Dutch dog trainer from Transylvanian village on nature, shepherds and sheepdogs

After working as a canine trainer in the Dutch army, Ray Dorgelo moved to Romania to be closer to nature.

Although born in a city, 40-year old Ray Dorgelo has always loved wild animals, from rabbits to small birds to bears. As a kid, he would play outside all the time and watch documentaries about animals and nature. As we are speaking on Skype on a Sunday morning in mid-June, I notice a big carpet representing a bear on the wall behind him. “He looks rather scary,” I comment. “No, he actually seems friendly,” Ray responds. We clearly read bear-related images differently. The Dutchman talks from his house in a village near Cluj-Napoca, in north-western Romania, where he now lives with his wife Jenny, five Carpathian Shepherd dogs, two goats and eleven chickens. Almost ten years ago, while working as a canine trainer in the Netherlands, Ray started attending a course on ecology and wildlife. He and a colleague became friends with a professor who was involved in the protection of large predators, including in Romania. Ray knew that Romania still had a large population of bears, wolves and lynxes. For example, the Carpathian brown bear population of Romania is the largest in Europe outside of Russia. Not long after, he started working on EU-financed project carried out by the University of Forestry in Brașov, central Romania. “We started doing field work, visited the shepherds’ camps, monitored the dogs, the problems that shepherds have there,” Ray explains. A year later, Ray and his colleague started a similar project themselves. They donated a pack of Carpathian shepherds dogs to shepherds who didn’t have good dogs. He kept coming to Romania several times a year until he finally moved here.