Replies

My border collie, Barney was theeee smartest dog ever. Once I had him fully trained to my liking, he never saw a leash again. He spent a good deal of the day on the front porch watching people passing by. And if I had a frisbee in my hand? A dozen squirrels could dance in a circle around him and he wouldn’t notice. Barney never barked either. He spoke with his eyes (one brown and one blue) or he groaned in little hushed tones and yips. He would reach out with his paw to grab my arm or leg to get my attention. He knew his left from his right, ran like the wind and could chase down a frisbee as far as I could throw one, get under it and still leap 6 feet in the air to pull it down.

We did many tricks with the frisbee, you’ve seen ‘em all on any Youtube video clip. He would run up my back onto my shoulders, he could do back flips as he snagged the frisbee from my outstretched hand. And the best trick of all... He would carry the frisbee back in the house and put it in his toybox when we were done.

Barney was big for a BC with 65 lbs of solid muscle. Wide-eyed with an unrelenting childlike enthusiasm. And in many respects, before my children were born, he was my child. But Border Collies do need to come with a warning. Do not bring home a BC unless you have plenty of outdoor space and you have the energy to get out there with them a couple of times a day. And you also need to turn them off when they have had enough and need to rest. It’s up to you to determine when that is because they don’t come with an OFF switch.

I would give Barney an occasional large milk bone for a treat and he would take it in his mouth, give me a look like, “okay, turn your head, don’t look”, and then he would go hide it somewhere in the house. Usually in closets or in a load of dirty clothes in the laundry basket. If he saw you getting ready to do the laundry, he would run in and nose through the basket, grab a milk bone and slink back out of the laundry room.

When I got dressed for work in the morning standing at the closet I would always have a pair of eyes watching me. Barney would sit behind me and watch, making sure I didn’t discover his stash. I would step away pretending not to notice and he would wait until I was out of the room and then go into the closet and retrieve a milk bone and head off to another part of the house to hide it again.

Sorry, but all the rest of you are just arguing over second place. Barney was one of a kind. A few weeks after Barney passed away, I was getting dressed one morning and went to slip on a pair of shoes and found a milkbone tucked away in one shoe. My eyes welled up and I sat down on the bed and cried. Greatest dog ever.