I heard the customary scratch on the front door tonight and when I went to let him in, Owen hustled off the front porch and out into the yard. At first, I thought he was after a bone, because sometimes he hopes I’ll let him bring them inside. Whatever he had, wasn’t a bone. I then hoped someone had thrown a dog toy over the back gate, but no, what he had, was the back end of a bunny. When we’re up at the cabin, Owen and Raymond are obsessed in that way that only bird dogs can be, about…
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I hesitate to broadcast this to the universe, but we seem to have reached a state of interspecies harmony here at the homestead. Raymond, former chicken-killer, seems to have figured out that he can follow the chickens around the yard, wagging his tail at them, and making small whining sounds without actually having to kill them. It’s clear he wants them, but so far, he’s managed, even unsupervised, not to kill them. And here’s Owen. If you look closely, you can see chickens taking dust baths in the background behind them. Owie’s never killed a chicken, his current challenge is…
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It’s not quite the lions and the lambs, but pretty close — we’ve had a big breakthrough in the domestic realm this week. The dogs seem to have developed the ability to mingle with the chickens without killing them. It’s a fragile truce, and one that requires close supervision, since the poor bird dogs are fighting generations of breeding that tells them to get the bird, but so far, we’ve had several episodes of domestic harmony. Which makes gardening much easier, as the compost heap is inside the chicken run. At any rate, I’m very proud of my boys. Such…
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I’ve written before about Owen’s robo-leg, but it’s worked so well that I had to send it back to the good folks at K-9 Orthotics in Nova Scotia last week for a tune up. It was really sad — the vet and I had to put him in a brace, like the ones he spent much of last summer in, except that because we didn’t have the fiberglass “cast” as a base, we wound up using a generic hard plastic brace for support. Since he really doesn’t have a functioning achilles tendon in that leg, it needs support, in large…
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Here are the chickens — they’re so goofy looking right now, they seem to be in whatever passes for eighth grade in chicken-dom. Their feet are enormous, and while their feathers are coming in, they’re still not really feathered out (look at their funny tails). But they’re getting little chicken-y personalities, and they like to torment the dogs by flapping their wings. I took the chooks outside for a little air last week, and here’s Raymond watching them. He spent the entire afternoon out there, occasionally running inside to whine at me that there were birds! birds! out there. In…
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This is Raymond, staring at the shed door, because on the far side of that door are four baby chicks in a cardboard box tucked into a dog crate all kept warm by an infrared light. There were six chicks, but I erred and thought they were too hot under the light, and so two of them caught a chill and gave up their tiny little ghosts. They’re resting peacefully in the compost pile. Here’s the little peepers. Saturday morning I called Murdochs, our local ranch store to see if the chicks had come in (they’ve had a shortage this…
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After nearly a year of surgery and recovery and then blowing the achilles tendon repair, my vet and I decided to go for an exoskeleton solution. This is Owen in his very fancy orthotic device that the nice folks at K-9 Orthotics in Canada built for him. We made a fiberglass cast of his leg (and cutting it off was the most traumatic part of the whole saga of the leg — poor guy, that cast saw completely freaked him out, and he was on a lot of drugs at the time) and they built him this spiffy brace. Unfortunately,…
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While it was indeed a lovely drive up the Clearwater river yesterday on the way home from Seattle, it made for a very long day in the car — I didn’t get back until nearly ten and I was all road buzzy when I got here. But today was lovely — walked the dog, did some grocery shopping, and then tried to decide what to do with the requisite homecoming chicken. I seem to be compelled to cook a chicken after returning from a trip. I’ve written any number of times about my mystical belief in the power of a…
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Yesterday afternoon, in the middle of the big snow, I realized I was down to only one egg, so I set off, with Raymond, for the little health food store a couple of blocks from my house. Ray hadn’t had a proper walk because of the snow, and I was feeling like I needed some exercise, and the roads were so crummy I didn’t want to drive. Well, Foodworks was out of my Milk Lady’s eggs, and what can I say? After eating her unbelievably great farm eggs for the past couple of years I just couldn’t bring myself to…
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If you look closely you’ll see a bad bad stinky dog’s nose poking out from inside the bathtub. For the second time this week, Raymond found a dead thing in the dog park and rolled in it. Tuesday I took him to the new groomer who is two blocks away, but as great a job as she did, I didn’t feel like paying for grooming twice in one week. One of the older guys who hang out at the dog park in the mornings suggested this miracle dog de-stinking mix: baking soda, shampoo and hydrogen peroxide in a bucket (actually,…