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The Trainer from Marcus

By Sentel Schreier

Bud Boudreau says every dog’s mind is different, “and it takes patience to understand each one.”

Bud Boudreau wakes at 3 a.m. on most mornings. He drinks a cup of black coffee, dresses and dons a cowboy hat and boots, strings a dog whistle around his neck and walks out to the barn to start another day of training border collie sheepdogs. He hasn’t missed a sunrise in 60 years.

One morning I rose early as well and drove down Highway 34, past Bear Butte and Union Center in Meade County, to learn more about a little-known man who is credited with changing the way we herd sheep on the Northern Plains. The daughter of a sheep rancher, I still remember the excitement of Boudreau arriving at our ranch with a mule named Lenore, a truck full of border collies and a lifetime of stories.

I spent the last 7 miles of my drive that morning on gravel roads. Admittedly, I had to call Boudreau to confirm I wasn’t lost. I arrived just in time to accompany him as he headed to the barn. A symphony of wagging tails, excited whines and barks greeted us. The old man fed the dogs and cleaned the kennels. Then he saddled his palomino horse, collected the dogs from their individual kennels and let them exercise for a while. He told them to sit and they sat. He called them by name back to the kennels. The dogs were quiet as they waited to see who would be the first to work. He called for Dot, and she waited triumphantly by the barn door.

Boudreau, who is now 84, rode his horse out to the pasture with Dot by his side. She watched him intently for a signal to bring in the herd of Targhee sheep. With one word,”Away,” he sent the dog counterclockwise in a graceful, wide arc around the herd. I squinted to see Dot’s dark silhouette against the sleepy horizon — about half a mile away.

With varying sounds from his whistle, Boudreau signaled Dot to go clockwise, counterclockwise, walk up, look, speed up, slow down, stand or sit. Dot interpreted the slightest change in tone of the dog whistle or pitch of Boudreau’s voice to mean a different command. Boudreau and his border collies have their own language.

“The dogs have such instincts bred into them,” he says.”It’s remarkable. It’s easy to teach them because a well-bred dog already has the instincts.” Watching Boudreau in the field with his dogs is like watching a music conductor. He makes the slightest sound and the dog bursts into obedient motion. The dogs are sensitive to his body language as well as the subtle movements of each animal in the herd.

“It was the strangest feeling for me,” Boudreau says of his move from Maryland to the open spaces of West River.

Border collies have been used for centuries to herd sheep. Today they are invaluable members of many sheep ranches in South Dakota and other states where herds are large, in part because Bud Boudreau came here 40 years ago.

It’s fitting that”collie” is Gaelic for”useful,” because a sheepdog can do more with sheep than several cowboys on horseback. The border collie breed can be traced back to the United Kingdom, to an era when wool was a big part of the economy.

Sheepdog trials also originated in Europe but soon became popular in the eastern United States. Trials are competitions that test a dog’s ability to herd sheep in cooperation with its handler. Dogs must successfully complete the”outrun” or initial gathering of the sheep and”drive” them through different patterns of panels. Typically dogs must then”shed” the sheep or separate a few from the rest of the herd, and then pen the sheep in a corral within a time limit.

According to Boudreau, Englanders literally wrote the book on how to train sheepdogs. He learned the basics by reading an English text when he was in his early 20s, but his fascination with border collies started long before that. When he was 10 years old, his aunt stole him away from the family dairy farm in Michigan to see a short film called Arizona Sheepdog. The black and white documentary kindled his lifetime fascination.

Several years later, a neighbor imported two dogs from Great Britain and brought them to the dairy. Boudreau was amazed by how they could round up cattle, just as he remembered seeing in Arizona Sheepdog. By then, Boudreau’s dad had converted the dairy farm into a racehorse training facility. He helped care for more than 40 racehorses and he broke thoroughbred colts. A fearless young horseman, Boudreau preferred to gallop the ornery young horses around the track in the early morning because they”weren’t so tough if they couldn’t see where they were going.”

Boudreau embraced his dad’s racehorse business and eventually took it over. But he also dreamed of training border collies. As a father of four — Dean, Jean, Jimmy and Susan — he marveled at the neighbor’s dogs’ habitual herding of his toddler children.”I got real excited one day when that dog was herding my kids around the yard,” he remembers.

Boudreau became well known in the horse racing world and ran the family business successfully for more than 20 years before his ambition led to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to train and shoe horses for Alfred Vanderbilt, owner of Sagamore Farm and Baltimore’s Pimlico Racetrack where the Preakness Stakes is held today. Alfred, a pillar in the horse racing community, was the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the world’s richest man in the late 19th century.

Sagamore Farm gave Boudreau the opportunity to work with famous trainers and fine horses like Kentucky Derby winner Native Dancer. However, Boudreau arrived in Maryland in a full body cast after a”brawl” with a young colt. Knowing Boudreau’s reputation, Vanderbilt waited a month for him to recover. He started his job caring for broodmares, shoeing horses and training 2-year-old colts.”I woke up at 4 a.m. and was done by mid-morning with nothing to do in a strange place. I was bored and had a lot of time to think,” he remembers of his Maryland days.”I thought a lot about sheepdogs.”

Bud Boudreau has trained dogs and horses. He prefers dogs, he says, because of their intelligence.

Life changed when a friend gave him a border collie as a gift. Boudreau took the dog to a sheepdog clinic in Virginia in 1982. Jack Knox, a famous Scottish dog trainer, led the program and was impressed with Boudreau’s self-taught knowledge and his ability to interpret a dog’s movement. Boudreau soon met Ralph Pulfer and Bruce Fogt, two of the most respected experts in the industry. He credits them with making him the trainer he is today.

He returned from Virginia determined to train sheepdogs. After working on the track each day, he spent time with his dogs and a small herd of Barbados black-bellied sheep he had purchased.”I would shoe horses for folks in exchange for time on racehorse farms to work my dogs. I would pull up with my trailer, unload my Barbados, then spend the afternoon training the dogs.”

However, he felt he had a foot in two quite different worlds — horse racing and sheepdogs. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, but the decision to train dogs full time would be costly. He had spent years in the horse racing world, achieving credentials, connections and financial security. In six years, Boudreau had become Sagamore’s resident farrier and even shoed horses for the historic Green Spring Valley Hounds and Hunt Club.”I had it made, but I felt like I wasn’t fully committed to the horses or the dogs. I had to choose. I chose border collies.”

When he revealed his plans, the head trainer at Sagamore Farm told him he was,”making a big mistake.” Boudreau chuckles at the memory.”Everyone thought I was plum crazy.” Boudreau left the stables in the hands of his son, Dean, who had been his apprentice.

Not long after deciding to train dogs full time, Boudreau saw an ad for affordable land in South Dakota near the tiny community of Marcus, about an hour’s drive east of the Black Hills. In 1986, he loaded all his belongings, including nine border collies and eight sheep, in a homemade trailer and Toyota truck and headed west.”I moved with my dogs to a cabin on White Owl Creek,” he remembers.”It was the strangest feeling for me; I went from a very crowded area in Maryland to not seeing another human being for weeks at a time.”

In 1988, Boudreau’s three sons traveled there and built a log home for their dad from scratch, incorporating materials from the original homestead 2 miles from the house. Boudreau had spent the winter collecting stones from the dilapidated homestead shack for his sons to repurpose into a hearth and chimney. The original homestead stove sits in Boudreau’s kitchen, a tribute to the pioneers that lived at Marcus before him.”I still make my famous waffles on it from time to time,” he says with a smile.

Boudreau’s sons pooled their skills for the cabin construction. Local ranchers provided further assistance. For example, Boudreau traded help installing Sheetrock for dog training.”My boys had so much fun building the house and the neighbors got a kick out of it too. They would stop by to see the progress every now and then. It was a special time for me.” Boudreau also planted a tree grove behind his house that now provides protection from the strong prairie winds.

*****

With hill country, a river and expanses of land, the Marcus ranch proved ideal for training sheepdogs. Boudreau also fell in love with the resiliency of his neighbors. He believes South Dakotans are special.”People here understand hardship but are some of the most content people I’ve ever known. It’s because they’re doing what they want to do with their lives. Out here in the country, you have to love what you do to stay. I feel I have lived in the best generation that ever was in the U.S. and I couldn’t be luckier to end up in South Dakota.”

Bud Boudreau’s house includes a stone fireplace and a woodstove salvaged from a homesteader’s cabin.

Despite the rural location, sheepdogs have taken him on adventures he would have forfeited had he stayed at the racetrack. He has even competed at international competitions in Ireland.

One of his most memorable trips came in 1993 when he met his future wife, Sarah, at a sheepdog trial in Durango, Colorado. They have worked dogs together nearly every day since they got married in 2000 at nearby Sturgis. Sarah shares his love for sheepdogs and competes in trials. She also serves as a judge at competitions.

For eight years, the Boudreaus hosted a dog trial at their home near Marcus that attracted judges from Great Britain and competitors from all over the country. Bud and Sarah, along with help from Ross Lamphere and Jim Roth, also started the popular midwinter North American Sheepdog Trials at the Black Hills Stock Show. Apart from dogs, the Boudreaus also share a love for music. Sarah spent five years in Italy playing the French horn in Milan’s Pomeriggi Musicali Orchestra. Today, Bud’s old guitar hangs in their living room, and he says he knows he’s”doing okay” when Sarah recognizes a tune. He thinks playing the guitar has similarities to training dogs.”You never want to practice a mistake,” he explains.

The couple’s accomplishments also led to an adventure on a big ranch along the Rio Grande River, where Tommy Hayre raises more than 20,000 goats and sheep on 110,000 acres. Boudreau’s skill with dogs was an invaluable resource on the rough, West Texas terrain.”The goats were so smart, they’d hide in caves and you’d have to ride in with the dogs on horseback to gather them,” he recalls. During the drought year of 1998, Hayre sent Boudreau to his ranch in Argentina for two weeks to show Argentinian cowboys (gauchos) how to use sheepdogs.

Boudreau recorded the trip in a detailed journal that he shared:”We stood around the adobe kitchen, with a fire going in the fireplace. Later on I found out there was never an oven in a gaucho residence. There is always a fire in the fireplace, both summer and winter. On the table was a blackboard that had been purchased in town, with the commands — ëaway,’ ëcome,’ ësit,’ ëwalk up,’ and ëthat’ll do’ — written out in a way that they could pronounce.”

Boudreau drank mateÃÅ from a silver gourd and bombilla, ate mutton ribs from a 2-foot machete and rode countless miles in the pampas.”Living with the gauchos was an experience I’ll treasure forever,” he says. He left Argentina confident that his dogs had found worthy handlers in JoseÃÅ, Tabares and RamoÃÅn.

Sheep ranchers in South Dakota and around the world appreciate the talents of the man from Marcus. Boudreau was inducted into the American Border Collie Association Hall of Fame last September, an honor he considers a highlight of his life. He was”in shock” to hear the news, but western sheep ranchers believe the recognition was long overdue.

In a nomination letter, Montana rancher Kelly Bradley wrote,”This part of the country had big numbers of sheep running on it and yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, there were not many places using dogs and certainly not realizing the potential of a well-bred and trained border collie. Bud Boudreau almost single-handedly changed all that for us ranchers when he came to this country and went to work educating so many of us about border collies. For many, it was the first chance to see stock dogs that did more good than harm to their stock.”

My father, Gene Johnson, met Boudreau at a neighbor’s sheep shearing in Harding County. He’s become a reliable presence at our own sheep shearings ever since. Dad says the trainer brought better technique and finesse to our ranch.”I appreciate Bud’s knowledge of sheep and dogs,” Dad told me.”But I also appreciate him as a great friend and mentor to me. He has a way of making hard work more enjoyable because he’s there.”

Boudreau helps ranchers train their own dogs and he has sold dogs to others. Just as he did at our family’s ranch, he also taught sheep growers the benefits of dogs by just showing up to help. When he came to our place, we always offered him a room, but he preferred to sleep in the truck near the dogs, who had a strict bedtime of 7:30 p.m.

We loved his visits because the work always seemed to go more smoothly. Boudreau and a couple of his dogs could round up huge groups of sheep without help. Their movements were like magic to me and I wanted a dog of my own. Finally, Dad traded Boudreau some sheep for our border collie, Kate, after he took her to the National Sheepdog Finals in 2015. He also gifted me a dog whistle, and he came to the ranch to show us how to use the many commands.

He says every dog has its own peculiarities.”I won’t sell a dog I’m not confident in. Sometimes a dog will take years to get to the place where I feel confident in finding him a home. Every dog’s mind is different and it takes a great deal of patience to understand each one,” he says.

Because every dog needs hands-on attention, it’s an inexact and difficult business model.”I’ve been dead broke,” Boudreau admits.”Some people live paycheck to paycheck; I live border collie to border collie. Once a dog gets to be worth a certain amount, I can’t afford to keep him. If he gets hurt, there goes my paycheck.”

Still, he has never regretted leaving his better-paying career with East Coast horses.

“Training dogs has made training horses boring because of their intelligence. It’s a different kind of art form. It requires more finesse because the dogs get so fixated on the sheep, they have to rely on your voice only, and you have to hope they listen, and keep cool if they don’t.”

Boudreau’s philosophy on raising dogs sounds like parenting advice.”You have to be somebody that commits. A collie’s mind is like a growing child — you can’t miss a day. You have to be prepared to exercise their mind daily.”

He also emphasizes positive reinforcement.”I want them to stop doing wrong because they love the outcome of doing right. I want them to think of me as a safe place to look to. In order for that to happen, you have to keep calm. You can’t lose your cool. I want my dogs to look forward to training as much as I do.”

Spend a morning with Boudreau and his dogs and one thing becomes as clear as a Meade County sunrise: The dogs live to hear his gentle voice saying,”that’s a good boy.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Puppy Love

By Fran Hill

If you check out any of my social media feeds, it won’t take long to discover that I am a crazy dog mom. Currently, we share our home with two dachshunds and an Australian shepherd. Another Australian shepherd and a border collie take up residence at the farm (and more than earn their keep with the hard work they do helping to manage the sheep). These dogs aren’t just animals or mere pets, they are members of our family.

Our pups have stockings for Christmas, celebrate birthdays with special meals, and the Gotcha Day for our two rescues is never, ever forgotten. Of course, with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I had to do something special for our little loves, as well.

Peanut Butter Pumpkin Puppy Treats are a simple homemade snack that put store-bought boxed treats to shame. Made from ingredients that you probably already have on hand, the dough comes together easily and rolls out better than most of the cookie doughs I have tried to bake. And most importantly, our pups love them … almost as much as we love our pups.

Share the Valentine’s Day love with your dog by making Peanut Butter Pumpkin Puppy Treats.

Peanut Butter Pumpkin Puppy Treats

(adapted from Damn Delicious)

1/4 cup peanut butter (I used a natural peanut butter.)

2/3 cup pumpkin puree (NOT pumpkin pie filling)

2 eggs

2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour, plus additional for rolling out the dough

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.

With a mixer, beat peanut butter, pumpkin and eggs together until thoroughly blended. Gradually add the flour about 1/2 cup at a time, mixing just until incorporated. The dough may appear clumpy.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead together until smooth.

Using a rolling pin, roll the dough to approximately 1/4-inch thickness. Cut desired shapes with cookie cutters, or simply into strips and smaller squares with a knife.

Arrange puppy treats on prepared cookie sheets. (The dough does not spread. Therefore, the treats can be placed more closely than when baking cookies.)

Bake 20-25 minutes until edges are slightly browned. (Larger or thicker shapes may take longer to bake through, and smaller treats may bake more quickly.)

Allow to cool completely and store in an air-tight container.

NOTE: Some dogs may have wheat or egg allergies. Consult with your veterinarian, if you have concerns.

Fran Hill has been blogging about food at On My Plate since October of 2006. She, her husband and their three dogs ranch near Colome.

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Tough Times Call for Tough Kennels

By John Andrews

Doug Sangl and Lyle Van Kalsbeek knew hard times were coming. The Great Recession had just hit, and business at their plastics molding company in Tea was slowing to a crawl. They needed a project to fill time, so they combined their love of animals and engineering expertise to design a dog kennel that’s tougher than anything else on the market and a better fit for cars and trucks.

Since then, production of Ruff Tough Kennels has become the partners’ top priority.”We wanted to make them safer and more compact,” Sangl says.”The body is solid; we got rid of the joint where they typically get molded together. That takes a few inches off. Our intermediate size kennel is popular for hunting dogs, and you can fit three wide in back of a pickup. Other kennels with a lip on them won’t do that.”

Other improvements include double doors, which allow access through either side of a car and provide another opening in case of an accident.”They’re kind of like a helmet for your dog,” he says.”We’ve had several testimonials from people who have been in accidents who tell us their dog is alive because of our kennels.”

Ruff Tough Kennels are available at Cabela’s, Scheels and Nyberg’s Ace Hardware in Sioux Falls, or online.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Copper’s Last Stand

By Lee Schoenbeck

To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time set for everything, a time for birth and a time for death. He sets the time for mourning and the time for dancing. Unfortunately, my old friend Copper has seen his last dancing, his last retrieve, and now it’s time.

When you’re born you’ve begun to die — the trick is to put as much space between the two events as you can. With a new puppy it’s the same story, just less space between. With a hard-working hunting dog, the space is even shorter. Ten or 11 good years is a good run through the winter sloughs and fields up here on the Coteau.

Copper came into our family in a picnic basket with a red bow on it for my daughter Erin’s 12th birthday, a cute, lovable yellow lab puppy. Copper’s bloodline came from a bait shop in Browns Valley, Minnesota, the last available of a litter of a hunting buddy’s buddy’s dog. Kind of an inauspicious way to start a decade-long journey as the best hunting dog that ever owned me.

Copper was never a housedog. He lived in an outdoor kennel on our place his whole life. For 12 years Copper and I have shared his morning and evening constitutional and feeding. In the early years these 20 minutes together twice a day were school time, but the smart ones learn quickly. Copper’s first fall was at six months, and before Christmas he was a hunting guy’s best buddy afield.

With great ones you don’t get many memorable stories because performance in the field is the norm. Copper lived for flushing roosters out of cattails in waist-deep snow in the sloughs of the Coteau. He’d hunt all day and only give up when the shotguns were emptied and he’d nestled into the straw in the back of the Avalanche at day’s end.

But I can remember one great (and unfortunately tragic) performance in Copper’s life. It happened on the Missouri River breaks. Copper was working a line of three of us up and down the rolling hills of the river breaks when a rooster flushed high, sucked the wind and was heading for freedom over a hill and a cattle fence to our right. Just on the edge of range my buddy hits the ringneck, clearly wounding it, but leaving it with enough power to coast over the hill, and the next one, into a pasture of large bulls. The bird came down a good quarter mile away, but Copper was on it.

We watched Copper go over the first hill, under the fence, and over the next hill cleanly on the bird’s line. But he was also heading into a crowd of very large Angus. We saw Copper run the bird down, grab it, turn and trot back towards us, with about 15 Angus bulls gaining on him. When we lost sight of him below the first hill, I was pretty sure the herd had just trampled the best dog I had ever owned.

After a few minutes Copper popped over the hill, bird firmly in grasp, trotting at a good pace with the herd still gaining. Like it was just another day’s work, Copper popped under the fence, left the bulls in the dust and dropped a beautiful rooster at my feet. Richard Nixon said that you can’t appreciate the greatest heights unless you’ve experienced the greatest depths. Ten minutes after we celebrated that amazing retrieve, Copper came up lame and never hunted with four good wheels again.

Copper’s had a lot of great days in the field. His picture popping out of the hole in the back of my Avalanche has been celebrated in published hunting stories and social media. But those bookend events on the story of his life have gotten very close together. He hasn’t hunted for two seasons and he really can’t get around very well any more. He sounds like a three-pack-a-day smoker when he breathes. He still smiles and lights up when he sees the Avalanche getting loaded for the field, and his memory is filled with enthusiasm for the hunt, even if his body says he can’t go along.

When you get a dog, you know this day’s coming. You just wish for that one last season, one last hunt, that last flush and retrieve, that last stand on the South Dakota prairie.

Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Goin’ Fishin’

By Fran Hill

At the farm, the guys rely heavily on working dogs to help with the sheep. From sorting for sheering, weighing or vaccinating to moving the lambs away from the feed bunks so the tractor and feed wagon can make their way for daily feedings, the herding instincts of our border collies are essential. However, with one of our loyal and hardworking pups no longer much of a pup, Hubs has felt the need to look around for a new generation of canine coworkers.

His search ended late last December when a cousin’s Australian shepherd had a litter of beautiful puppies. Immediately Hubs claimed a female, and in March Nilla came to live with us — in town. There were many sound reasons why we brought this puppy into our dachshund-ruled home flanked by city streets instead of immediately making her nest among the sheep at the farm. I won’t deny that a large factor might have been how my heartstrings were tugged as she slept in my lap during the 5 1/2-hour drive home from picking her up.

It has been an interesting few months as Nilla navigated the puppy door to the fenced backyard, mastered housebreaking, chewed a dining room chair, learned to sit for jelly beans, trampled my herb garden and the rhubarb (but hasn’t chased away the snakes), made some day trips to the farm to begin the transition to her working future, snuggled, wrestled and snoozed with our dachshunds, and dug holes in the backyard every time it rained. Every time it rained. And, if you weren’t aware, it has been a fairly wet spring and early summer.

Our smart, curious and friendly puppy doesn’t seem to have any interest in the dirt when it is dry, but a quick downpour and suddenly she is excavating a path to China. I blame the earthworms. Our soil is rich with night crawlers that become super active in the rain. If Nilla finds one squirming across our damp concrete patio after a rain shower, she dances with excitement. Maybe she just wants to go fishing.

I haven’t been fishing in a while, but Nilla has got me thinking about it. There is something about freshly caught walleye from the Missouri River that just can’t be beat. Maybe I shouldn’t be scolding Nilla for digging holes to find worms. Maybe I should be rewarding her with a taste of freshly pan-seared fish with a light lemon and butter sauce. Manicured lawn be damned; let’s go fishing.

Fran Hill has been blogging about food at On My Plate since October of 2006. She, her husband and their two dogs ranch near Colome.

Lemon Butter Fish

(adapted from Cooking Light)

4 fish fillets (about 3/4 inch thick) — cod (which is what I had on hand), halibut, walleye or whatever

black pepper

kosher salt

1 teaspoon flour

2 tablespoons butter, divided

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 tablespoon parsley, finely chopped

Pat fish dry and season both sides with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with flour.

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a large nonstick skillet. Add fish to the pan and cook until lightly browned. Carefully turn fish over; cook another 4-5 minutes (until fish flakes easily). Remove from pan and set aside to keep warm.

Add remaining tablespoon butter to pan and cook until lightly browned, swirling pan to melt butter evenly and prevent burning. Remove pan from heat, stir in lemon juice.

Drizzle sauce over fish. Sprinkle with parsley. Serve immediately. (Serves 4)

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Hot Dogs

By Fran Hill

My life now revolves around hot dogs. No, I didn’t invest in a little food cart to sell dirty water wieners on the street corner. Hubs, Ace, and I opened our home to two more dachshunds. We are now a three hot dog home.

After we lost our female doxie to heart disease in December, our house was very quiet. Ace, our remaining dachshund, stopped eating, reverted to some poor bathroom habits, and clung to me when I was home. Sissy’s lively personality had been our spark. We were lonely and grieving.

In January, I decided that it might help Ace to find another companion and contacted an area rescue organization, Dakota Dachshund Rescue. I perused the (unfortunately) long list of pups available for adoption and sent a rambling email that described Ace’s more stoic personality and the habits of our lifestyle. The reply came quickly with a request that I complete the adoption application and asking if my hubs and I could attend the monthly Meet and Greet to get to know some of the adoptable dachshunds.

Dakota Dachshund Rescue is a private, all volunteer, non-profit organization. The very small group of volunteers really love wiener dogs. They work together to rescue abandoned, abused and unwanted dachshunds, including those that need rehoming because their owners just can’t keep them anymore.

Without a facility to house the dogs, all dachshunds with Dakota Dachshund Rescue are in foster homes. My hat goes off to those volunteers. They open their homes and hearts to the pups with the hope that they will one day have to let them go, even if it aches to do so. Once a month, the organization hosts a Meet and Greet at an area pet store, Your Pet Stop in Sioux Falls, to ease potential adoptions. With our references checked and adoption application approved, Hubs and I set off to meet some loveable doxies. Of course, Ace also joined us. There would be no four-legged family additions that were not approved by our long and lean king of the household.

Tabby and Jenn seemed to know we were the ones before we were even in the door. Jenn curled up in Hubs’ arms and fell asleep, and Tabby batted her big, brown eyes and barked at me every time I set her down and tried to walked away to look at another dog. Ace, meanwhile, took it all in stride and lounged at Hubs’ feet inside a pen at the back of the store. The mother and daughter pair of doxies had never been apart, and it was required that they be adopted together. We were going to be a three dog family.

A few personal issues put off the official adoption for a few weeks, and during that time, I drove the DDR volunteers crazy with my never ending emails. What were the girls’ sleeping habits? What kind of food did they eat? Were they OK with stairs? The girls already had me wrapped around their little paws as I purchased new kennels, harnesses and food dishes to be ready for their arrival. Everyone was anxious for the girls to come home.

The day I picked up the girls, Jenn jumped into my lap and kissed me incessantly. Their foster mother and I hugged and brushed away a few tears as I prepared to leave. In the car during the drive home, Tabby nervously let me know that she needed a pit stop and after a brisk walk, curled up in the carrier and went to sleep with her tiny daughter. I cried again.

Arriving home, I had arranged for Ace and Hubs to meet us in the backyard. When I opened the gate and let the girls run in, Ace danced around them with joy. All three pups explored the backyard and sniffed for squirrels together. Just moments later inside the house, all found their spots to settle in and cuddle with Hubs in his chair and watch a little football.

Tabby and Jenn have now been with us just over two weeks, and there has never been any doubt that the girls are home. It is as if they have always been here. Their smart, inquisitive minds learned the ins and outs of the puppy door immediately. Tabby isn’t thrilled with Ace’s love of playing ball, but has learned that boys will always be boys. Jenn took a few days to really begin eating and even now the little cuddle bug would prefer to be held instead of have a treat, but has no problem letting us know that dinner smells good and she would like a bite. Ace has shared his home, his bed, his toys, his food and his heart with both girls. Every morning begins with a sweet round of mutual kisses and butt sniffs among the pups. This is their forever home.

Our furry hot dogs make our home happy, and Deviled Chili Cheese Dogs make our tummies happy. While not a menu staple for the health conscious, chili cheese dogs are a deliciously messy indulgence. Start with good quality wieners to really make this treat worthwhile. The heat of the saucy, seasoned ground beef can be adjusted from mild to wow with your choice of chile powders. An extra step of tossing the scored hot dogs with hot sauce adds an unexpected burst of flavor, and don’t skimp on the cheese. Melty, gooeyness is essential for a superb chili dog.


Deviled Chili Cheese Dogs

(adapted from Rachael Ray)
1 pound ground beef
kosher salt
freshly ground black pepper
1-2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 tablespoon chili powder (I used Ancho Chile Powder)
16 ounces tomato sauce
8 all-beef hot dogs
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon hot sauce (I chose Frank’s Red Hot)
8 hot dog buns, toasted
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

Heat skillet to medium heat and add the ground beef. Season with salt and pepper. Brown and crumble the beef. Add Worcestershire, onion, garlic and chili powder. Cook together a few minutes to soften the onion and garlic. Add tomato sauce and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat and simmer until sauce is thickened. Meanwhile, boil the hot dogs until heated through. Drain and return pan to the heat. Add the butter and hot sauce and stir to combine as butter melts. Score the hot dog casings and return to the pan with the hot sauce. Brown the dogs and crisp the skin in the sauce mixture. Heat broiler. Arrange hot dogs in buns and top with chili and grated cheese. Place dogs under broiler and melt cheese. Serves 4.

Fran Hill has been blogging about food at On My Plate since October of 2006. She, her husband and their three dogs ranch near Colome.

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Hunting’s Odd Couple

By Lee Schoenbeck

“Welcome Hunters, and Your Owners Too” the local vet’s marquee announced. If you are a hunter with hunting dogs, then you appreciate the reality that you feed them for ten months so you can play with them for two. But if you have ever been along on a pheasant hunt, you know that it’s the dog that makes the deal. No matter the claims made to fame, it’s not the warrior, it’s not his weapon, it’s his hunting dog that makes a good South Dakota pheasant hunt happen.

The requirements placed on a hunting dog, to be successful, is more than a little unusual. To fully appreciate it, get down on all fours. Not on your living room carpet, but in the nearest corn stubble field or slough. Now put your nose on the ground and run hard for ten yards, or until your nose falls off, whichever occurs first. Yet a good hunting dog will do that drill all day long, no matter what the weather. While you have your face down in that field, notice all the smells. A good hunting dog ignores the rabbits, the deer and whatever the cattle left, to focus on the apparently unique subtle scent of the wily ringneck. This hunting dog gig is no small feat.

At the other end of the equation, ask the hunter about his hunting dog and you will be surprised to learn how many South Dakota hunting dogs purport to speak the Queen’s English. The later in the evening you ask, at one of the local watering holes in Oacoma or Gregory or Gettysburg, the likelihood the hunter’s dog will be reported as capable of performing higher math increases exponentially.

Seriously, here are a few pointers if you are inclined to join the ranks of hunters with hunting dogs.

Don’t buy your dog on a whim at a DU banquet after too much refreshment. Owning and training a dog is no prefab program — it takes commitment.

Don’t overfeed your dog. The two cups a day of quality food is really all your dog needs, and your dog will hunt better and live healthier if you stick to recommended rations — even as small as they seem compared to the size of your dog.

Feed your dog a good brand of food. There is a direct relationship between the amount of cleaning you will do in the kennel, and the quality the food your dog consumes. It doesn’t need to be a designer brand, but a good one. I’m not sure if Bernie allows for commercial product placement plugs here — but if diamonds were good enough for your wife, then Diamond may be a good choice for your dog.

Control and training is everything in the hunter / dog relationship. If you have a hunter acquaintance that you never want to see again, take an untrained dog and a really loud whistle along on your next hunt with him. On the other hand, if you want to see your Facebook friend requests quadruple — train your dog. A good rule of thumb is ten minutes a day, twice a day, every day. For a half century the best books on dog training, they could be called Dog Training for Dummies, are those written by Richard Wolters in the 1960s — try Game Dog for starters.

Nothing wrong with a spare. My hunting buddy of many years lost his dog the week before”the opener” and moped through the fall dogless — half a hunting team — a shadow of his former self. The next year, I bought and trained a second dog. Who wants to be that poor dogless hunter schmuck? A few years later we relocated, and a new hunting buddy had three dogs. If two’s good, who am I to argue with three? Life doesn’t get much better than working birds over three dogs in heavy cover, and they never make you be a blocker (the guys that people are shooting towards).

Pick a breed that fits your hunting environment. If you pick up a Pheasants Forever magazine, you will see many articles promoting the attributes of dogs that have no apparent ability to survive hunting in sub-zero weather or snow over two feet deep. These are pretty dogs; they just aren’t South Dakota hunting dogs. The most versatile and practical hunting dog to own in the pheasant capitol of the world is a Labrador retriever. They can hunt in wind chills of 50 below (maybe more, but that’s the limit this hunter has tested), live in outdoor kennels year round, and love you like the woman of your dreams (that would be you, honey, if you happen to be reading this).

The relationship between a hunter and his dog is a special one. Taking a break on a sunny afternoon hunt, lying on a South Dakota hillside, with your best dog’s head resting on your lap, is about as peaceful as it gets. Dogs have a funny way about them. If you’re their hunter, they love you. They own you, they make you feed them and walk them twice a day, but for that you get unconditional love. The part about making you look good in the field is just an incidental benefit that man’s best friend provides for the hunter he owns.

Lee Schoenbeck resides near Watertown with his wife Donna, two of their four children and four dogs. He is certified as a Civil Trial Specialist by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. His website is www.schoenbecklaw.com.

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Working Dogs

Children are fewer and hired hands are hard to find, but a South Dakota rancher can always depend on a stockdog.

By Bernie Hunhoff

Caitlin Kettler and a border collie called Jack bring the cows into the yard of the Kettler ranch near Blunt.


Caitlin Kettler rounds up the cows at her family’s Blunt ranch without a horse or even a holler. All she needs is Jack, the Kettler family’s rambunctious but obedient border collie.”Away to me,” she says, and Jack circles counterclockwise.”Come by,” she says and he changes direction.

“There,” she says, stopping him in his tracks.”Look back,” she continues, and he turns his head to see that he forgot a cow. He happily scampers after it.

Nobody knows just how many South Dakota farms use dogs to guide their cattle and sheep, but the number is growing.”It will surprise you how many border collies are on farms and ranches,” says Pete Carmichael, a Timber Lake rancher who raises, trains and shows stockdogs.

Carmichael says there’s a difference between a good ranch dog and a trained stockdog.”A ranch dog knows your habits and where your fences are and what you’re going to do. But take him away from home and he won’t know what to do as well.”

Cattle dogs are more popular than sheep dogs, probably because cattle are more common than sheep in South Dakota.”Probably nine out of 10 calls I get are for people wanting cattle dogs,” he says.”They say I can’t hire help and the kids are grown up and the old lady gets mad at me when she tries to help.”

Border collies are the most popular breed of working dogs both in South Dakota and elsewhere because they are so intelligent and trainable. Retrievers, corgis, mastiffs and even mutts are also used but the best dogs in field trials generally come from lines that have been refined for years — some for centuries — through selective breeding.

A dog’s herding ability stems from genetic behavior shared with wolves and coyotes. Though centuries of domestication and selective breeding have diminished the killing instinct, the desire to circle and gather a target is strong in border collies and some other breeds.

“They are the predator,” Carmichael says.”The prey is a chicken or a cow or a horse, regardless of how big an animal they’re working. They originated from wolves and wolves worked in packs. There is always an alpha, so that’s the reason you’ve got to approach them right. They have to know that you’re the alpha — so you don’t let them run loose or do other things that let them forget who’s in charge.”

Carmichael’s admiration for a good dog is obvious.”They’ll amaze you sometimes at how smart they are and the things they can do,” he says.”Stealth isn’t necessary but it’s part of the predator’s thing. And they can move stock with their eyes a lot of times, especially sheep. A sheep can only look at them so long before it gets fidgety.”

Training a young dog is a lot like raising a child.”You want to keep them happy,” he says.”If you put too much pressure on a young dog and they get so they’re not having fun, then you better back off a little bit.

He says training a young dog is a lot like raising a child.”You want to keep them happy,” he says.”If you put too much pressure on a young dog and they get so they’re not having fun, then you better back off a little bit. I start them on sheep and let them have their fun. Do that a few times and man they know that’s the most fun they’re going to have today. Overwork them and they’ll lose that enthusiasm.”

Carmichael, lanky and soft-spoken by nature, advocates a gentle approach.”The dogs don’t understand words but they understand tone, so we use a gentle voice. That’s the trouble with some people, they are way too loud for them.”

Some trainers prefer to use a whistle with their dogs, he says.”If you get a little upset they might pick it up in the tone of your voice, but they won’t pick it up on the whistle.”

Competitive stockdog trials are serious business.”The sheep trials are pretty much professionals who wouldn’t know one end of a sheep from another,” grins Carmichael, who both enters and judges at the events.”For the most part they are living in a fantasy world. The cattle dog trials are still pretty much cowboys but that will probably change and they’ll be beating us cattlemen out.” Dogs are tested at trials on how smoothly and quickly they move sheep or cattle through a pattern of obstacles.

Some dogs can compete with both sheep and cattle, but not all can handle cows.”Some lines of dogs aren’t strong enough to work cattle,” Carmichael says.”It takes a stronger dog with more guts. A lot of the imported dogs that come from Great Britain are sheep dogs and they are bred to handle sheep without being rough. You put those dogs on cattle and the old cow thinks ‘sshhh … you’re nothing to me.’ You need a dog that will stand its ground because if the dog gives ground the cow learns right quick.”

Trials are open to all breeds but border collies dominate in competitions, just as they do in the real world. The result has been a steady increase in the value of a good dog. The very best may bring $5,000.”The other chapter to that story,” says Carmichael,”is that if a dog isn’t for sale you can’t buy him. It’s like trying to buy that grandson of mine.”

The Timber Lake cowboy does raise litters to sell but he’s fussy about where the dogs go.”A guy might give you $3,500 and take him back to the ranch and not treat him right. He might let him ride in the back of the pickup truck and he falls out, or he lets him in with some bulls where he gets hurt. So if I have a good one I’m going to question the guy and see if he’s going to take care of him when he’s using him and when he’s not using him.” Carmichael hosts clinics on how to treat and train dogs to work with stock.

Show dogs are vastly outnumbered by real work dogs in South Dakota, and they’re to be found anywhere in the state. The Kettlers of rural Blunt train and sell border collies. They also use them daily for farm chores and Caitlin and her sisters show them in 4-H. Their dad, Murray, a Fort Pierre veterinarian, enters the dogs in trials.

Scott Jepsen and his family raise sheep near Vermillion with an old dog called Maggie. Jepsen says Maggie is especially useful when he must drive a tractor through a gate, a challenging task for one person because a savvy sheep or cow is quick to bolt.”They seem to know when the gate is open and when you can’t get there in time,” he says. Maggie stands at the opening, daring the sheep to escape, as Scott stays on the tractor and completes his chores.

Maggie needs expensive medication to treat congestive heart failure but the Jepsens consider her a bargain at any price. Scott’s wife, Jeanne, used to haul fat lambs to the Sioux Falls Stockyards, and took along Maggie to help unload. Maggie would jump into the trailer and nip the first lamb, who would depart with the rest following like the proverbial sheep in a dream. However, a stockyards crew knows from experience that sheep seldom unload so easily. Duly impressed, one of the crew asked if he could buy Maggie.

“I suppose you could,” said Mrs. Jepsen.”But then my husband would have to get out of the sheep business.”

EDITOR’S NOTE ñ This story is revised from the July/Aug 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.