A 'lifetime dog' shows author how to find a life

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A 'lifetime dog' shows author how to find a life

Jon Katz writes about how a crazed border collie named Orson helped him renew his spirit.

Mary Esch | The Associated Press
Posted December 19, 2006

WEST HEBRON, N.Y. - From the broad porch of his 200-year-old farmhouse, author Jon Katz gazes over an idyllic scene of hills and valley, one border collie lolling at his feet and two others pacing restlessly nearby.

"A lot of people tell me I'm living their fantasy life," Katz says. "There are a lot of frustrated, alienated people who just aren't doing what they want. I think that's sad."

Katz has done what many frazzled urbanites can only dream of doing: He chucked a spirit-sapping life in suburban New Jersey, bought a picturesque farm and an assortment of amiable animals and started a new life far from the city lights.

Most people need a catalyst to provoke such dramatic change. For some, it's a divorce. For others, a brush with life-threatening illness. For Katz, it was a maniacal dog named Orson.

In his new book, A Good Dog: The Story of Orson, Katz chronicles the life and death of the lovable but troubled border collie that transformed his life. It continues the story begun in Katz's previous book, A Dog Year, now being made into a movie.

Katz refers to Orson as his "lifetime dog." It's a term that many dog lovers understand.

"Lifetime dogs intersect with our lives with particular impact; they're dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable, ways," he writes in A Good Dog.

Orson was a well-bred, handsome dog with keen intelligence and a wily nature. He came to Katz when he was 3 years old, bringing with him the sort of mischief that lands dogs in the pound: escaping from the yard, chasing school buses, nipping kids, stealing food.

"He was very loving, very beautiful, very affectionate," says Katz, sitting on his porch. "He watched out for me, hung around with me. But he had a broken part to him. He was just very unpredictable."

Orson's arrival five years ago provided the impetus Katz needed to reinvent his life. At the time, he was living in New Jersey in a house with a white picket fence and two civilized Labrador retrievers. He worked at home, writing about media and technology.

A comfortable life, but not fulfilling. Katz's beloved daughter had gone off to college. He had a lot of acquaintances but few close friends. He craved change.

"I believed that before that death when the body gives out for one reason or another, there was another, more insidious one -- the death of your sense of possibilities, a rusting of the hinges and closing of the doors inside your mind. That was the one I most feared," Katz writes.

His attempts to deal with Orson's problems led Katz to buy a 110-acre farm on a steep hillside in Upstate New York, near the Vermont border. He also acquired two more border collies, some sheep for them to herd, several donkeys to guard the sheep from coyotes, a gimpy rooster, three hens and a barn cat.

He now writes about dogs and rural life from the place he named Bedlam Farm.

Katz tells people his is a working farm; the crop is stories.

It was a lonely decision, to forge a whole new life. "Nobody thought this was a good idea," Katz says. "Nobody. Nobody. My wife, my daughter, they thought I was crazy. My friends all thought I was out of my mind."

His wife, Paula Span, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, has come to love the farm, Katz says. "She grudgingly admits it was a good idea."

Orson, the dog that brought Katz to Bedlam Farm, is no longer there.

In A Good Dog, Katz talks about the extraordinary efforts he made trying to heal what was broken in Orson: sheepherding lessons, acupuncture, herbs, an animal shaman, a traditional vet, a holistic vet, even an animal "soul retriever." When Orson's behavior became increasingly violent toward people, Katz had to make an agonizing choice about whether to have Orson euthanized.

Ultimately, it came down to values and responsibility. Katz thought of the grinding poverty in the nearby hills, of an elderly woman down the road who was dying of cancer and couldn't afford food or health care. How could he justify spending tens of thousands of dollars to determine if a tumor was causing Orson's aggression?

He thought about the millions of Americans who are seriously bitten by dogs every year. How could he value his love for a dog over the safety and welfare of an innocent child?

In the end, Katz writes, "I had to listen to the moral law within me."