The longest wait

There is a certain time of evening when the humans disappear into the Dog Free Zone in the kitchen and certain sounds are heard. The chink of china bowls. The fridge door opening. Sometimes the slice of knife on chopping board, sometimes the sound of tins being cut open. Always a delicious aroma. Hard to wait patiently for any of it to come out and make it to floor level. Still, wait the dogs must. Snowy thinks staring very hard at the miniscule gap under the door might make it widen, but Georgie knows that the door handle turns and that's the trick.


Being nearly blind, however, means Georgie sometimes gets disoriented and stares hopefully at the wall instead.

And if there's movement! Dogs must get to it, scrabble hard and try to help it happen faster.

But movement doesn't always mean food being served. Sometimes it's a very long wait.

Truck dogs

Georgie and Snowy fancy themselves real sheepdogs when they ride in the tray of the ute through the paddocks. From up here they can lord it over those woolly herbivore things that usually intimidate them terribly and make a laughing stock of their wolf heritage.

Georgie is just tall enough to look over the side. She doesn't like it when SO brakes suddenly and she hits her nose though. It's humiliating. It's also somewhat painful. Some of the larger potholes are a bit rough and hard to take when you're a toy poodle too.

The solution is to use your larger and much more padded companion as a cushion.

Make no bones about it

Every time we send a couple of sheep to slaughter we get all the bits of them back. Partly because it's the most wonderful, fresh, tasty lamb we'll ever have but also because we show maximum respect to our charges by not wasting a morsel. The dogs agree fully although probably for different reasons. A whole sheep includes many parts that make really good natural dog food, especially raw meaty bones. They're great for their teeth and gums and keep them busy for half an hour or so. Snowy the beagle and Georgie the poodle don't much care about teeth and gums except what they're used for. They use them to full advantage. Georgie holds her bone down with one paw to gain leverage.

Snowy however favours the lollipop method more.

Breakfast barrier

When it's really cold SO sometimes has his breakfast in the big room by the fire. To do this successfully however requires some sort of division be used between him and reaching cat paws,


or he'll end up with everyone vying for the contents of his plate.


(Everyone with fur has had breakfast, by the way, they just fancy boiled eggs and toast)

Beagle with beagle

Snowy's favourite toy lately is a stuffed beagle. Unusually it's a tan and white beagle, not the usual tri-colour, which is perhaps why she likes it so much.

In her little beagle mind it is tremendous fun to run up and down the living room with it pausing only to chew it's poor head. Cats and other small dogs need to get out of the way or be beagled.

During this time Snowy acts like a cross between a mad antelope and a cannonball with the replica of herself clamped firmly in her teeth. Her toy. She clearly recognises it's beagle attributes because she selected it herself from among roughly 20 of Georgie's toys.

Not that our dogs are spoiled or anything. Much.

High maintenance hairstyles

Georgie and Snowy both love to roll in noxious substances. As far as we can be we are organic farmers and gardeners so we don't have any truly toxic chemicals here or anything, but the most deadly chemical known to insects doesn't come close to the smell that a three week old drowned rat can emit. Or fox droppings. Even seemingly innocent sheep manure can get pretty pongy when rubbed into a poodle's fur, unnoticed because it's the same colour, and allowed to fester for a week.

Eventually though, Georgie can't hide any longer. With that aroma the neighbours half a kilometer away were asking what she'd done. Georgie protests about having a bath, but we can't hear her over her smell.

Making her best appealing eyes, or singular eye in her case, doesn't work either...

and it's back into the shampooing, rinsing and drying routine. People think non-shedding dogs are low maintenance but this is not true. Georgie also gets a haircut every few weeks otherwise her early 80's Kylie Minogue hairstyle clouds her vision and she can't see. All those curls also get quite matted in carrying out farm dog duties although in Georgie's case these only involve following us at a distance, barking at benign things and checking out the clearance under fences. Most of her time these days is spent monitoring the warmth of the fire on her mat, only looking up occassionally when possible treats are detected.