Farm News 02-10-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 16°
Weight 207, moving in the right direction, finally

A Dirty Little White Dog

Every barn needs a small terrier, an industrious little dog that will crawl into every tight space, seeking and driving out the varmints. Scotch Terriers, the well-known black 'Scotties' are good barn dogs. Our son had a Scottie that did a great job in the barn for many years until he died. When we put up our new barn we began to look for a good terrier to keep it free of varmints. What we found was a West Highland White Terrier, a dog that looks somewhat like the Scotch Terrier but is white and smaller.

We went to a breeder near Whiting, Kansas, actually something of a puppy mill, in the expectation of buying a mature female who hadn't worked out as a breeder. They had such a female, just under two years old, and a very nice dog. Then the woman who ran the place brought out a puppy, a little white ball of fur that would just fill two hands cupped together. She put the puppy down on the floor and it immediately ran to the older female, grabbed her tail, and, growling fiercely, started pulling on the older animal's tail, almost shouting, “Let's play.” Who could resist a puppy like that?

During the trip home our new puppy alternated between sleeping in Paula's lap and wiggling with pleasure at being held and cuddled. By the time we reached home we were convinced we had made a good choice. While driving we discussed a name and decided to call her Tessie.

When we reached home I put a small warm light, a 75 watt bulb in an aluminum reflector, about a foot off the floor in the corner of a stall, covered the floor with a deep bed of fresh straw, and shut Tessie in the stall for the night. She whined a bit when I left her, but quickly settled down beneath the light and went to sleep. I checked on her several hours later and she was sleeping quietly.

The next morning I went out to do morning chores and opened the stall door to let Tessie out for her first morning in the barn. There were so many new smells! She was under my feet half the time, and sniffing new smells the other half. Her new barn was the most exciting place she had ever found. And, the barn had more lessons to teach her than she could ever have imagined.

Tessie had to learn that chicks, ducklings, goslings, bunnies, and kittens are to be protected, not harmed, her teachers being the mothers of those various baby animals.

Puppies want to get along with everyone, not just the humans, and achieving friendship with everyone is a puppy's primary social goal. They watch the other animals and quickly learn their signals for alarm, defiance, welcome, and unfriendliness, just as they watch human faces to learn something of the effect of the latest cute trick. Terriers are bred to integrate quickly and smoothly in a barn environment, and Tessie was a fine example of her breed.

When I came into the barn for morning chores I let her out of her stall for the day, and after evening chores I shut her back in her stall, this time with food and water, and turned on her warm light, and I continued to shut her in her stall at night for the rest of the week. After four or five days I turned off the warm light. For the next eight or ten weeks I kept food and water in her in her stall, and also fed her fresh goat milk at the milk stall during chores each morning and evening. Soon, she shared the water bucket with the cats and had a dish of dried dog food in the milk stall.

One evening, after she had been in the barn for about three weeks, I heard her barking. I went out to see what the fuss was about, for she was barking up a mighty big fuss for such a small dog, and discovered that she had two half-grown raccoons treed in the barn. Each of the coons easily weighed two or three times her weight and could probably have killed her with a single snap, but Tessie's bravado kept those coons up in the rafters and worried. That was when she completely won my faith in her ability to be a great barn dog.

One winter we had a possum invasion of the barn. She would start barking, I would go to the barn, and there would be Tessie, with a possum cornered somewhere. It took a while for us to learn to work well together and, at first, we let a lot of possums get away. Before the winter was over, though, we had caught and killed seven possums. She caught them and I came and killed them, working together like a dog and human team. After that winter and for many years after we had very few varmint problems.

Tessie liked to run around me in circles when I walked across the yard, swinging out in a wide sweep and then running past inches from my legs. As she passed a few feet in front of me she would drop down and roll over, sometimes two or three times, then roll back up to her feet and begin swinging out on the next circle, calling out, “Let's play.”.

She liked kittens. When a litter of kittens became old enough to start exploring the barn all of them would have rough, stiff fur from being slobbered on by a dog. Tessie would carry them around in her mouth and, in cold weather, it was common to see kittens sleeping snuggled up to their nice warm friend. She was the same way with bunnies, she like them and never hurt one. Wild rabbits, though, she would kill whenever she could catch one, which was not very often, for Tessie had short legs and was not speedy.

Tessie loved little kids. She learned not to jump on them and, when a kid came into the yard, she would run up and sit down in front of them, tail wagging and eyes shining, saying, “Let's play.”

In the last few years Tessie slowed down. She became completely deaf and her vision was never very good. She had learned to respond to hand signals for, 'Come to me', 'Sit', and 'Stay', so her deafness was not a big problem, although in her later years 'Stay' was obeyed only if she felt it was a reasonable request. Left with her nose as her primary sensory organ, she would stand in the yard and sniff the air, checking for intruders. If she smelled something suspicious she would bark for a little bit, and then amble off to one of her favorite napping spots and lie down.

Monday morning Tessie failed to appear for morning chores and I knew something was wrong. The dirty little white dog, who always showed the grime she accumulated in sniffing out varmints, had died.

Tessie radiated the joy of a prefect spring day. When I think of her I see her galloping across the yard in a rocking horse gait, laughing and calling, “Let's play.”