Poor Smoky, our family's Australian Shepherd, never met the mark. We still tell stories about
how he chewed through a door, dragged around a heating grate caught on his collar, and never could quite break the habit of chasing cars no matter how many collar bones he broke. Dad would just shake his head in disgust and say he just wasn’t like old Boots.
Years later, I remember one of my neighbors say to me, as he pet my Alaskan Malamute, Denali, “Dogs just add something special to life, don’t they?” Having just finished a tugging marathon around town that I most definitely lost with a baby on my back, one in-
utero, and a toddler beside me, I was not feeling that dogs were special - just a lot of extra work that I didn’t have time, energy, or arm muscles for. I gritted my teeth into a forced smile and nodded robotically in agreement though. Everyone else in our tiny Alaskan village loved her but me. Shortly afterwards I sold her to a local dog lover who fed her pizza and bacon from the table.
After I thought I did some deep research, my next attempt was our Great Pyrenees, Sassy. Our first mistake was to assume purebred was pure just on the word of the breeder. Our giant lab/Pyrenees mix that we ended up with was lovable but high strung. And somehow I missed that wandering off was a major issue with Pyrenees, something my poor neighbors did not appreciate. Apparently she had been terrorizing them behind my back for years… time to say goodbye.
I thought I was forever done with dogs. But a farm without a dog is tough. A few dogless summers later, we had the Headless Chicken Incident. Each morning we found a fresh pile of dead meat chickens, their heads and hearts ruthlessly torn away and the gory remains left cast aside. My husband and son tightened all the cracks and crevices, put up a game cam, set live traps, tacked metal sheets to the bottom to prevent digging under, and still we’d find another 10-12 dead each morning. Our 50 chickens quickly dwindled to 5. The last 5 were carefully preserved in a freaking plywood box each night and we declared, “if the devil can get through that, he deserves to eat them.” We were able to partake of those remaining birds ourselves but they were undoubtedly the most expensive meat birds ever to be consumed.
It was time to buy a dog.
Comments