Like just about everyone else in my suburban neighbourhood, I have a dog. Three times a day, I walk this little creature around the streets, saying hello to the other people with dogs, or really to the dogs themselves. I know more dog names than people names.
Last night, I was out walking her and I slipped on the ice, went down on one knee and had to pause. Being 57 years old and overweight, getting back up was a struggle.
My dog, Sasha, came back and looked me over for a minute, as if to say “What’s the holdup?” and then went back to leash-end, wanting to get a move on. I didn’t blame her, but it got me thinking about some of the basic differences between the farm dogs I had as a child and teenager, and the domestic dogs I and so many others have now.
Most of the differences are obvious. I think a lot of people would observe that farm dogs usually have some kind of function, in the sense of helping to herd the sheep or cattle or whatever, and also that nobody runs around pampering them, doing things like picking up their poop in purple, lavender-scented bags or dressing them in down vests and winter booties, to name just two of the really weird behaviours I’ve completely normalized as a dog owner.
Less obvious is the empathy farm dogs develop with farmers. When you spend as much time with people as farm dogs do, you can see a link developing between dog and person. They walk around with you, they follow what you’re doing, and more than anything, they just seem to know.
The farm dog I remember most is Honey, a Golden Retriever who followed my father absolutely everywhere during the course of the day. One afternoon, my father was working on something and got a small piece of wood in his eye. It was very painful and irritating for him, and he went to the hospital emergency room, where it was removed and he was given various ointments, and then had a large white cotton patch placed over his eye.
When we got him home and out of the car, Honey came up to see him and—this is the key part—she just knew something was amiss. She was never more than about three feet away from him the rest of the day. Honey was a sort of semi-domesticated farm dog. She came in the house, but was given her food, and slept, in the barn. The night of the day that my father hurt his eye, she stayed in the house for the first time, lying on a rug on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, watching over my father.
About four or five years later, I was a teenager and it was considered OK for me to be left alone to look after things for a night while my parents actually got out to socialize (note that this was a dairy farm, so one evening was about all they could leave for). Honey now had her meals in the house and slept at nights in an old easy chair in the farm kitchen. I took a break from the Saturday night TV lineup to go down to do a last check of the barn before bed and she jumped out of the chair to come with me.
It was a cold, clear winter night, with the moon shining down on the snow as I crunched my way down the hill to the barn. I opened the door and the familiar warmth and smells of hay and cow wafted over me. We had a sort of I-shaped barn, so I looked over the cows on the row at the top of the I, then walked down the large, long row (we actually called this “The Long Row”), making sure everything looked OK.
Finally, I arrived at the end row, looked over all the cows in the individual stalls, then checked the three large pens we had there. That was when I realized that there was no more Saturday night TV for me.
In the first pen was what I can only describe as a “retired” cow, named Victoria, who was very elderly, but her lineage and contributions to the herd were such that we had more-or-less permanently given her the pen to live out her days. She was well known for allowing the farm cats to have kittens in the corner of her pen, and she would warn off anyone who wanted to come and look at them with snorts and a shaking of her head.
The second pen held a cow recovering from a malady that I can’t recall all these years later, but I remember her looking comfortable and relaxed in the large space. The third pen held a young heifer awaiting the birth of her first calf, and when I looked in there, I saw nothing but trouble.
She hadn’t been due for a week or so, and we just had her in the pen as a precaution. But she was in the full throes of birthing, and the situation looked challenging. I could see a nose and the tops of a couple of hooves, but she strained and strained and didn’t make any progress.
I have no idea how calvings work on modern, factory-style farms. I don’t really want to know. On small family farms such as ours, the goal was usually to ensure the cow was comfortable and had the space to support the birthing process. If she looked to be having some trouble, we’d put some calving ropes on the calf’s ankles and help out the cow by pulling whenever she strained.
I went running up the barn to a storage room, where we kept the ropes. Honey trotted alongside me, sensing my urgency, staying with me. We went back to the pen at the same urgent pace, and I put the ropes on the little hooves. Honey stood on her hind legs and put her front feet on the wall of the water trough to get a good view.
The birthing process took about an hour. Very slow, very gentle. I had assisted with plenty of calvings before, but never dealt with one on my own. I was worried that the calf might suffer because of the slow pace, but eventually when it arrived, it was fine, stirring at the anxious ministrations of its mother as she licked it.
Honey had realized at some point that the drama was ebbing and turning into a more routine process, so she had retired to lie on top of a couple of hay bales facing the pen and wait it out. I took the calving ropes off and headed up to the milk house to wash them and myself. She didn’t bother to come with me, somehow understanding I’d be back. I got myself cleaned up and returned to the pen. It was a homey scene now, with the mother licking the calf all over, and the little one doing the classic new-born calf maneuver of trying to stand, and get to the cow’s udder for some mother’s milk. I turned off the lights, but the moon was now shining in straight through the barn window onto the pen, providing a soft, warm light.
I shuffled up the Long Row, turning off lights as I went, and then Honey and I stepped out of the barn and headed back towards the house and perhaps a late-night repeat of Kojak or something. I had taken about 10 or 15 steps when I stopped dead in my tracks. Honey stopped and looked up at me. Then I just started to cry. Standing in the snow, in the moon-lit darkness, I cried my eyes out. I was stirred by emotions I couldn’t articulate at all. Honey sat down on the snow and looked up at me. As my crying ebbed, I reached down and patted her head. Somehow, she just knew.
I turned around and went back to the barn. I didn’t bother turning on the lights. I went back down the Long Row, then turned down toward the pen. I picked up a hay bale to sit on and put it in front of the pen where the cow, now standing, was still licking her calf while it wobbled on unsteady legs and drank. Honey jumped up on the hay bales beside me, turned around a few times, and settled down.
The light from the bright moon shone through the barn windows. I rested my hand on Honey’s head while her tail wagged gently.
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(Photo: Gary H/ flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
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