) end up being mistreated or given up for adoption. How much better to try to understand them, to learn to communicate with them.

Someday I need to write a whole essay titled “How a Puppy Training Video Taught Me the Heart of Prayer.” I am not making this up. A few years ago, my parents purchased dog-training videos produced by the Monks of New Skete, a monastery in upstate New York. The Monks of New Skete, to financially support their contemplative life, raise German Shepherd puppies, as well as running a camp to re-train “badly behaved” (in the perception of their owners) doggies.

So, at the time I visited my parents and watched this video, I was really struggling with trying to figure out the purpose of spiritual disciplines like prayer. I’d approached spiritual disciplines something like jumping through a set of hoops. I’m good at jumping through hoops, but after a while I get resentful if I feel that someone is arbitrarily making me jump through the hoops. So I was a bit grumpy with God.

Then, one of the monks explained that the benefit of training both dog and owner together was that they learned a vocabulary to communicate with each other. The point was not to teach the dog tricks. Most dogs greatly desire to please their owners, but sometimes they don’t know how. Training—even if it’s training them to jump through hoops—allows dog and owner to develop a common language.

Oh. It’s not about the tricks.

Now, if you take the analogy much beyond that, it of course breaks down, as any analogy will. But, to this day, I maintain that one of the most important spiritual lessons of my life came from a puppy training video. Talk about God adapting self-revelation to a medium we can relate to.

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