Peekskill Police Welcome Juice, Say Goodbye to Basil

For three months, geese have reigned undisturbed in Peekskill.

, the goose-herding collie, went to the great meadow in the sky in March after serving the citizens of Peekskill for more than a decade.

Now Basil has a successor-Juice. Like Basil, Juice is a highly trained border collie, although she has a smooth rather than a long-haired coat. And, like Basil, she brings to her job a ferocious mix of intelligence, awareness, speed and skill.

To look into a collie's eyes is to see a creature that never stops thinking. Although the thought process might be different than what goes on in human minds, there is a strong presence, a personality that often gazes out through eyes that are at once cautious and friendly.

Border collies lock on to their leaders emotionally and do whatever they can to please them. Basil took little interest in other ups. "She was called 'Cheapshot' because she never learned to play with other dogs as much as try to herd them and take cheap shots at them to try to fit in," says Officer Wendell Bowman, the man in charge of Animal Control in Peekskill and the person who is also responsible for keeping the city's many parks clear of geese.

Juice has already shown the same tendencies. She clearly prefers people to pooches, and she is utterly focused on just one person-Officer Bowman.

Basil was 16 years old when she passed. She was born on June 10, 1995, and died on February 18, 2011. The few short months of spring that Peekskill's open spaces went unguarded had a huge impact on the local environment, says Peekskill Police Chief Eugene Tumolo.

"It was remarkable, the transformation, from when Basil passed away at the beginning of this spring and the return of geese to this area," Tumolo says. "The problem became 10-fold because we didn't have any mechanism to minimize their intrusion into these places, and now that we have Juice and Wendell is back in operation, we have control over these places, and it's very, very important," Tumolo says.

Anyone who has walked through a Peekskill park recently can agree with that. There are mid-sized dogs that poop less abundantly than the geese that have been leaving their greenish-brown calling cards for strollers, football and soccer players and passers-by to skid on.

For the first time in more than a decade, goose chicks are populating Peekskill's greenways. As was the case with Basil, Juice will carefully avoid injuring any of the fowls she's herding. But she'll also make certain that geese don't feel so comfortable they can get around to nesting next year.

Juice comes from the same Virginia breeder, Barbara Ray of Big Bend Farm in Millbrook, VA. She has undergone two years of intensive training, starting with sheep and working up to geese. More than 400 of Big Bend's graduates are currently on goose patrol across the nation.

Though prices for goose-herding collies are usually $8,000 or more, Juice cost Peekskill just $5,500, in part because of Officer Bowman's wonderful reputation in the dog world.

But it's likely anybody seeing the change that has come over Peekskill's parks in just the last few days would say that a dog doing Juice's job is worth the cost at any price.