Archive for the ‘Animals – Pets’ Category
October 25, 2005 – New Puppy for the Farm
After our experience with Blue and the confidence Emma has gained in dog training, we now have a new puppy. Her name was Missy, but nobody really cares for that name, so we are thinking of a new name. We were leaning towards Maizzie, but when Martin says that it comes out like Macey. So we’ll decide tomorrow and get on with it. We got her from the animal rescue league – she is about 4 months old and a mixed breed that contains some spaniel.
October 19, 2005 – Goodbye to Blue
After a period of decision-making and talking to animal rescue league and our vet, we decided to put Blue down. He had bitten Martin in the face, bitten a neighbor who fed the pets when we were out of town a few weeks ago and nipped at Martin again after we brought chickens back from the locker.
We got Blue from the animal rescue league this spring and he was Emma’s dog. Here’s a picture from one of his first days at high hopes.
She trained him to stop jumping on people, took him to obedience classes and taught him dog agility.
It became painfully obvious to us that doing the easy thing would be to do what so many others do to pets – dump him off in another town, bring him back to the rescue league and not tell anybody about the biting or make up a story to Emma that we did return him to the rescue league. It’s just too bad the the right thing involves a lot of pain and heartbreak.
Emma said it right – it’s not fair to lose two dogs in one year. I agree.
September 13, 2005 – April Does in Another Door
We’ve already replaced one door after April freaked in a storm and destroyed a door. This time, there was a possibility of storms, so the dogs were locked in the garage. This is what the door from the garage to the mudroom looked like.
Again, we are paying for the shortcuts of the previous owners who installed a hollow-wall interior door in an exterior location.
August 1, 2005 – Blue
Our new Australian Shepherd has a new collar these days. We just couldn’t break him of chasing cars on the road. Rather than have a dead dog, we bought a “training collar” (which is a nice way of saying shock collar). Before, when he chased cars, he immediately got stern warnings and locked in the garage, losing his freedom. So after a few rounds of that, he would chase the car against our commands, then run in the garage to get his punishment!
It seems to be working. We’ve had it on for a little less than a week and I’d say the chasing has almost (but not quite) completely stopped.
July 31, 2005 – Strange Days
Today was a strange day. We had a small chance of rain, it started about 6:30 am and I ran out to get the laundry. At about 10:00 I checked the radar and there was only a narrow band. By one the narrow band was still there and the last drops fell at 5:00. Two people said the clouds today were the weirdest they had seen. A neighbor called and left a message to look at the clouds to the north (I love the neighbors who alert me to this stuff) and my Mom sent me an e-mail saying they saw some weird clouds north of Ames. Here’s what they may have looked like, as I received both messages a bit after the fact.
April flipped out today. The lightning, although not frequent, dragged on for most of the day. She freaks out is storms ever since she was caught in a hailstorm that dropped hail big enought to break windows a few years back.
This is what she did to the back door before we heard her! This was an ouch on the paws as the broken wood is sharp!
July 13, 2005 – Chicken Loading
We just finished loading the chickens in all the chicken cages for transport to the locker tomorrow. It’s finally become a bit of a routine and marking of the season for us. After dark, the chickens are loaded into the crates and put in the pickup truck. I postponed the appointment at the locker a week since it seemed they weren’t growing as well in the heat. Now, however they seem very nice and plump.
About 4 am, I’ll awake and bring them to the locker, hand them to the slaughtering man six at a time and in a few minutes we’ll have dressed chickens ready to go home.
April has now figured out her job. She used to bark and flail at the chickens as they squawked and fluttered on their way to the chicken cages. Now she just watches and spends the night by the truck under the yard light, guarding the chickens all night long.
We always worry about heat this time of year. It is not uncommon to lose chickens due to the heat. Sugar Creek Farm had just such an experience (my nightmare) earlier this year.
Claire claims she wants to come tomorrow morning. We’ll wake her up and see what happens.
May 20, 2005 – Dog Agility
Emma has been taking Blue, our Australian Shepherd, to dog obedience classes and today got the dog jump apparatus out for the first time. It was a bit of a milestone since it was the first time she has used the equipment since Frankie, our Shetland Collie died unexpectedly. She started Blue jumping over the lowest rung, and moved up to the top, exclaiming, “Blue’s a natural!”
Blue is a very fast and strong dog, so this jumping is no sweat for him, even the highest rung. Got a bunch of tomatoes and peppers planted in the straw that will become next year’s raspberries. All the cages are up and the plants are ready to go.
April 8, 2005 – Blue ;)
Here’s Blue! More about him tomorrow.
April 4, 2005 – Frankie :(
Early this morning when Linda woke up and went to check on Paullina, Frankie was lying on the ground, stiff, only moving his eyes and his ears. We got him to the vet, but he didn’t last much longer. Evidently he suffered some sort of auto-immune reaction which caused liver and other organ failure. In hindsight, we look back and Emma recalls he didn’t want to jump over the dog agility apparatus on Sunday – I recall seeing him try to throw up something (of course, the dogs frequently try to throw up something, so I didn’t think twice about it.) Emma is crestfallen. We’re going to bury him in his favorite blanket and put one of the branches form the shrub he rested under on top of him so he will be surrounded by familiar things…
His last photo March 25.
