Cracker dog days

Brandy
Lord of all he surveyed and very fond of my truck
(You knew my first car was a pick up truck, right?)

Florida Cracker's post and hilarious video of a Bear transporting (or was it transponding) a chicken got me thinking about some dogs we used to have....back in the day...... I don't talk about them much any more as we have been border collie people for most of the last few years. And that was a different part of my life.

However, a long, long time ago I worked in a veterinarian's kennel, as a generalized dog holding, cat box cleaning, dog doo shoveling, porcupine quill pulling, kid of all work. While I was so employed a yellow dog was brought into the hospital with major injuries. He had supposedly "fallen down stairs". (He sure broke a lot of stuff for just a little fall. We always sorta, kinda thought that something else just might have happened to him. Something involving feet and kicking.) Anyhow my boss patched him up and for some bizarre reason I fell for him.

Two Bears, Airs above the ground

He looked amazingly like a border collie except for the yellow part. He was also a hog and messed his cage and kennel run up in horrific fashion every single day. And I cleaned it every single day. He was loud and active (giving deep meaning to the word hyper) and a pest, but I liked him a lot.

Because of his many broken bones he was with us a long time. His vet bill, even in the days before pet vets as neurosurgeons, reached staggering proportions. Finally the day came that the casts came off and the pins were pulled and his owners were called to come get him

And to pay that massive bill. They didn't show.

The boss kept calling them. They kept not coming. Weeks went by.

We never heard from them again....or least not until a number of years later when a similarly damaged kitten was brought in to be put to sleep. That was back before animal rights was a big deal and there was nothing we could do....couldn't have proved anything anyhow.

Who would want a crazy dog like that? All he did was mess up the cage and bark. Although he grew up pretty he was a homely pup and not much liked by anyone but me. The boss decided to put him to sleep.

Enter 18-year old me. There was just too much dog there to just erase as if he never had been. I begged my boss to let me have him rather than put him down. He thought I was nuts and wouldn't. Finally on the last day before what would have been his last day my employer relented and I took him home. (Fortuitously my folks were at camp or our relationship would have been quite short. He was a very bad dog in those early days. For the most part he got over it.)

Thus began 14 of the best dogs years I would ever have. I took Brandy, as I named him, through several levels of dog obedience. Let's just say that he got it. He would literally do anything of which he was physically capable if I could communicate to him what I wanted. Anything at all. My obedience teacher scorned him because he was a mutt, but he aced all his classes. He beat labs and goldens at Frisbee. He would dig if I asked him to, where I asked him to (He and his daughter Two Bears actually helped us lay water line at our camp. They would dig frantically around large rocks until we could get a hold of them to get them out. No lie.) He would climb a ladder and walk around on the roof of the cabin and then climb back down if I asked him to. He walked scaffolding. Jumped to the roof of the cap on that orange pick up and back down if I waved my hand. He wore clothes and was the funniest ham you could imagine when dressed.How he could strut. He just loved clothes. (He also bit people, but he never bit anybody that I wouldn't have bitten were I a dog.) And was he shaky about the house training thing. And stole parsnips and hid them in the walls.....quirky you might say....chewed stuff up too...a lot of it.

Bobby, one of the few dumb ones (but lovable...very lovable)

I could brag him up all day and probably sound like a fool, but my little bro who reads this will remember all the crazy things he did and can vouch for the veracity of the tale. We loved that dog so much that (what with our irresponsible youth and all) we mated him to a dog we met along the way, named Sparky, who was part coyote and his exact duplicate in brains and ability. (Not to mention destructive bad dogness.)

We called the resulting pups "Cracker Dogs" after the little dog that went cracker dog in the James Herriot books. There were several generations of them. They all had this way of tearing in circles radiating joy and vigor that we just loved. Like their parents they were hellions. Besides being trainable they got bored easily. And destroyed things. I was poor. No dog crates.

Two Bears, Capriolle

We loved those cracker dogs. At one point I had five of them. (Somewhere I have a picture of all five leaping off our garage roof into ten-foot snow drifts.) Two Bears, perhaps the best of them, (except Brandy, of course) would catch any chicken in my large flock that I pointed out to her and fetch it to me...handy....they all would have herded stock for me if I had a clue how to train them.

Two Bears, thinking, "Take me to the chickens, boss".

After Brandy died, Two Bears used to drag poor Bobby, one of her sons, off to the hedgerows to dig out woodchucks. She would bark. He would dig.

The last cracker dog was a second Sparky. When we discussed her intelligence, a box of rocks often entered the conversation. However, she adored the kids and would not bite them. She raised them all through their dog learning years and never did one thing wrong. (Or at least until she met Mike, the first of the Northview border collies, who showed her that there was food on the table and treasure in the trash.) Once someone stole her out of our backyard and dumped her in another city. (Thank God she had tags so we got her back. Believe me when I say that they would not have stolen Brandy or old Twoie.)

Sparks died just a few years ago when cancer entered her spinal cord. Thus ended an era that lasted decades ....the cracker dog years. I love my border collies, but dang those homemade hounds were fun.