It's intense work, keeping a golf course spotless. Canada geese drawn to the water features make it all the harder, drilling the greens with their beaks, leaving a mess with every waddle.
Enter the country club dog.
A sleek border collie named Zorro can be seen every day roaming the Rolling Hills Country Club course in west Wichita, swimming the pond, treeing the squirrels, chasing the spray of a sprinkler. As polite as any member, he leaves these diversions promptly in answer to his master's call.
"Z, load up, load up," golf course superintendent Wayne Van Arendonk commands. And the dog, his face bearing the black-and-white mark of Zorro, is by his side in the golf cart in a flash.
Some ducks swim the six-acre pond on the front nine, but there's not a goose in sight.
"He'll swim for 45 minutes if he has to shoo them off," Van Arendonk said. "That's his main thing, but I gotta tell you, he's a big benefit of the members. They all love him."
Dogs -- border collies in particular -- trained and marketed to chase off geese have become more common on golf courses over the past several years. As hard as it is to believe when the waterfowl congregate along the river or a residential lake, they are a protected species of migratory bird. Dogs are one of the humane deterrents recommended to herd them off to less-green pastures.
"He's such a herding dog he wants to herd anything that moves," Van Arendonk said of Zorro. That includes Van Arendonk's cats when Zorro goes home with him for the holidays. Otherwise the dog lives in the golf-course maintenance shed.
Other area courses that have dogs include Crestview and Reflection Ridge in Wichita and Cedar Pines in Andover.
A pet English setter and springer spaniel mix handles the geese and greets members every day at the clubhouse door at Cedar Pines.
"The geese are pretty smart. They're going to find better areas to land and do their thing once they know there's a dog established in an area," said Bob Bauer, owner of Cedar Pines and of the dog.
Chad Stearns of Crestview Country Club says that course was having a big problem with geese year-round before a border collie named Zeke arrived three years ago.
"Since we've had him, it's been a tremendous turnaround," Stearns said.
Not all members of the country clubs love dogs, and the border collies, needing constant occupation, sometimes do things that aren't acceptable on a golf course.
"He didn't at first but he's kind of becoming a dog now," Stearns said of Zeke. "He'll go chase some balls. He picks them up in his mouth and brings them back."
While Stearns hasn't heard any complaints about it, the occasional game of fetch does hold the potential for havoc, one he hopes to remove with more training.
Jeremy Jakeway got a lower-maintenance Labrador retriever to take with him to work at Reflection Ridge. The dog, also named Zeke, runs the course early in the morning before the members show up, then hangs out in the maintenance shed during the day.
"We have a lot of people who are always asking where he is," Jakeway said.
Most members love the country club dogs and take them as par for the course.
Jim Aronis, for example, stocks his golf cart with treats for Zorro.
"He'll be looking for his cookie," said Aronis, a longtime member of Rolling Hills. "He'll see me on the course and, if they let him go, he'll come on over."
Zorro knows the course's boundaries and stays within them. Whenever a staff member sees him doing his business, it's cleaned up immediately.
He follows Van Arendonk not only around the course but around the clubhouse, getting a pat on the head at each desk in the business office. A painting of him by member Carol Graham hangs in the dining room.
"He's very polite," office manager Susan Wilson said. "If he has to wait, he sits down and waits. Being around so many people here, he has such a fabulous personality."
As the geese recede, the friendship of a dog comes all the more into the fore.
"Come here, bud," Van Arendonk calls to Zorro.
"He's the favorite employee of the whole club."
Source: The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle
