Tramping through the hemlock forest at sunrise when the morning light sparkles through the trees or standing on a hill overlooking a pasture of brilliant yellow and dark purple wildflowers, it’s easy to forget the purpose of Glen Highland Farm. That is until you hear the happy barking.

When someone rings the big iron bell at the front gate, a herd of Border Collies bounds forward with an immense cacophony of deep woofs and high-pitched yips. The pack includes gorgeous purebred Border Collies, scruffy mixes, smooth coated and long. Some are black and white; others are red and white. Tricolors and merles are mixed in.

Inside the gate is where the magic of Glen Highland Farm really begins. The 175-acre network of trails, fields, forests and glens tucked away near the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York is a unique rescue sanctuary created by co-founders Lillie Goodrich and John Andersen.

Border Collie rescue is the heart and soul of Glen Highland Farm. The mission of helping abandoned, neglected, lost Border Collies learn to be dogs again is rooted in Glen Highland Farm’s no-leash philosophy.

Following a Dream

Goodrich, a former TV producer, and Andersen, a former CEO for a handful of multimillion-dollar corporations, both know what it’s like to run a successful business. In 2001, they traded in their intense corporate-driven lives for a different kind of stress, a nature-infused, service-based life of giving.

Knowing they didn’t want to spend the next decade begging for funds, Goodrich and Andersen sat down for a serious discussion before liquidating their assets, selling their Connecticut home and pouring all the money into Glen Highland Farm. “We wanted to do something significant for animals, but we wanted to be smart about it,” Goodrich explains.

First, Goodrich participated in the “How to Start an Animal Sanctuary” workshop at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, and visited with other successful rescues to see how they did it. Then, she and Andersen decided they had to think outside the box. That’s how the couple discovered the 150-year-old post-and-beam horse barn originally built by a relative of Malcolm Forbes.

With plenty of space and scenery, they would be able to expand their program by offering training camps where people bring their dogs to learn agility, tracking, sheepherding, even animal communication. Glen Highland Farm also rents cabins and RVs for those who want to vacation with their canine companions.

Every August, the farm hosts a camp for inner city children between the ages of 10 and 14, pairing each underprivileged child with an underprivileged dog. The youth learn to train the dogs, practice agility, learn about nature, and in many cases, turn their lives around.

Thinking outside the box also applied to the couple’s fundraising efforts. Glen Highland Farm costs about $300,000 per year to run, and that money had to come from somewhere. Andersen, once an inner-city child himself, spends three months a year writing grants to fund his pet project, Camp Border Collie for Kids.

“You can’t get grant money to help dogs, but you can get it to help children,” says Goodrich. Meanwhile, Goodrich organizes the training and animal communication camps using her intuitive life-coaching skills. Besides the inner city kids’ program, the rescue is supported by proceeds from the camps and donations.

At Glen Highland Farm, rescue dogs live in the horse stalls, each equipped with soft bedding and plenty of toys. A grooming room, feeding room and laundry area make the barn functional. One door slides open to the main yard where the resident pack of 18 Border Collies runs, plays, and helps counsel and train a few rescues rotated into the yard.

Out the other door, several spacious fenced paddocks provide space for the rescue dogs to run, play, chase and herd each other.

“Whenever people come into the barn, they are so surprised at how well this works,” Goodrich says. “Our system isn’t based on anything anyone has ever done before. It’s fresh, it’s not the old-school way to run a rescue, and that gave us a lot of room to be creative. That’s how we stumbled onto this place and saw what it could be.”

Beyond the barn and paddocks, the rest of the run-down dairy farm needed some work. “We set out to create a property designed by dogs, for dogs,” says Andersen. “We turned our dogs loose, and wherever they liked to go, we followed with a tractor and a chain saw. Wherever they liked to stop, we cleared the area and made a space to just be.”

Each trail, green space and swimming area is named after the dog that blazed or chose it. “Darcy,” a Border Collie found tied to a tree in the Bronx, led the way along Darcy’s Trail. The high place where “Major,” a Border Collie/Gordon Setter mix, first leapt into the creek is now called Major’s Leap. Visitors can ramble down Haley’s Trail, take a dip in Emma’s Pool, get muddy along Wit’s Way, race down Gibson’s Gallop, or spend some quiet time meditating at Linc’s Lookout on the site of a former Iroquois settlement.

“Linc lived in the barn with the rescue dogs, and he was a guiding, calming spirit,” says Andersen, pointing out the gentle pack leader’s gravesite. “You could hear him talking to the new dogs when they came in. This lookout was his favorite spot.”

Life on the farm is far from easy. Aside from running the camps, the work involves 30 hours of mowing every week, maintaining trails and bridges, answering hundreds of daily e-mails, and completing plenty of paperwork. Goodrich and Andersen also take in about 150 dogs each year through their Sweet Border Collie Rescue program, rehabilitating them for as long as they require, then carefully placing them in good homes. Over 850 dogs have been rehomed since the program began. Some­times finances are tight, but because Goodrich and Andersen have built such an extensive infrastructure into the rescue, money always seems to arrive when it’s needed.

Coming Back to Life

When Border Collies arrive at Glen Highland Farm, they tend to be strung-out. “Bella” is one who arrived with eyes wide, cowered in her crate in the back of volunteer transporters Jane Locacio and Debbie Grassi’s van. Goodrich coaxed the tricolor mix out of the van, into the yard, and took off her leash. Bella paused for a moment, surprised by the sudden freedom. She sniffed the grass. In minutes she was running with the other dogs.

“Some of these dogs have never been in grass. They hold back at first,” says Goodrich, who resists heavy leash work and prefers to let the dogs learn from their own energy and from each other. “When you’ve been made wrong for herding livestock and having all that energy, it takes awhile to find your place in life. I don’t rush them.”

Training is an important crux of many rescue programs, but not this one. “We don’t train the dogs unless a dog has fear issues and needs to be desensitized,” Andersen explains. “We let the dogs heal themselves.”

For some, healing comes from finally being able to move, run and work. “Claire,” a purebred Border Collie dumped in someone’s yard, jumped the fence and started herding their cattle. The owner called Glen Highland Farm as soon as she saw the feisty girl racing around the pen after her cows. The petite Border Collie immediately struck up a friendship with diminutive “Toby,” a shaggy Border Collie mix who arrived just the day before from a Manhattan shelter. The two little dogs could barely contain their glee, racing after each other and flipping toys into the air.

As the dogs come in, they also go out. When Joe Bove arrived from Hometown, Pa., with his two Border Collies, “Mozart” and “Cap,” he took one look at 8-month-old “Murdoch,” a merle Border Collie, and fell head over heels in love. Having adopted Cap from Glen Highland Farm last year, Bove knelt down to greet the wiry pup as Mur­doch jumped happily onto his knees. “Welcome home, kid,” he said.

Goodrich especially likes adopting dogs to people who have had Border Collies before, because they understand the special challenges of the highly intelligent herding breed.“Joe is great. Cap had a lot of issues, and he knew just how to work with him,” says Goodrich.

Minutes later John and Cheryl Gearhart arrived from Willington, Conn. They had discovered Glen Highland Farm on the Internet. They sat with their Border Collies, “Jack” and “Maisie,” in a sunny spot on the grass and chatted and played with a few different rescue dogs Goodrich thought might work.

“When we lost our last Border Collie from stomach cancer, Jack was so traumatized,” John Gearhart says. “Now he’s getting old, and we don’t want Maisie to go through that same thing, so we want someone for her.”

The Gearharts liked “Manny,” a wiry smooth-coated Border Collie from a New Jersey shelter. They spent the night with Manny on the campgrounds. That evening, Manny put his front paws on John and rested his chin on Cheryl’s knee. The next morning the Gearharts said he was the one.

Though Manny balked at getting in the car, Goodrich boosted him in and let him look around. His tail began to wag. When he jumped back out, Goodrich knelt down and put her arms around the nervous and excited Border Collie.

“He’ll have a meltdown when you leave, but then he’ll be OK,” she says. “You can do this, Manny. You’re ready, handsome. You’re ready.”

Getting Border Collies to this point is Goodrich’s goal. She and Andersen discovered the breed on trips to Scotland. “Border Collies get put to sleep so often in a shelter environment because they do so poorly in small spaces,” Goodrich says. “They are so often misjudged, and then they lose their lives.”

She solicited shelters in the area and in neighboring states for two years before they finally began to call her first. “When shelters realize their facilities can make these dogs go downhill fast, they start working with us, especially when they get in those dogs that are super active or totally shut down.”

As the Border Collies explore their environment, run, play and work out their differences, they come back to life, Good­rich says.

Busy Being a Dog

When the dogs are ready, Goodrich can see it. That’s when they go up for adoption. “Some of them are ready to go in a few weeks. The average is probably three to six months, but some take as much as a year, and that’s OK,” she says. “They can stay here as long as they need to, and when they are ready to move on to the right person, we let them go.”

That’s not easy, of course, but it’s the mission Goodrich and Andersen have chosen, and a necessary part of the life they’ve built together. That mission impacts everyone involved. Caretaker Susan Monnelly gave up a life as a software engineer in suburban New Hampshire to come live on the farm at the Connor House, a separate house Goodrich and Andersen built to house dogs that needed more individual attention and emotional or physical healing.
Monnelly points out “Rand,” a car chaser who suffered a serious internal injury and has had trouble gaining weight. He also tries to herd rocks, picking them up and carrying them around or staring obsessively at them.

Glen Highland Farm also changes the lives of the campers. “This place is magical,” says Kim Clark, while heating a pot of coffee on an open fire outside the cabin where she is staying with her two Rat Terriers, “Lexie” and “Natasha.” “We don’t come here for us. It’s all about them. I’m already planning next year’s trip because I’ve never seen them so calm. Every dog here is as happy as a lark.”

Susie Mautz of Penn Valley, Calif., has four dogs from Glen Highland Farm. “The first time I came to camp, I listened to the speaker, Dawn Hayman, talk about how animals see the world as beautiful and with hope, but that people need to open their hearts to others. She changed my life that day.”

For Goodrich and Andersen, hope comes from helping Border Collies find their feet and learn that life can be good and people can be kind. “All this off-leash time might not work with every breed. We just give the dogs the space to remember who they are,” Goodrich says.

“This is how dogs are supposed to live,” says Andersen. “Every summer during camp, someone comes up to me and says, ‘John, John, my dog is lost!’ I tell them, ‘Your dog isn’t lost. You’re lost. Just relax. Breathe. Your dog knows exactly where you are. He’ll be back. Right now he’s busy being a dog.’”

And that’s what Glen Highland Farm is really all about: Letting Border Collies learn to be dogs again, without too much human intervention. Goodrich sweeps her arm out toward the barking, the litter of tennis balls and toys, and the tails like black-and-white flags waving all over the farm.

“See?” she says. “You can see it working.”