A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love, Loss, and Interspecies Companionship in Rural Ireland

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Grieving his father's sudden passing, a film scholar and father of two boys finds solace in the picturesque idyll of Ireland's East Clare region, where he discovers and adopts an enigmatic border collie from an abandoned farm.

What is the essence of a sheepdog As much a part of Ireland's traditional and rural life as the countryside itself, working animals are known to be incredibly smart, loyal, with distinct personalities. Dara Waldron's memoir about the wandering border collie he adopted the year after his father died is an animal rescue story, a journey through waves of grief and understanding, and a reflection on place with a happy ending. To make a family pet of Oscar, Waldron enacts the daily ritual of walking the rugged hills and rivers of Ireland's woodlands in its intemperate weather-rain, sleet, and snow. Oscar's instinct, as a sheepdog, is to run away and return to his handler. Testing the limits of Waldron's tolerance and trying his fragile trust, days with Oscar are defined by the author's attempts to process his grief. Slowly it seeps into his consciousness: Oscar is asking him to understand a creature who lives for another, who will always return. In lyrical description of Ireland's mystical landscape, along with meditations on art, philosophy, and animal rights, this exquisitely wrought memoir about one man and his dog experiencing a symbiotic calling foregrounds the healing terrain of nature, and the true purpose and breadth of life.

Reviews

"Freely traveling between academic and rural knowledge, Dara Waldron explores the fluid divide between the animal and human world.A Sheepdog Named Oscaralsomakes you realize how importantlandscape and weather areto our thinking.His moving book in essence is about responsibility and what it means for humans 'to take care'."Peter Delpeut

"What wins one's heart isnot just the almost indecently elegant writing, writing that really does justify the descriptor "Proustian," but Dara Waldron is right on time with this deeply personal memoir that explores extra-human sentience as part of a relationship cemented through grief, growth, and regeneration."Aryan Kaganof

Author Bio

Dara Waldron is a film scholar and author of two monographs and multiple articles in international film journals and magazines: Millennium Film Journal, Alphaville, andMIRAJ among others. His 2018 book New Nonfiction Film: Art, Poetics and Documentary Theory is a standard reference for documentary filmmaking courses across the globe. He teaches Critical and Contextual studies at Limerick School of Art and Design and has been a visiting Professor at Aalto University in Helsinki, LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, and the Ethnography Lab at University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2023 he published a study of sheepherding traditions documented in the 2009 film Sweetgrass (dir. Barbash, Castaing-Taylor) that included auto-ethnographic reflection on herding practices and farming in Ireland. A Sheepdog Named Oscar: Love, Loss, and Interspecies Companionship in Ireland's Midwest, an extension of this study, is his first memoir. Born in Manchester and raised in Ireland, he currently lives on the border between County Limerick and Tipperary in Ireland's Midwest, in the shadow of the Silvermines Mountains and close to the gates of well-known Glenstal Abbey and its school, which feature prominently in his memoir.