“Bedlam Farm” ~ home of author Jon Katz and the back drop for his many books & HBO movie. This beautiful farmstead offers a gracious 4 bdrm Greek Revival home loaded w/ warmth & charm, offering beautiful views of the Black Creek Valley & situated on 92 acres of land. The quintessential farmstead, this property includes a grouping of restored barns, heated studio perfect for the artist, 15-20 acres of pasture, high quality fencing, & frost free hydrants for watering the animals. Country living at its best.
It seems that Border Collie arch-fiend Jon Katz is ready to move on and leave all the dead dogs he’s written about and buried on his “Bedlam Farm” in the past. Eighteen months ago he was flirting with offering it for sale at $650,000. His Realtor obviously demurred and he thought he’d get $475,000 but the property was actually listed for $450k.
Today the sizable acreage is still on the market for a full hundred thousand less. And while $375k sounds like a steal for so much property (ghosts of dead dogs past not withstanding), the yearly taxes on the place are over $11,400. That’s almost as much money going to a rural municipality which provides little in the way of services as you’d be paying in equity-building mortgage payments which are also a tax write off.
Although many of my past dogs have had great fondness for certain places on the land we lived on, I’ve never been able to bury their ashes under those favored apple trees or in the shade of the hedge because I’d hate the thought of leaving them behind one day. They belonged to me, not to the land. And while I entertain no fanciful notions of rainbow bridges or anything after life save the oblivion of death, there’s just something unpalatable about someone else’s dog taking a dump on top of the final resting place of my cherished companions or their remains being carted off to some landfill when some new owner decides to put in a pool where the orchard used to be.
So for now, the dogs travel with me in their little tins, and perhaps when I’m gone and cremated we’ll all share the same vault in a wall somewhere. Not that it will really matter since I’ll be dust then too. But today their dust has symbolic value to me as it serves as a tangible reminder of their physical presence in my life and the very real living memory of them I carry in my mind and feel in my soul.
That’s something that you just can’t buy and you certainly can’t sell it either.
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At my parents house there’s three cats and two dogs buried,some ashes others intact.
Their buried in the brushes where the dogs avoid taking a dump.
I know at some point that the house will be gone,probably pretty soon. I feel though that graves and ashes are of little importance,that memories and photographs are the best ways to keep the animals alive. I don’t know if I`ll meet my pets again but at least I`ll have the memories.
I agree that the ashes and remains are not as important as the memories. I don’t have the ashes of any of my previous pets, and never had a yard to bury them in. I do have a pretty good quantity of undercoat brushed from my dog the day before she died, which I’m holding onto for weird sentimental reasons. Maybe I’ll have it spun into yarn someday.
I feel exactly the same Christopher. I hold no notions either but I want my companions to be with me when I go….in the same vault so to speak….and I will keep their ashes safe until that time comes…. I recently lost my beloved companion who was 16 years old. I couldn’t think of him being in the ground…. Perhaps I’m silly…but it’s how I am. My animals remain with me in whatever form for as long as I live. xxxxx
I saw that so many people were ticked off at his books that I started to read them.
There are very few dog books I just hate, I tried to read a sample of The New Work of Dogs at a B and N.
It was just full of relatively uninformed speculation about dogs.
There’s too much of that shit already. Why would you read that crap?
BTW, this is why I want to be cremated and have my ashes spread in a grove of quaking aspen. Aspen die off as the forest matures, so no one will be coming to my grove of aspen and paying homage to my corpse. I am not my body. I’m just a fluttering avatar of carbon that soon will burn out. The only afterlife I need is passing my carbon and other elements back into nature from whence it came.
I dunno, might be fun to be buried in somebody’s basement concrete to creep them right the hell out when they remodel.
One last joke on the world.
That man is an absolute mess.
Rumor is that Katz and Cesar Millan are going into business together.
retrieverman recently posted..A deer fence
The ultimate Trifecta would be Milan-Katz-Pattison.
Haven’t read Katz beyond one or two columns. What’s the complaint? And yeah, I keep my dogs’ ashes, although my dad has offered to scratch a hole in the corner of the family vault in West Virginia and put them there. Which is a cool idea and I might take him up on that.
The herding snobs think he’s a poser and the trainers think he didn’t do enough to rehab his dogs before he put then down for bad behaviour. And most people hate books where the dogs die at the end, especially if they’re put down.
*I* hate books (and movies) where the dog is put down, or books and movies where a dog is killed to establish how utterly evil the villain is. Herding people think EVERYONE is a poser, so I can’t feel one way or the other about that, but having no idea why his dogs were put down, I can only wonder how much his neuroses exacerbated those of the dogs he “had” to put down. In my experience, people end up with the dog they make, no matter what the dog’s “baggage” is–and yes, genetics plays a huge part, but most of us are able to find a way to live with the dogs we have. It’s interesting to me to see certain behaviors repeated over and over again when people get “new” dogs.
Others will be happy to inform you of all the things he did wrong with the dog. My unique take on the issue is that he got two if those dogs from the same breeder who is here in Colorado. The sort of things you learn through the grape vine and the squabbles breeders have with each other in public have altered my opinion of Katz somewhat as I do not believe he was the appropriate home for a dog who already had the baggage that Devon/Orson did.
Novices should not take on rescue Border Collies, and if you read the condition Orson arrived to Katz in, I don’t think Katz had a chance and was done a major disservice by the breeder.
I’ll have to read it, but from my experience with rescues, fosters, and volunteering at shelters, I have always thought that rescues of any breed are not special flowers, for the most part (obviously dogs that have been severely abused or starved for a long time may be a different case). If the dog has a basically good temperament, they don’t take long to acclimate and to bond. They may still have quirks, but the puppy you raise from an 8-week old may also have quirks.
Katz had two elderly Labradors and replaced them with a young Border Collie known to have behavior problems, and is stunned to discover the dog is not satisfied being a piece of office furniture.
I want my own ashes spread on the trails I hike everyday with my dogs. I have their ashes and hope we will all be cast to the wind together one day. Silly sentiment I guess but it works for me.
Hope all is well Chris. Just dropping in for your posts. I always enjoy the good reading!
I remember being horrified by Katz’s first dog book about his two labradors. Each dog was in the early stages of hip dysplasia when he had them killed. Katz didn’t try treating them. It looked to me like he had decided he wanted to write about Border Collies and didn’t want to be bothered with the 2 Labradors.
Every book he has written since has verified my impression that he is a narcissitic, abusive, heartless man who should not be allowed to own a dog.
I just lost my beloved Border Collie 9 days ago. I have always had private cremations for my dogs because like you I cannot bare the thought of leaving them behind if I move.