Sally Wright is a fellow Ohio mystery author, and was a 2001 Edgar award finalist for her novel Pursuit and Persuasion.

Animals. I’ve been thinking about them the last week (why, you’ll see by the end of this). Because what is it with them, that they can reduce seemingly ordinary sensible adult humans to quivering baby-talk babbling coddlers who refer to themselves as “Mommy” or “Daddy” in relation to four-footed beasts? (I’ve been guilty of all but the last excess, and hope to hold the line there.)
There are ferret fanciers who dress their “babies” in clothes and costumes and compete in cuteness contests. Ferrets have got great faces, alert and very expressive. But I hunted with them in the wilds of Scotland, and when they’re working, cute’s not the word I’d use.
They’re intelligent. They’re sleekly elegant in an otterish sort of way. But they’re tough, and born ruthless - single-minded, at the very least, when they shoot down a rabbit hole, taking matters into sharp pointy teeth.
They’ve long been used in England and Scotland to drive rabbits out of warrens into the talons of hawks and falcons, and that’s when I got to watch them. Then ferrets are all business (and they do get the meat for themselves and their families, once the raptors share the spoils.)
I was being taught to hunt with a Harris hawk for the third of my Ben Reese archivist-ex-WWII-Scout books, Pursuit And Persuasion, and I, never having hunted anything, was repulsed to begin with with the dark side of nature - “nature red in tooth and claw” - and the way the real world works. I ended up being fascinated by predators who do what they do best - hunt the way they were born to –while cooperating with us.
Watching sheepdogs herding sheep on farms, and competing in trials in Scotland and England was just as fascinating - seeing the discipline and the interest the dogs have, the intelligence, and the pride they seem to take in the work itself, as well as pleasing the trainer.
I love watching assistance dogs, and sniffer dogs, and obstacle course enthusiasts, and those who retrieve in the field. You can see they love it, the challenge and the stimulation - the sense of doing work, of accomplishing something and being appreciated - of using the instincts and abilities they’ve got.
Horses too - I can hardly take my eyes off them when they plow, or race, or clear a fence, or make dressage a dance. I’ve stood for an hour on the edge of a road in rolling Indiana farmland and watched Amish farmers plow with teams of four or six draft horses – any one of them too big to hold if they didn’t obey commands.
I’ve also shown-up at dawn at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Kentucky, where I eavesdropped shamelessly on trainers and owners while we all watched jockeys, in jeans and halfchaps, breeze thoroughbreds around the track before the heat of the day.
I don’t know much about cows and calves (unlike Judy Clemens), but I have been chased by a large herd. I had to scramble over a fence to escape with skin intact in plain view of a country hotel full of watching waiters and guests, who laughed behind their hands later when I showed up for dinner.
I’ve had lots of dogs, many of them boxers, or boxer-mutts of one sort or another, several of them rescues. The best was Maggie. And it’s taken us a-year-and-a-half to regroup after her death from cancer, and be ready to get a puppy. We had help training Maggie from a very good-natured fourteen-year-old cat who was born on the front step. Kitty’s not without her hangers-on, and we seem to be feeding every stray farm cat in northwestern Ohio. I’ve liked knowing all of them - the possums too, that Maggie used to play with, who still eat Kitty’s food.
What I don’t like is ill mannered, undisciplined dogs, and cats, and horses. It’s not their fault most of the time. It’s the people who get suckered, I suspect by sentimentality, who don’t teach themselves how to help their animals develop their own potential.
Training an animal’s very hard work. It takes real patience and determination. But a well-behaved animal’s a whole lot happier, as is everyone else. A dog that can be trusted not to bite, grab food off a table, jump up on visitors, or stray away from home has real freedom and dignity and a whole lot more fun. One who can’t be trusted gets put in a cage, shut in a room, kept on a chain till it’s crazy.
An untrained horse is dangerous to everyone around it. My horse vet tells me tales that make my hair stand on end. I’m not a lifelong rider. I’ve only had three horses since I was thirty-five. The first was a mistreated ex-race horse (Journey, in the Ben Reese books). The second, Max, was a thoroughbred-quarter horse cross with the best traits of both. One eye had to be removed the year I got him, after months of painful treatment, which is part of the plot in the fifth Ben Reese, Watches Of The Night, coming out this June.
I had to put Max down last summer when he was 31, after having had him 17 years. He had cancer of an intimate and off-putting sort which you don’t want to hear about (especially you men). Max was the best horse I could’ve had, and I’m glad I kept him from living through the worst of where it was going.
An amazing thing happened the day after I put him down. I was rudely awakened really early by a very loud, very strange bird call outside our bedroom slider. Whatever it was, was big, and nothing I’d heard in northwestern Ohio - though I had heard one somewhere, sometime in the past.
I looked out the door, and found a peacock staring straight at me. A peahen, to be precise - crown up, feathers fluffed - under the wide green ash.
I didn’t know anything about peafowl, except what I’d read in Flannery O’Connor. I was afraid the peahen (it took two days to determine that for sure - that it was a female, not an immature male) must’ve strayed from an owner I didn’t know existed.
She wasn’t tame exactly, but she’d let me watch her, then fly a few yards away if I got closer than five or six feet. She liked the fenced-in garden outside our bathroom, and would preen on the step by the door.
I spent the next few days trying to find the owner, or someone who could tell me what to feed her, and what to do with her later, because how could she live where we live once cold weather arrived?
I met lots of new people while tracking down leads (two of them extremely peculiar, who’ll turn into characters in some book later). I ended up driving forty miles and back to talk to an old retired vet who has every farm animal I’ve ever heard of, as well as forty peafowl. He said he’s known peafowl to fly fifty miles or more. Sometimes from a cemetery, since some let peafowl loose on the grounds (which came as news to me), then pen them in heated houses in the winter.
She didn’t need me to feed her. She’d drink out of our farm pond and catch bugs for herself. If she stayed through the winter, she’d have to have food and protection.
She didn’t. An hour after my husband and I left to join our kids for a week, the peahen split. It was five days after Max died - five days of me kept busy with another animal. Which looks like a gift from here.
Horse people and vets who knew Max still tell me I’ll never find another like him with the physical abilities and the brain, as well as the generous heart. We connected, Max and I, in ways I can’t describe. It goes back to animals who work - the ones who accomplish something with a person that takes effort from both. They end up at a new level – sheep dogs, assistance dogs, obstacle course virtuosos, dressage horses, cross country eventers. Most love to learn new things, and take pride in what they do.
But do I always use good judgment when I deal with animals myself? No. What did I do after Max was put down? Did I hang up my spurs, being no spring chicken, and take up something sensible like breeding blue roses?
I looked for another horse. An older horse, of course. A mature horse with sense and proportion. A well-trained steady horse who wouldn’t spook at barking dogs or leaves blown on the ground.
What did I buy? A five-year-old mare. Well trained for her age, yes, but still an adolescent female with moods and sensitivities. She’d been owned by a very accomplished woman who’d raised and ridden her well, and she’s a nice horse – three-quarters thoroughbred, one-quarter percheron – who’s well meaning in general, but spooks more than I’d like.
Which means, “What was I thinking?!” I don’t even have a place where we can ride in the winter, so we’ll both start new each spring, adding sore human muscles to equine nerves and high jinks.
I don’t need to get tossed off, not with my arthritis. But I was last week, off a school horse I was riding in a public barn to get myself in shape to start my mare in the spring.
Am I sore? Please!
Was I fortunate? Absolutely.
Am I an idiot? Probably.
Animals. That’s the way they are. They make some of us do silly things because we can’t resist them.