Hot pink piggies

It is really summer, and the humidity is competing with the heat for top billing.  Because of the heat Craig came by this evening to select the pigs that will be shipped tomorrow.  He marked them in pretty pink livestock crayon,

because I can't read ear notches.

It is always sad and satisfying to see these pigs leave.  Sad, because they are fun and smart and oddly entertaining, in - and I am not joking - a zen kind of way.  Pigs have this wonderful calming grunt (more oink than om) when they are happy, and I miss them until I get the next batch.  Satisfying, because they grew into such handsome hogs, who like to ham it up for the camera.

And yes - they are very dirty.  They have been wallowing in the cooling mud, and even though we hosed them off before Craig came, they managed to reapply the mud.  

The genius

Those who know me are aware that I will go to great lengths for a joke, and admittedly I love to exaggerate, or to employ skewed versions of reality, to lend a little spice to life.  That's all true, to the extent that I sometimes wonder if I see too much genius in an ordinary dog.

This morning's event showed me once again that there is nothing ordinary about Decibel.  She is smart, wicked smart really, and I might as well accept it.

The setup:

About three weeks ago a cat showed up, half-grown, scrawny, and with the one redeeming feature of being extremely friendly.  Harold was gone at the time (meetings), so I just hoped the cat would wander off before his return.  It almost worked.
However a few days after Harold's return I hear him chatting with someone in the barnyard, and even without looking I know that the cat is back.  Sure enough, that cat found a sucker.

The drifter cat disappeared and reappeared a few more times, once even taking the black female cat with him, something that warmed my heart, but prematurely as it turned out.  That female is my least favorite cat, since she scratched me when we were treating a bad cut on her, so we avoid each other.

On Monday the drifter cat limped out of the cat carrier by the cat food; he had obviously been beaten up.  Nothing major, scratches mostly, a few bites, which are going to abscess, since that's what cats do.  Oh well, there are times when you just have to face facts:  We had a new cat.

So we brought him to Dr. Ann to be vaccinated, castrated, medicated and integrated into our animal family.  Before he left for work, Harold hollered out the car window, "His name is Jasper."
News to both of us, I am sure.

Dr Ann suggested we rename the cat Spew, since he spent the majority of the time at the vet's puking.  Now Jasper the Spew (or Vesuvius) is on a twice daily antibiotic.

The deed:

This morning Harold went to the barn to do his cat parent duties while I was still trying to solve the mystery of tying shoe laces.  He came out of the barn, Decibel at his side (which surprised me, since she likes to give Jasper 'hissy fits'), no cat.  The medicine has to be refrigerated, so Harold returned it to the kitchen.

I went to the barn, Decibel now with me and set up in the barn in the meanwhile:  Feed for the cow, bucket, teat wipes, cat food refill, pig feed refill.  I commented that she was a good 'helper Briard' for looking for kitty with Dad.
Then Decibel surprised me, she went downstairs to the milking area.  Dogs are not allowed there, and they usually wait upstairs for their share of the milk.  Since I was refilling the feeders for the pigs (now hogs) I didn't say anything about Decibel's faux pas.  She looked through the gate into the sty.

"Do you want to say hi to the piggies?"  I asked.  It was unusual, sure, but then it was early morning, and my mind wasn't even up to spinning idly.

I shushed Decibel back upstairs, followed, and she was parked in the hall, her head stuck through a gap in the screen that keeps the upstairs stuff from falling into the pig pen.

What was she doing?

Pointing at the missing Jasper kitty, sleeping on the window sill, that's what.

She couldn't have been more obvious.  Of course she didn't go down to the milking area to be a bad girl.  She tried to get me to notice the kitty.
I got the medicine, treated the cat, praising Decibel to high heaven.  I still don't know HOW she knew what we were looking for, after all we only treated the cat twice before to her knowledge, but she knew.  She didn't point at a random cat either.  (Token and Buckwheat were ignored).

The only conclusion:  She's a genius...

The brains behind the guy

                                                                              ...Not just for a canine.

Always a goof

Decibel still has the occasional inner puppy attack.

Usually she simply forgets her size.

This morning she climbed on my lap while I was trying to put my shoes on.  Needless to say she succeeded, with the lap dog gig, while my shoes had to wait.

The other night she decided that she did not want to be combed.
Grass seeds and ticks abound right now, and controlling them requires frequent checks and removal forays, which the dogs don't appreciate.  Well, maybe Maggie appreciates it, she will insist on being petted until the human of her choice finds and removes the tick.

When I turned my attentions to Decibel however, this is what I saw:

Decibel had squeezed herself under a tray table that is a tight fit for Maggie.

She is trying to blend into the background

Do I look like I need to be groomed?

The trick backfired, after Decibel managed to turn around and look for a backdoor, I grabbed a paw and started the tick and seed removal.  We have nasty grass seeds that will poke into the skin between the toes, and cause all sorts of infection and inflammation if not caught in time.

Call me 'NO PAWS'.

When it comes to wells, all's well that ends wet

To my immense surprise, and Harold's relief, the well produces


   w
           a
                  t
                         e
                                 r


(Okay, so maybe oil would have come in handy, but then again... Nah.)


We pumped the well for 25 minutes at 15 gallons/minute (375 gallons) before I got tired of watering things, filling the goldfish pond, and hosing things off.  Even Decibel got bored with biting the stream of water.
According to our calculations that meant the well had to refill multiple times, and there was never a diminishing of water pressure.

While the first 30 gallons or so were a bit stinky and rusty, the water we have been pumping since is clear, not salty, and beyond that first batch not stinky either.  We haven't tested it for potability, (I tried a bit to see if it was salty), but since it used to supply the house a few decades ago, chances are that it is potable, although it might need to be "shocked" with bleach, if bacteria are high.

So far the dogs have been drinking the water without ill effects and the fish are fine.

Harold bought garden hoses and has been watering the plants, edible and 'just for pretty'.  Since this is 'extra' water, we are generous with it, and give the pigs showers to cool them off and even give the barn and the car a good wash now and again.

Well Jam

 Harold is back from his meeting and back to working at deep subjects, as wells are well known to be.  Today I helped him get the pump in the well, which is more difficult than it sounds, because apparently you can't just drop the thing in there, but you have to lower it with pipes and wires and a bit of safety rope all in a controlled manner.

The pit - the MONEY pit.
Inspector Decibel says:  Safety First, the pit should be covered, or Skeeter could fall down the well!

Harold is putting the wire and the safety rope on the pump.  

How deep is it?  T-H-I-S deep.

Decibel the helper Briard... finds a distraction.

She snatches up a piece of non-essential cardboard, and ...

... she's off!

That's GOOD cardboard

The peanut gallery stays in the shade.

We managed to get that done on the third try, and now Harold is back to monkeying with the other parts of the plumbing, hooking up the electric, installing the valves and pressure gauges, and the tank.

So I made some apricot jam.

This is my third batch this year, and I have fruit for one more batch frozen.  All you need is 6 cups of chopped apricots (the hail did a number on one side, but the other side was usable, and there were NO WORMS in any of the apricots, which is some sort of miracle), 7 cups of sugar, a quarter cup of lemon juice, a bit of butter and a pack of pectin, and after mixing and measuring, boiling and bubbling, it becomes jam.  Apricot jam is just about my favorite, since it always tastes sunshiny even in winter.

Summer guests

Here a a few pictures of the summer Jerseys.

Naturally this time I wanted to show Decibel in full herding action, but...

... while Decibel was there and ready, just after this picture, Maggie let out the "I got a rat up a tree, come quick" bark, and Decibel ran off to help her sister.

I tried yesterday to get some shots of her herding too, but it was not meant to be.  It's like getting a picture of kids doing something cute... nearly impossible.

First there was the whole shoe incident:

After the heifers arrived, Ruby has been plotting how to make them her minions, or how to trade up from the two steers.  Because she is a smart cow, Ruby knows which gate and pasture connects to where and it did not take her long to get to the paddock right next to the new herd of heifers.  That's where she was in the morning, and I had to take her by the bell and drag her back to the barn, because Ruby (for once) was more interested in having a big herd than having a big meal.
The morning got more complicated because I had locked the pigs into a small section of the corral the night before, and now they were away from their milk trough.  Two pigs were leaving, and I didn't want to spend too much time chasing them.  Now of course the pigs want their milk, and I had used a rubber tub the night before, but not retrieved it, and it was now buried in the muck.  So I had to get in the small pen with big hogs, who promptly poked me and shook mud on me, get the tub, rinse it off, go back in there (same mud bath), and get the milk in the tub before the pigs got wise to it, and get back out.  So by the time I got Ruby milked and the pigs fed I was pretty much covered in mud.
Then I had to go back to the horses and let donkey out, (he eats separately, because he has few teeth left, and needs to take his time), and re-unite the steers with Ruby, who was licking the Jersey heifers through the gate.
Just after coffee the truck for the pigs that were going came, and loading them was another adventure, but it finally got done, and I was really muddy from head to toe, and I think that was the third pair of shoes that needed to be hosed down for the morning.  So when the time came that I wanted to take herding with Decibel pictures, I put on an old pair of sandals.  I got half-way up the pasture, when one heel falls off!
I figure this is not going to work, so I head back to the house, and the other heel falls off, so at least walking is easier, if odd, since now my heels are lower than the toes.

So I thought, well I try again this morning, which was less disastrous where muck and shoes are concerned, since the remaining pigs have access to the big pen again, but Maggie managed to override that.

It's up there...

...right up there...

...or maybe up on that tree!

                                                                  Where's the rat?

Herding aspirations

Now that Ruby has company in the form of two steers, we have a 'cow herd' again, and Ruby is a lot happier for the company of her own kind.  For Decibel the newcomers were at first something to carefully investigate, which means you sneak up on them, bark and head for the hills, circle around and repeat.  

But steers are not as skittish as sheep and thus the performance only works to startle them at first, then they turn to investigate and even chase the unruly canid, so soon enough a new strategy is advised.  And it can't be said that Decibel is slow in any sense of the word, and so she soon figured this one out.  

The first glimpse of her good sense came when Skeeter - the possum dog - thought he had to bark at the steers.  They are not afraid of something barely cat-sized, so they were giving spirited chase.  Decibel had been walking with me, took off and charged into the pasture, physically shouldered Skeeter out of the way of a head-butt attempting steer, shoved him out of the pasture onto the driveway, and when I am just about to burst with pride, she raced back and yapped at the steers herself, making them run and scamper, for she is decidedly larger than a cat, but when they raced into the barnyard, Decibel veered off, her chore completed and rejoined us, all puffed up with pride and other stuff.

Soon these forays became more organized, and now I can make use of all that energy, and have Decibel drive the steers back to the barn.  Ruby is really no problem, the cow knows where she gets milked and fed, but the steers are boys and thus not quite as clever.  They usually follow the cow, but they do it at their own speed, which means they often miss a turn or a gate and then all they can do is race along a fence bawling, hopelessly 'trapped', since backtracking to a gate is not in their vocabulary.  

This is where Decibel shines!  

She will circle the dummies, turn them and drive them with enthusiasm through the gate and to the barn.  The only time we get into chaos is when Ralphy decides to 'help'.  His approach is less organized and louder, and so the steers then run in separate ways, which makes the whole herding thing fall apart for a bit.  Still, Decibel is not discouraged, although one time she actually gave Ralph a talking to, in form of a big bark right in his ear, which couldn't have said "quit it you dummy" more clearly.  Then she shoved the old boy out of the way, and went back to gathering up the steers, and working them.   That's my girl!

Now, she is not the bravest of souls, so when one of the bovines charges, she dances out of the way, but she is so quick at coming back around, that it hardly matters.  Not that I mind her 'cowardice', it is only good sense and hopefully will keep her from getting kicked or butted.  Now the steers are getting used to her, and are far less likely to actually kick, but at first I was worried.

Also, since cattle move slower, more deliberately, and are quite willing to slow down, this makes the whole herding exercise far more orderly than with sheep.  Sheep scatter and keep running, and since Decibel can easily catch them, she will easily catch them, and uses her teeth to stop them, which is why we put the sheep to rest in the freezer and have the steers.  It is not Decibel by herself that is the problem, she actually listens quite well to me, but wildly running sheep chased by four dogs (just having fun) tends to get too chaotic.  Yet with the steers Decibel actually works, (neither Skeeter nor Maggie are all that interested in the steers) and when they are going in the right direction, or have reached the barnyard, Decibel runs back to her people without a second thought.  

Now of course when it comes to Decibel, I tend to have rose colored glasses on, so I kept my opinion of her excellence to myself, but Harold said, "Look, she is actually working, not just chasing", when Decibel did one of her patented herding moves.  So it is not just my imagination!

She will listen and slow down, and one time when she tried to 'herd' the cattle the wrong way (I was done with them, and didn't want them to go back to the barn), I told her "Decibel, that will do" and she stopped with the steers and raced back to me, and I swear we never worked on the 'That'll do', she just knows.  

Now we just got a summer visit from 19 Jersey heifers, and it will be fun to see what Decibel does with a real herd.  The first morning she saw them, I was busy with the other critters, and before I could worry, she simply circled them in an easy trot, decided they were in a close bunch (they were lying down chewing their cud) and after a few checks over her shoulder Decibel decided she didn't have to work them, and came to 'help' me.  Again, that doesn't sound like much, but less sensible dogs might have just barked and scattered the little heifers, and since the heifers were in a new place, that might have gone wrong.

You might fear for the chicken, but Decibel is interested in the kitchen scraps, not the hen.  

                                               She's so much more than just a pretty face

Now Decibel is not the only dog with cow sense, but Maggie, the other one that has 'brains', does not herd.  She likes the critters, and often plays with them and for some reason they like playing with her, and are not scared, nor too rough.  Maggie used to play 'headbutting' games with one of the steers, even when he was close to butcher weight, and she never got hurt, because they both knew that it was a game.  But Maggie does not herd them.  Her agreement with me is limited to not hurting them, and she can go into the chicken coop to kill rodents, without even giving the cackling hens another look.  This is the same dog that knows that pheasants are fair game, because they are NOT Mom's.