Our latest dog, what I call our lastest — which is a misheld position that Miss Kitty has corrected me on repeatedly throughout our dog years — has just reached his “growth potential.”
As owned animals go, my first question is always about daily rate of gain. When it comes to pets, that generally causes a smirk among farm neighbours and friends and a puzzled look from my more urbane circle. This is sometimes followed, for the citified, by a mildly horror-filled moment, which I imagine involves fleeting visual thoughts of east-Asian butchery shops.
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And, in mixed company, there’s a silent signal, a look through the top of SWKBTI’s (she-who-knows-better-than-I) glasses to hush up my country ways and return to the discussion of hybrid car efficiencies and my son’s fencing club. (Please note that this does not involve posts or insulators, and stretching is something done before parrying.)
Bear, as we most aptly named the dog when he was just five pounds, has been with us for a year. At nearly 30 times his acquisition size, I feel he is nearly ready to join the ranks of farm dog and has met my DRG objectives.
While he doesn’t have the usual farm dog characteristics yet — the frost-bitten ear tips and half missing foot of Golden Retriever Roger, his predecessor and the lastest full-sized Raine dog, the optional fourth leg of Blue Heeler Spike or badger scarred face of Bassett-hound Dryfuss — Bear has enormous size on his side.
A cross between Great Pyrenees and a from-the-neighbour’s-place Black Lab, he has shown, during initial ventures to the farm, that he can cover a quarter mile in the time it takes to bellow, “no Dryfuss, Roger, Jack (my son’s name), Spike, Mooshka (our other Bassett hound), Bear. Get back here and leave that coyote alone,” about twice.
And he can soft-mouth fetch a cat without being asked — must be the Lab in him — and has shown other good farm dog instincts, such as herding livestock until threatened by hissing and spitting llamas and a deep and abiding fear of the MIG welder. I should be so smart — I would break less stuff.
The Lab tendencies to friendly participation in man’s recreational pastimes, such as hunting and farming, are a good hybridity mix that I hope will cause him to follow the air seeder in the field the way most of his large predecessors have done, rather than riding in the tractor, as some have.
