Good things take time and effort. That goes for just about anything worth having or being in life.
Making a good dog, a good horse or a good kid doesn’t happen overnight. All these things take dedication and effort. The other day, someone was talking about the high price of good ranch horses.
All I could think of is how many hundreds of days and hours my daughter and all good trainers put into every horse they ride. Just taking a horse from one level to the next can take a couple years. Some never make the transition.
There’s nothing wrong with a good ranch snaffle bit horse, some of our most dependable ol guys are just that.
But, when you take the time to take a quality horse up through a hack, then two rein and finally to finished bridle, and they are soft mouthed and supple, they are worth every penny and more.
Same principle goes for dogs. Taking the time to work with a dog every day makes all the difference in whether they end up being a joy or a knot head. I’ve got a couple of each and a few in the middle. All but two of our dogs are good listeners.
They come when called, don’t chase my cats and stay home when asked to do so. One is even a reasonably good cow dog. The two that are knot heads fall into two categories, one is a pup who needs more work and one is light on brain tissue. I worried when my daughter wanted to keep a berniedoodle. We’d bred several litters and the pups were the cutest things under the sun, but I worried about their basic intelligence. I was right to worry.
She kept one out of our last litter. Sarge is 90 lbs of energetic happiness. He bounds around like a giant black muppet; but, he left his brain somewhere else. He lacks good manners and no amount of painful correction seem to change his behavior. He knocks me down, gooses me on a regular basis and always seems to be literally under foot. He’s never mean, but he’s a gigantic pain to be around.
There are a lot of young people who act a lot like our berniedoodle. They aren’t mean, but they sure are difficult to be around. I am 100% sure that making good kids is a full time, lifelong endeavor. I’ve written before about the friends and family who have called and asked us to host their kids on the ranch for a summer.
The lament is always about the same…teach them how to get up in the morning, how to work and how to live without video games or the cell phone. I just say no because it’s an exercise in futility to try and reverse a lifetime of bad habits in a couple months.
The few kids I’ve made the effort with still fear me, and frankly, I’m still annoyed with them. The same bad habits and lack of character that I saw in them as teenagers still plague them as thirty something adults. I always go back to the old joke “never try to teach a pig to sing, it’ll waste your time and annoy the pig”.
I’m afraid that we live in a culture of instant gratification and that isn’t a good thing. I’ve begun to believe that in our country, we are probably now operating on an 80/20 model. Only about 20% of the citizenry possess quality character.
Quality takes time and effort. It usually costs more, and for good reason. It’s not easy to teach or instill unless you start early and are consistent. Even then, our best efforts don’t always work.
All I know for sure is that before we jump into anything big in life, we ought to consider just how much time and effort it will take to do things right. If we can’t commit to that expense, we should admit it and just back away. If we asked ourselves the hard questions up front, I’m convinced we would have a lot more good kids and good dogs.
We’d be willing to pay for good horses, and we’d have fewer unhappy marriages, failed businesses and general malaise in the world.
Kris Stewart is a rancher in Paradise Valley, Nevada.