Oh, what a joy to be home in fall on the farm. It may have rained much of the weekend, but that's okay, we needed the moisture. In spite of the rain I got to spend much of Sunday out in the country with Willie, Lassie and weekend visitor Brody (the Cavalier) out in the hills collecting wild apples. Five huge buckets full. Yum yum. Yum for us... I made applesauce much of Sunday afternoon (thanks to friend Harriet who leant me her Foley Food Mill; now that's a handy item) while the dogs slept. Yum for the sheep: the ewe flock got to crunch away on juicy apples that I tossed into their feeders. The lamb flock is separate (I don't castrate the ram lambs, so the boys are now old enough to breed their mommas. Not a great idea!) and has access to lots of wild apples on their own, so everyone Read More
“Dog Training” versus “Real Work”
So I'm working Will, my young Border Collie, last night, asking him to push the lambs into a corner so that I could catch and treat a sick one. (Lambs get diarrhea just like people and dogs do, I suspect it feels just as bad for them as it does for the rest of us. Poor little guy looked miserable.) Willie is doing really well at this kind of task, even though he can be the kind of dog who is "sticky" and won't push the sheep forward when it's needed sometimes. But he seems to love real work, when the sheep really have to get into the truck, or the lambs have to be pushed into a corner so that we can catch and treat one. How do I know? Well, I don't for sure, but his eyes seem brighter, he looks especially animated when we are done and most importantly, he is much braver when we have "real Read More
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