Forward Talent Unleashed

Trainer Ariane Bailey ’00 and her three Australian shepherds are star teams on set and in the ring.

Illustration by Romy Blümel

Ariane Bailey ’00 grew up in rural Maine with dogs and other companion and farm animals. In her post-Bowdoin years of apartment living, she could only have cats, but as soon as she bought a house, she began looking for a dog to adopt. She fell in love with Jacob, an Australian shepherd who is now thirteen, as soon as she saw his puppy photo on Petfinder. Initially a timid little guy, he blossomed with training into a confident dog who has, Ariane says, “an excellent sense of humor.” Their partnership inspired her to become a professional dog training instructor and to enter the world of competitive dog sports and performing. Two years after rescuing Jacob, she got Skye from a New England breeder, and Skye joined Jacob in agility, disc, obedience, and scent work, both dogs winning multiple championships, working as models, and performing together at fairs, festivals, and events. Skye has appeared in television roles and starred in Netflix’s The Noel Diary with Justin Hartley and Barrett Doss. Finn, who is three and from the same bloodline as Skye, is Ariane’s newest dog. “His career is just starting,” Ariane says, but he is already competing and has appeared in two commercials and has performed live.

Starting out, both the human and the dog are learning—the human to communicate with cues and the dog how to read them. Dogs also have to be exposed to different environments with different things to see and hear so they learn to perform in distracting situations.

For some dogs, learning to stay at the start while their handler walks onto the course is really tough. For others, learning to stop on or go through the three contact obstacles (A-Frame, Dogwalk, and Teeter) is the most difficult. For some dogs, it’s the weave poles. And then there are those pups who struggle to ignore the judge.

Herding and sporting dogs— Australian shepherds, border collies, shelties, Labradors, golden retrievers, etc.—have been bred for generations to be biddable and to want to work (originally with shepherds, ranchers, or hunters), and they also tend to be athletic.

When he was looking for an Australian shepherd for the movie The Noel Diary, director Charles Shyer called Berloni, who told him he knew an Aussie trainer skilled enough: Ariane. Charles fell in love with Skye, and Ariane—who in her day job is an attorney—worked with Skye at night and on the weekends to prepare her to be a star.

Ariane and her dogs perform disc dog freestyle routines at fairs and festivals, where the dogs catch the discs in a performance set to music.

Working on set is fun but hard, Ariane says. Both trainer and dog need to be able to adjust on the fly when the director suddenly wants something different. No matter what the script calls for, the hardest thing is getting the animal to look natural and not look off camera.

Animal trainer and agent Bill Berloni was looking for local teams to perform on stage with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in a production called “Playing with Dogs” in 2017. Three people gave him Ariane’s name, and her dogs ended up being among those performing in the show.

Some of the skills Ariane has had to train her dogs to do on cue are expected: bark, walk or play with an actor, sleep, and go to the door to greet someone. But they have also had to pop their head up over a wall, run and leap over stuff, sit on a bench and pretend to watch a movie, back up and knock over a barstool, and even eat soup.

Lessons in Investing

Last fall, George Schultz ’05 and Pei Huang ’08 co-taught a course called Mental Models: Unconventional Idea Discovery at Columbia Business School. The course, which is part of the business school’s value investing program, teaches students to look for patterns, similarities, and lessons in historical case studies and to use them to generate unconventional ideas for future investing. As part of the curriculum, Schultz, who is an investor at Whale Rock Capital Management in Boston, and Huang, who is an investor with Eminence Capital in New York, shared lessons from their own past investments in public companies across a variety of industries. The nine students pitched their final project ideas to other current investors.

“It says a lot, in my opinion, that two Bowdoin students co-taught this type of class,” says Schultz. “This is what a liberal arts education and Bowdoin in particular is all about—learning to think for yourself and learning to reason.”

Taking Flight

Biologist’s two-minute nature video on building a bird’s nest goes viral.

IN 2018, biology professor Nat Wheelwright—the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus—put out a fun two-minute video on how to build a bird’s nest. Five years later, it has accrued more than 250,000 views across the globe.

The YouTube clip was part of a weekly series called Nature Moments, made over the course of a year, presented by Wheelwright and produced with assistance from colleagues on the Bowdoin staff. The videos, showcasing the natural history of common animals and plants throughout the changing seasons, were all shot in Wheelwright’s Brunswick backyard.

The bird’s nest episode, in which he examines the discarded home of a black-throated green warbler, has been seen in nearly every corner of the world. “Just like human houses,” observes Wheelwright, “the materials birds use have to provide a solid structure to hold their young, plus insulation to keep them warm, but unlike our homes, their nests need to be hidden from predators.”

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