Ducks And How To Train Them

Have you ever tried to train an animal to do something? Like a dog to shit outside, or a cat to stop scratching your new table leg? It can be hard, but you love them at the end of the day, so it’s worth it in the end, your new companion learns to live by your rules and everyone’s happy. Now, strip that all away and you are left with my experience with a pack of hellions, also referred to as waterfowl or even more widely known as, ducks.

Who doesn't like royalty-free images of ducks? I know I do.

There’s a reason ducks are only one wrong letter away from being one of my favorite words, they are assholes. They don’t enjoy your company like a dog or cat does, they don’t fetch the paper or do cute things. They just waddle around, emitting a sound that apparently doesn’t echo and is rather annoying when there’s a large group of the feathered harlots scrambling about, scooping up whatever they find and enjoying the freedom of shitting outside and wherever they like, I could never understand why my sister wanted a pack of them for our small 2 acre home in Wexford, but what she wanted she always got, so here I was, stuck with these foul waterfowl.

At first of course, as a city boy moved to the country I thought the things were aces when they arrived! Donald Duck was my favorite Disney character after all, so why not have some real life Donald Ducks roaming about the place? You wanna know why? Because Donald Duck was a duck with anger issues, it was his gimmick and I thought it was great, however, it wasn’t entirely a work of fiction I came to find in time. They quacked constantly and just got in the way of everything when working around the family home/sister’s farm with people you are related to living on it, but anyway, let’s get to the meat of the story, how I came to train the creatures.

Look at 'em, like they are lords of the water or something, spawn of Poseidon and rulers of the rivers and byways... until Darragh came to end their tyranny.

At the back of the house was this small river, which stretched all the way down the back of the house. Wasn’t particularly deep, it could fit a raft (Which was great in the summer) and was actually pretty awesome for a house to have! There used to be this sandy bank that was where the ducks used to hang out by most evenings before we’d put them in their shed for the night. One day, when my Da was particularly eager to work on a project, he looked at this sandy bank and the cogs in his mind started to turn, until he had a eureka moment and knew what to do, make a boardwalk all along it so you could look out across the rolling fields at the back of the property, have a beer and relax on, a simple man with simple ambitions. He went to work with drawing up his plans, sketching out what he needed to do, what materials and gathering measurements while I started herding my feathered nuisances back to their shed for the night, not knowing what to expect from my Da and not realizing what he had in mind for me.

The work began pretty quickly, not taking too long to get the boardwalk up and built. It was large and covered in decking (Which seemed to be a common material in any Irish household during the Celtic Tiger, stuff seemed to just appear) I remember admiring the structure as it started to look like his drawing and become real, but it dawned on me “Da, don’t the ducks generally just hang out on the sand under the boardwalk? How are they gonna get back up here to get to the shed if it’s completely blocked off now?” I remember him smiling at me in response. “Thought of that already, son” he said, poking his temple quickly before bringing me across to this little opening in the fence on the boardwalk. It was small, like a medium sized dog flap, and behind it was a small slatted ramp that went down to the sandy area. “Ah, class! But Da, not gonna lie, the ducks aren’t the brightest fuckers here, how will they know to use the ramp?” If this was a movie, at this point it would flash forward to me in the middle of a river, the sun slowly setting, I’m in waders with a hole in the right leg and fighting my way over to a pack of quacking ducks. “Just herd them up the ramp, easy really!” He said as he stood on top of the boardwalk, looking down whilst smoking a rollie. “Just get around them, push them back this way toward the ramp” he’d call out with a smile as he watched me flounder through the water, cold and cursing the whole thing. “It’s not that fuckin’ easy, if it was, you’d be down here doing this instead ya bollocks” He would just laugh and throw pebbles on the other side of the ducks to try to stop them from swimming further down the river.

Look at that smug smile, who knew royalty-free images of ducks could bring Vietnam like flashbacks to my childhood.

The success rate was low, nearly as low as my spirits as the evenings faded fast, the water filled my right leg (Because why would ya replace them? It’s only at the top of the leg…) making me cold wet and miserable as I approached them slowly from the river like the titular character from the story “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, knowing he would be defeated but it was his destiny to try, only he didn’t have a smug prick looking over him saying the same pieces of advice over and over again, like those travelators in Tesco as you approach the end (“Please prepare to push the trolley OFF the end of the conveyaah” I always wondered how many people go postal that Tesco keep quiet about) Every night it was hours trying to get them to go up that ramp, we tried putting food on the ramp, we tried using long sticks to funnel them toward it, but more often than not, they’d scurry off and hide in a bush or make their way up awkwardly around the boardwalk, which was not what my Da envisioned. He wanted them to goose step up that ramp and back to their shed as if they were members of an adorable SS unit, so we kept at it until they did it.

It took us about 2 months in the end, the moment when I got into the river and the first duck headed straight the ramp, followed by the next, by the next… it was like Christmas on cocaine. I silently rejoiced as I watched them go up the ramp one by one, too afraid to make a noise unless they decided this was some cruel joke and they lept back down into the river, quacking in a menacing tone. From that night on, they just made their own way up the ramp when I got into the river, then eventually I didn’t have to get into the river, and the whole system was on the cruise control to cool. I and my Da would watch them every evening, marching through the gap in boardwalk fence and toward their shed, we had achieved the impossible, trained ducks to do a basic task without much effort. I couldn’t have been prouder of this strange feat, it was hell, but it worked!

So what’s the meaning behind all this? Ducks are assholes, don’t get them unless you want a tiny feathered rapist wandering around your home, and through perseverance, you can achieve anything, like training ducks to walk up a tiny ramp.