This is not another rant about meddling or unwanted advice, just some discussion of dog philosophy and very civil disagreement. I have gotten a steady number of messages from very nice and very thoughtful people who are worried about my bringing Gus out into the pasture and letting him off leash.

I know I sometimes bristle about people telling me how to live with my dogs and animals, but the messages were actually quite lovely, filled with respect and concern for our new puppy. I am accepting my life, or trying.

Gus is quite small, and some of the animals are quite large, I do understand that it is possible to look at my photos and be worried. Looking through the viewfinder, I shook my head, Gus is much smaller than a chicken.

The messages could not be more sensitive or, in most cases, touching. There is no reason to be angry about them.

“I don’t mean to tell you what to do, but I do get concerned when I see Gus is running around the pasture without a leash. It would just take one misstep by a donkey or a panicked bunch of sheep to run right over him and do him much harm. This is all up to you, but I love Gus already and would hate to see harm come to him,” wrote one reader.

Another cautioned me to be careful: “you would feel just awful if that little puppy were killed or seriously injured out there, and I would hate to see you carry that burden.”

I do understand how they – and others – feel. The truth is,  we just have different ways of looking at the world. There is no right or wrong.

I suspect these are people with pets, not animals, and the animals here are something of cross between the two, they live on a farm, but they are also pets.

Gus is a very savvy dog, he came out into the pasture again this morning. He stepped back from the donkeys but sat near them, he stayed out of the Pole Barn, where the sheep were hiding from the strong sun.

He gave Fanny a lick on the nose, as he does every morning, and stayed with Maria, and sometimes with me. He keeps a watchful eye on both of us. He also hugs the corners of the barn and makes sure there is a safe place for him to retreat if necessary.

Every day, he is becoming more at ease out there, but he is always watchful, and he moves quite quickly when he needs to. I see him looking around, figuring things out,  watching and listening.

One of my seminal philosophies for puppies is to “let dogs be dogs.” Let them work out their quarrels, learn  how life around them is structured, develop their own survival and adaptive skills. If they don’t learn these as puppies, they may not earn them at all, this is the critical period for them to learn and develop their world view.

If Gus is kept on a leash in the pasture, or kept out of the pasture, he will never be a farm dog, he will be permanently afraid of the animals, and will learn to live outside of the farming circle (above) which is so much a part of our lives

And I want him to be a part of our lives, not a witness to them, or an outsider watching anxiously. I see that small dogs have great survival skills, they are fast and confident, they have piercing screams when they feel threatened, and they know when to stand up for themselves, and when to run and hide.

I’ve seen a lot of small dogs like Boston Terriers on farms and the farms always say the same thing: “let them be dogs, they are smarter than we are about surviving.” Good advice.

We watch Gus closely, and are always available to him.  When my daughter was young, we confronted much more serious issues and dangers to her. Facebook’s teen pages are much more dangerous to kids than Lulu or Fanny will ever be to Gus.

So we are letting him be a dog, not a dependent and protected ward. Is there some risk to that? Sure. Accidents happen. Dogs don’t get perfect lives any more than we do.  A donkey could get spooked, the sheep might stampede, a hawk could sweep out of the sky. The more opportunity we give Gus to make his own decisions and learn from his experiences, the better he will do, the happier we will all be.

There is risk living, even to getting on an airplane these days. It is quite unlikely to crash, but you could get slugged and dragged down the aisle.

Then, there is my own philosophy of life. I am no hero or brave man, but when I moved to the country, I undertook all kinds of risks that were new to me, and potentially dangerous. There were rabid raccoons, foxes and possums, brutal snowstorms and floods,

I got frostbite several times chasing sick donkeys around, a ram banged my had into a big wooden pole, walked in woods raked by hunter’s gunfire,  my car was demolished by lightning while I sat ten feet away, was nearly run down by a steer, and drove on narrow icy roads in awful weather.

I was kicked by donkeys, infected by cat bites, knocked unconscious from falls on the ice, rescued too many times  count.

Life is full of risks. I had an anal, safety-conscious friend who never took any kind of risk, he wouldn’t even walk on wet sidewalks. We all joked that he would live longer than any of us.

He was run down and killed by a Philadelphia bus whose driver had a fatal heart attack at the wheel. Life happens to all of us, and no dog of mine will live in a bubble if I can help it. Gus is learning more every day about how to be safe on a farm. There is no better training in all of the world.

I want to let my dog be a dog, and  if these last few days are any indication, Gus will be a great one.