tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post3169976410407119809..comments2024-03-26T22:16:26.572-04:00Comments on Terrierman's Daily Dose: 5,000 Blog Posts LaterPBurnshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05781540805883519064noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-39363010479849698812012-05-30T12:01:49.648-04:002012-05-30T12:01:49.648-04:00I got a Border Terrier more than 30 years ago and ...I got a Border Terrier more than 30 years ago and the breeder wanted me to show it. I said I would, and I drove a couple of thousand miles showing that dog but NEVER saw the breeder at a dog show and never heard from her again. At some point, coming back from a Pennsylvania show, I turned to the wife and said "I hate this" and we decided I was no longer bound by my promise to show the dog, and I never went to another AKC show after that. <br /> <br />During my tour through the world of dog shows, I had run up against a lot of theorists who never seemed encumbered by any actual experience digging on dogs. The border terrier books do not show a single working border terrier with a fox. Whiskey, tango, foxtrot. At some point the issue became comical -- it was like talking to someone who had theories about education but had never been to an elementary school, or someone on Capitol Hill who had a theory about U.S. health care policy but had never looked, listened and smelled the inside of a nursing home. <br /><br />At age 10 my first border terrier died of a heart attack at night. Later I ran into the breeder and she said it was a congenital problem with that litter. I looked around for another border, specifically looking for a small one that could work as I wanted to go where clearly no one was going. I went to the number one border terrier breeder in the world looking for a puppy that would be small (no names!) and the result was an enormous dog that was simply too big to go to ground. This breeder was all about "great heads". <br /> <br />What to do? I did AKC go-to-ground with this over-large border terrier and met a few people who dug groundhogs, but I noticed they all talked about needing a "hole dog" and that was not an AKC terrier -- it was a miniature dachshund. <br />Whiskey, tango, foxtrot. <br /> <br />I looked around for a smaller dog -- a true working terrier -- and I eventually got a very small Jack Russell after about a year of obsessive searching in which I (correctly) chose to ignore the folks who told me a 13 inch dog was going to be fine (Did they actually have picture of their dogs hunting? No!) The dog I finally got was Sailor - the greatest little 11" digging dog I have ever seen anywhere. She was 4 months old when I got here and she could go anywhere. Smart too!<br /> <br />I started digging on my own with the wrong tools and no knowledge but Sailor made up for a lot of my inadequacies. Along the way, I noticed that all the books about working terriers were actually story books, and many were clearly fiction, as the real world problems you actually get in real digs -- roots, rocks, rips, sunburn, lost dogs, broken equipment, mishaps -- were almost never mentioned. By now my malarkey meter was pretty fine-tuned and set to go off pretty quick. It's a meter I take everywhere in the world of dogs at this point. <br /> <br />I started writing down what I was doing in the field as a kind of defensive reaction. I knew a dog could die underground if I made a mistake, and so I worked hard not to make mistakes. I taught myself almost everything I know because there were no books on how to dig to the dogs, how to vet the dogs, how to find quarry, why this history was so twisted, why the show ring was a failure, etc. In fact, until I wrote *American Working Terriers* only two semi-practical books on terrier work had ever been published -- one in 1540 or so, and the other in 1930. <br /> <br />After someone I know (no names) killed a dog underground due to poor preparation and knowledge, I wrote *American Working Terriers* in order to keep more dogs alive and to try to get more people in the field. <br /> <br />That's the story, more or less. <br /><br />I have met some great people along the way, listened to a lot of nonsense, gotten a few helpful hints, and tried to pass on what seemed to work for me. <br /><br />PPBurnshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05781540805883519064noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-24923886492100919002012-05-30T11:02:45.671-04:002012-05-30T11:02:45.671-04:00Thanks for your common sense voice in the dog worl...Thanks for your common sense voice in the dog world, and congratulations on 5,000.<br />Can I ask how you came to start digging? As you said, not many people do it. <br /><br />RichardThe Midland Agrarianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17214111067042466363noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7684843.post-50350672360371667452012-05-30T01:08:00.396-04:002012-05-30T01:08:00.396-04:00Not sure you're a dog lover, eh? Seems like th...Not sure you're a dog lover, eh? Seems like this is not the first time I've read this about you, from you. I have no (maybe "few" is most accurate) illusions about many things I openly love. Dogs, horses, my husband, fill in the blank (I love a lot of things!). I think the purest kind of love just might be love with eyes wide open. "Love" with rose colored glasses is not love; rather it's lust, or something else equally chemical. Love is warts and all, and not having those limitations matter. <br /><br />SeahorseSeahorsehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00133454380103294333noreply@blogger.com