Frieda’s life has taken many twists and turns – abandoned in the Adirondacks, adopted by Maria, brought to Bedlam Farm – but things have definitely brightened even more for her since we moved to the new Bedlam Farm. Frieda has brought an engineer’s planning to something she has always loved – the running off of trucks. At the old farm, there were very few trucks, and Frieda was usually off in a run behind the house. She would bark and lunge and run along the fence, but the sightlines were off and while she never gave up, she was frustrated.
If she could have designed a perfect environment to wait for trucks, chase trucks and run them off she would have chosen this farm, this fence, this road. The new dog run fronts on a busy state highway. At certain times of day all kinds of trucks come roaring by – milk trucks, logging trucks, delivery trucks, freight trucks. In just a few weeks, Frieda has perfected her system. She hears them coming a long way off, waits until they are almost here, and charges in full roar.
Then she sits quietly by the fence, out of sight, cautious, alert and waits until the next truck is just a few yards to the north or south. Then she barks, lunges and follows – I should say chases – the trucks away from the farmhouse. Frieda loves this new work and is quite wonderful at it. At the old farm, I used to yell at her to be quiet, but I have evolved, and now when she chases a truck off – there is no way to stop Frieda from doing her duty and chasing these smelly and loud beasts away from us – I congratulate her.”Good girl,” I say, “thanks for protecting us from those trucks.” Frieda’s melts with pleasure when I praise her, rushes over to me, leans against me for some rubs and hugs. She has found good work to do, and is reinforced for it constantly. She is a happy and busy dog.
Truck chasing will not ever be on TV, and people from Ireland and Scotland will not go home with oooh-aaah stories of the wonderful truck chasing dog they meet over in America, and the amazing things they are trained to do. And those intense people will never give out ribbons for one of the junkyard dog’s most time-honored work. But Frieda is every bit as much of a working dog as Red. She is just as serious and focused. And she has driven off hundreds of trucks in just the short time she has been here. She is clever – she bides her time. She is patient, she is not distracted. She is brave, even the biggest diesel does not deter her. And not a single truck has made it onto the farm to harm us since Frieda went to work. This is a great place for Frieda to be, and while I have been slow to honor and appreciate this work, I have caught up with myself.
It is a great training lesson, of course. Let dogs be dogs, within reason. Find what they love and use it. Before we chase trucks, I ask Frieda to lie down, sit and stay. Her reward is chasing trucks.
As Red loves to work sheep, as Lenore loves food and love, Frieda loves to chase trucks. She is quite wonderful at it.