Individualism is the bane of the herder, Steve. There’s always one who doesn’t want to go along. She’s probably a Democrat.

I wouldn’t be surprised, MB, I’ve known a lot of cats that have lived into their twenties with proper care and no parasites.

According to Wikipedia, Socks is still alive.

the herders can be intensely annoying. when i lived at the beach i had two of them, a collie and a mix [australian shepherd-x?]. i used to swim a half-mile or so in the sound every afternoon, with the collie [afraid of water] running back and forth on shore, barking her head off, and the mutt swimming circles around me, alternately trying to pull me and push me back to shore. we all got plenty of exercise, even if we did look like an episode of lassie gone terribly wrong.

the same mutt who wouldn’t let me swim laps in peace adored swimming on his own when all the humans were safely on shore. a few of us, collie included, were walking down the beach one day, when one of my cmpanions asked, out of the blue: do you know what your crazy dog is doing? [no, i didn’t, he had disappeared under the surface of the water, but he did that a lot] your dog is herding that school of mullet that’s going by.

She loved the winter and the snow and would herd anything available, people, cows, cats, rabbits.

Have a dog constantly trying to get everyone into a small group, was extremely annoying. The only being she avoided was our senior cat, Torch. Torch was 20 pounds of evil who did what she damn well pleased, and anything that contested that reality ended up bleeding.

dogs in general are the groupiest of groupies and don’t care a lot about personal boundaries, yours or theirs [unless they’re old and creaky]. it’s just more noticeable in the big guys when they sit on you, lean on you, drool on you [our neighbors had a houseful of great danes, wonderful dogs].

i think god designed shepherds to be shedding machines. i have yet to figure out if this was intelligent or not. the recent human interference in the design of the breed makes me about as rabid the faux moralists on abortion do.

We always had Shepherds, and my Grandfather had Great Danes, and neither were respectful of personal space, but I admit that the worst offender was a neighbor’s cocker spaniel who treated cats like puppies, including trying to carrying them around. It got noisy.

no need to paint the big dogs with such a broad brush. labrador retrievers, including buddy apparently, typically don’t acknowledge the concept of personal space, but plenty of other big dogs do, particularly mine [though by my standards he’s not big]. around here, it’s not predicated on size, or species, so much as age. it’s the rowdy in-your-face youngsters who know no boundaries that we oldsters [dog, cat, and human] are having to constantly defend our persons from.

Bill got a dog because he was leaving office and most of his other “hobbies” were not going to be permitted.

Let’s face it, big dogs don’t really understand personal space and Socks was too old to want to train him.

Socks was there first, but got discarded when he objected to Buddy moving in. Happens to cats a lot.

Hmmm… not entirely unlike Israel.