You think you’ve heard about every kind of 20th Century behavioral dysfunction, until you learn there exists a sex therapist for animals. But then again, why should one be surprised that the causes of sexual dysfunction, disinterest and lack of opportunity in the animal kingdom parallel those that afflict humans?
So much so, that one Chicago-area man makes his living helping some dogs, horses and even a few lions, leopards, elephants and other show biz animals, do what the birds and the bees have traditionally done on their own.
Robert Herd, who calls himself a “mating specialist,” works out of a small house in Elgin, just down the road from high-income horse country in Wayne.
Not surprisingly, sexual dysfunction has hit hardest among man’s closest friend, the purebred canine.
“It is the dogs who pay the bills here,” says Herd. “I tend to work with the larger breeds, the Irish wolfhounds, Great Danes, borzois, St. Bernards, all the big, heavier dogs.” One reason why, says Herd, is “they’re so big, they poop out quicker.”
Because he calls his business “Herd’s Merchant Semen,” one expects Herd to look something like Jack Nicholson in “The Last Detail.” But the middle-aged man who greets one at the door is more like television’s radio shrink, “Frasier.”
Herd’s home, however, is filled with all kinds of exotic equipment. Semen storage tanks are grouped in a corner of the living room. On the kitchen counters are a microscope and video system, which projects wriggling spermatozoa onto a television screen, and a massive Coulter counter, an expensive sperm-counting device.
The walls are decorated with posters, photographs and prints of domestic and wild animals, some just cute, and some, as with a brace of giraffes, in flagrante delicto.
“In some cases, I’m just a referee,” Herd says. “The owners come in here arguing over who’s going to hold the head, who’s going to hold the feet, and nothing happens. I tell one, you sit here, and the other, you sit there. I jump-start the dogs, help them, whatever.”
So what does he do, show them a tape of “The Lady and the Tramp?”
“There’s nothing supernatural we’re doing here, nothing mind-boggling,” Herd says. “Often the male will get exhausted and can’t perform,” Herd says. “Maybe he needs a little guidance, education, practice. We pick him up, help him onto the bitch and then say, that’s enough for today. Next time he’ll be encouraged to go a little further. We take it one step at a time.
“Normally we breed the dogs naturally. If that doesn’t work,” he adds, he collects the semen from the dog manually, and artificially inseminates the female. “Or we freeze it for use down the road, just like you do with horses and with cattle.
“You have dogs who can’t do it, because they have been injured, or who don’t know how to do it because they are stupid,” adds Herd, “dogs that have been trained not to do these kinds of things by their owners. Or the dog is too tall or too short to accomplish the job. These are all mechanical problems, nothing genetically wrong.”
Perhaps because of his matter-of-fact attitude about the exotic service he provides and his gentle sense of humor, Herd is neither weird, spooky nor offensive, even when he shows a visitor videotapes of various techniques of one aspect of his work, called “collecting semen” in the horse and cattle industry.
The tapes, showing him working with aging Arabian stallions and a cranky 19-year-old lion (whose sperm is collected through a chickenwire fence), are more comic than obscene, and a sad commentary on how it has become necessary for humans to assist.
Herd also has collected semen from another big cat, a leopard that works with a magician. “He’s an 11-year-old virgin. He doesn’t even know what a female is,” Herd says.
One of the most common problems Herd encounters is the “rusty” male. He says of a dog recently brought to him for consultation: “He’s 6 years old and he’s bred one bitch in his life. I teach the owner to collect his sperm once a week, as maintenance. It is the old story, use it or lose it.”
Stress takes a toll
“Civilization has done to pets what it has to human beings,” Herd says. “The dog is highly trained and he’s got semen, but he’s so stressed out, it is useless. With this type of dog, you have to ask the owner, `Do you want ribbons or do you want to have puppies?’ Let him relax, have some fun once in a while, then he can have puppies.
“Then you get the highly trained obedience dog. He’s been trained not to have anything to do with females. He’s not supposed to be looking at girls.”
Herd has been doing his problem breeding assistance for 30 years, the last 10 on his own.
The breeders who use him feel their lives, if not their dogs’, would be sterile without Herd.
“There would be fewer Bernese mountain dogs in the area if it weren’t for Bob Herd,” says Elaine Squires, a Bernese mountain dog breeder in Morris, Ill. “The breed had a fertility problem before we started going to him.
“If you are a breeder of any stature, you use him or recommend him,” adds Squires, who has used Herd for all her breedings for the last eight years.
“All the top handlers use him. We’ve been there in the spring when there are so many people and cars there that he almost has to have a parking attendant. He’s an expert for the experts.”
On their own, Squires says, the dogs just eye one another. “But when they get to Bob Herd’s, they get down to business. The male dogs know that when they get there, it’s to be bred. You pull up at Bob Herd’s, their motors are going.”
“That’s the boys,” objects Janet Madl of Roselle, a Great Dane breeder. “I don’t think the girls get as excited about it.”
No business in the woods
What’s Herd’s “secret?”
“He’s a kind man,” Squires says. “He’s very patient. He really cares about the animals. If you have an inexperienced male or female, they get confused sometimes. Bob takes a great interest (so) that it’s a positive happening for both animals.”
“Yes, what I do is like a sex therapy clinic,” Herd admits. “The cause for most of these dysfunctions is modern civilization. People always say to me: `How come we have to come to you? The neighbor’s mutt is always pregnant. Every year!’
“See, nobody needs me out in the woods. I’m not needed there at all. Out there it is survival of the fittest.
“Dogs out on the street learn about sex, and if they don’t get it, then they don’t reproduce. Whereas the show dog, he’s kept alive no matter what his problems are, and will reproduce, passing on some of his problems to his offspring. Therefore, next year I’ll have twice as many problems! I’m developing my own niche here; the more I do, the more I get back,” Herd says.
Herd has no formal education in animal reproduction. “There’s no schools to go to,” Herd says. “You don’t have to be Einstein to do this. You get better than the experts out of sheer practice. Schools have started now to teach some of this stuff, but it’s not part of the normal academic program.
“There’s not much money in it,” says Herd, who charges by the breeding. “Maybe we do it artificially because the dog couldn’t handle doing it naturally. It doesn’t matter how we do it, it’s $25 the first breeding, $20 thereafter.”
The elephant forgot
Born and raised on farms in Canada, Herd conducted breedings as a farm boy, working with bulls. He has since worked for kennels, breeders, veterinarians and dog handlers, all of whom were faced with problem breedings.
Most of his current clients learn of him by word of mouth. Once they try him, they usually remain customers for years.
Sometimes, when the human owners’ schedules don’t mesh with breeding schedules, Herd even makes house calls, says Madl, who has used him for more than a dozen years. “He’s just there when we need him,” she says.
In his spare time, Herd works with “exotics,” such as a 15-year-old African bull elephant, who does film shoots for commercials. “Because these elephants are endangered, we’re trying to set up a breeding research facility,” he says.
He shows his visitor an artificial vagina for the male elephant that Herd made with plastic pipe.
“Right now we’re getting used to each other,” Herd says. “It’s a two-way situation. You have to let the animal get used to it. He has to go through a long phase to trust me. And I’m a little wary of an animal that size. How many people do you know who have the nerve to crawl under an elephant? He’s a little leery of me.
“There’s not many books in the library you can go to and get info on how to collect semen from elephants,” he says.
Footgear for big jobs
Richard Fink, head laboratory technician at Prairie State Select Sires, near Hampshire, Ill., where since the 1940s they have been practicing semen collection from bulls, has known Herd for 15 years.
“I refer all the people who call here for help to him,” says Fink, who applauds Herd’s success with domestic animals. “He’s had success where other people have failed.” Fink credits Herd’s “devotion to his work,” saying, “If he doesn’t know the answer, he’ll find it. But I kid him about his work with the exotics, that someday he will come in here with a stub arm from a lion chewing it off.”
Herd also faces danger when he travels to farms to collect semen from valuable stallions that may be prevented by physical problems from performing his breeding duties. “Say you’ve got a horse that’s been injured-sore legs or sore back-maybe he’s a little afraid of the mare,” says Herd. By artifically collecting his semen, the stallion’s usefulness can be extended.
For work with larger animals, Herd wears “special boots, the kind steelworkers wear, not only with a steel toe, but with a plate over the instep, because I’m almost under the horse. I don’t have any fear. All he’ll do is pin me down momentarily.
“I get a lot of older stallions who are set in their ways and you have to work harder,” he adds. He shows a tape of a beautiful 15-year-old Arabian stallion, who is used to doing it naturally. “He knows he’s got to be on a mare,” says Herd, so when Herd stimulates him, the horse rather comically walks around on his hind legs with his front feet hanging. “Otherwise he was fine. A little shy at first-`Oh, ow! Don’t do that! What are you doing?’-that kind of thing. Not nasty,” says Herd.
One stallion lay down afterward. “It was fun for him,” Herd notes, “but it kind of scared him a little bit.”
Crump’s secret
Herd was taught this technique in 1987 by a West Virginia horse breeder, Jim Crump, who developed it himself, collecting semen from stallions in a baggie, without a mare for visual stimulation. “Only recently he’s been telling other people about it,” says Herd. “He thought everybody would think it was kinky. I wasn’t getting anywhere until I went to him. He showed me the finer points. As soon as I worked with him, I felt a little better and started looking for other animals to work with,” says Herd.
“Now that I’ve got a little bit of the basics,” he goes on, “maybe I can work with a tiger or leopard who needs to breed but can’t because he has problems, perhaps medical, or because he’s afraid of females. Or the animals are so valuable that even if they knew how to breed, the owners are afraid of throwing them together for fear one of them gets injured.” People don’t want to ship animals around the country, because of the expense. And what if there’s a plane crash?
Everyone appears content with the fertile outcome of Herd’s ministrations, but there is a downside to it, he admits.
“Due to our human interference, we’re reproducing animals not as sound as they were 50 years ago when they lived out in the barn. Their quality, to me, is declining because we’re interfering. I’m not needed in Africa either, because the stupid elephants that don’t breed are left watching the ones that do. The more I help, the worse it gets.
“It’s called job security,” he concludes with a laugh.
