I get tons of messages – e-mail, Facebook posts, letters – from people asking me for advice  about their border collies and other dogs. I am not a trainer, or a vet, so I usually tell them to talk to a professional. I wrote one book about living with dogs “Katz On Dogs,” and I think it has been helpful to people, but I am not a trainer and don’t give training advice in any forum. If I did that, I would be instantly overwhelmed and you can’t train somebody else’s dog, especially via e-mail.

It would also be dishonest. People who have problems with their dogs should see  Cesar, or call their vets or hire local trainers. Not writers of memoirs, novels and children’s books.

I believe border collies, like any working breed, but more than most, require committed, patient, determined people.

I’ve had four border collies – Homer, Orson, Rose and Izzy. I gave Homer away, I put Orson down after he bit some people, I’ve had good luck with Izzy and Rose. I love the breed (and I also love Labs), but I think anybody who gets a border collie ought to know that they are, as a rule, nuts.

I adore Rose, but only a crazy dog would butt heads with rams, corral cows, battle goats and plow through blizzards to get the herd down to the feeder. Or stalk an Imaginary Squirrel for years, just because she got the idea into her head that one was up the tree (I did see the first one.)

You have to use the craziness and make it work for you, as the sheepherding people do.  Border collies will do anything for work. Whenever Rose heads for her tree, I make her sit down and stay. She happily does it to get to her squirrel.

Border collies nearly overwhelmed me, and my methods of training and dealing with them have certainly changed, and radically. I did very well using Rose to herd and work with sheep, but that was more due to her persistence and savvy than it was to me. And I depended heavily on the advice and training of a shepherd and brilliant dog and border collie trainer, Carolyn Wilki of the Raspberry Ridge Sheep Farm in Bangor, Pa. If you need help with your dog, go see her. She will yell at you and tell you the truth.

Border collies are really not for everybody and if I didn’t have a 90 acre farm and woods and paths and ATV’s and fields, I would probably not have a border collie, much as I love them.

I don’t really believe you have to have a farm or sheep to have a border collie. If you are willing to do the work, you can do it almost anywhere. But they do have to have work, and they have enormous energy and intensity that needs to be focused. It makes me sad to see border collies walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Can’t imagine there is much for them to do there.

I do not believe they have to have sheep.

Without sheep, I still work Rose more than an hour a day – walks, frisbee, balls, ATV. She’s doing very well. I have to say Labs are saner, if…well, simpler. If you see love and food as their work, it works much the same way.