Animal Terminology

Animal husbandry has a language all its own. There are terms for males, females, young, having babies, raising them, and equipment. I once referred to a hay mow (rhymes with cow) in a story and a fellow author wanted to know what on earth I was talking about. I just sort of assumed everyone knew what a hay mow was - but farming and animal terminology are becoming a specialty.

 

So, for all you non-farm types, a mow  is the storage for hay usually found on the second floor of a barn. Dairy barns, at least the ones for small dairies, are set up with the cows on the bottom or basement floor, and hay storage above in a mow. Stantions are like a head gate - their the way cows used to be locked in place in a barn, so they faced their manger, where they ate, and their butts pointed to the gutter, where they pooped. That's a mini-course on dairying - at least on the small farm scale.

Lambing Season

                Well, it may not be warm but, technically spring, also known as lambing season, is here. The other day someone asked me why lambs are always born all within a few weeks of each other.  I blinked a couple times while I processed that fact that things sheep people take for granted are complete unknowns to non-sheep people. There’s a whole bunch of information that goes into answering that simple question, ranging from sheep reproduction to farming economics. I gave her an inadequate two sentence answer, kicking myself for all the things I left out. So, here’s the long answer; everything you never wanted to know about sheep sex.

                Unlike cows, pigs and chickens, sheep (for the most part, there are exceptions for you purists out there) are seasonal breeders. That means there are only certain times of year that they “come into heat,” are in “estrus,” or cycle. If you’ve never heard these terms, they are just farming euphemisms for meaning there are only certain seasons when an animal can be bred and get pregnant. Sheep usually start cycling around September and stop around December. So, basically they can only be bred and get pregnant in the fall. (That’s in the northern hemisphere, folks.)

                From an evolutionary standpoint this makes perfect sense. Gestation, or the length of pregnancy, in a sheep is about 145 days or 5 months. If sheep were bred in the spring, they’d lamb in the fall and the lambs would need a lot of nutrition to grow just when grass and feed was at an all time low (fall into winter). If they were bred in the summer, they’d lamb in the winter and most likely would freeze to death if they lived in a cold climate. Even with a barn, keeping a new born lamb alive in subzero weather is hard. I can testify to this personally, having warmed up a lot of frozen lambs in warm water in the kitchen sink or kept orphans in the kitchen by the wood stove.

                So, ewes start coming into heat, or cycling, or being able to be bred in early fall. But they can’t be bred every day. They cycle like anyone else. And this is where it gets difficult to explain to non-animal people. Animal people are all about biology and sex. Regular people, the ones that don’t raise horses, cows, sheep, pigs, or goats, often don’t know how their own bodies work, no less how a sheep’s does. But let’s give it go. Every female of any mammalian species releases an egg or ovum every so many days and can be bred at that time. For sheep, that’s every 16 days. If you have a flock of sheep that means in the fall all of them in any 16 day period all your sheep should come into heat once.

                So here’s how a farmer does it. She decides when in the late winter to late spring she wants to lamb. Some will lamb early to have lambs ready to be sold for slaughter by Easter. Others want their lambs to go out on grass in May and grow out on grass, so they’ll aim to lamb in April. So the farmer decides what month she wants to lamb. Then she figures out when five month ahead is. She puts the ram (or rams) in with the ewes five months ahead. Usually the ram stays with the ewes for only a month or 32 days. That’s two heat cycles and we assume everyone that can be bred will be bred within two heat cycles. That also means everyone will lamb within a one month period.

                Lambing season is hard. If you’ve got 30 ewes, odds are one will lamb every day. If you’ve got 300 ewes, odds are 10 will lamb a day. Most ewes need no help lambing, but still you want to be there to make sure the lambs get cleaned off and dried so they don’t get cold. You want to be sure they find the teats and suckle. You want to be sure if the ewe has two or three lambs she accepts them all and doesn’t put all her attention on the last, forgetting about the first. You want to be sure no one steals her lambs. You want to be sure they get separated from the others so they have some “mommy and me time” to bond.  

(It’s a lot like humans, actually. When I was in nursing school, the maternal nursing instructor said “what we worry about with newborns is that they are kept warm, that they eat, and that they bond to their mom.” That’s no different from sheep or cows, but the instructor and apparently human mothers don’t like having that pointed out to them. )

Anyway, back to sheep. Lambing in one month means for that month you have a lot of sleepless nights. For some odd reason sheep like to lamb at night, usually on the very coldest night if at all possible. Not being there means some lambs may die. So, most farmers are up every few hours checking on their sheep during lambing season. But once it’s over, it’s over. You get a barn or pasture full of bouncing happy lambs and you can sleep till next year, when you do it all over again.

               

               

By a Dog’s Nose

 

                My first dog, as an adult, was a Golden Retriever named Finn. Like most Goldens, Finn had an oral fixation. He wasn’t happy unless he had something in his mouth. He regularly met me at the door and took my book bag from me, which led to relieving female visitors of their purses. He had a very soft mouth and once chewed on the handle of a filet knife while sitting on our waterbed without cutting himself or the bed. But Finn’s real claim to fame was that he loved refried beans; unopened cans of refried beans.

                He’d grab them off the counter and puncture hundreds of holes into the can with his teeth. Then he’d crush the can with his teeth, squeezing all the beans out. We’d come home to find flat little metal discs, which once were cans of beans, stuck beneath the couch cushions, or hiding under the table. Any trace of refried beans had been licked up and all that remained was crumbled and flattened tin cans.

                Amazingly, he never tried it with anything else. It got so we did experiments, leaving a row of cans on the kitchen counter. There’d be a can of corn, a can or two of green beans, a can of peas, and a can of refried beans when we headed out to work. And when we came home, the corn, green beans, and peas where all still there, but the refried beans had been crushed and eaten.

                “He can’t be smelling through the can,” my husband insisted.

                “Well, I doubt he’s reading the label,” I replied.

                A dog’s nose, though, is a super power. Better, I think, than x-ray vision or the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. According to NOVA a dog can smell 10,000 to 100,000 times as well as humans. Forty percent of a dog’s brain is devoted to smelling. They have 300 million smell receptors in their nose.

James Walker of Florida State University is quoted as saying, “If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well.”  (NOVA) But he’s not seeing it, he’s smelling it!

That’s why dogs are used to detect snakes in cargo from Guam, search for explosives, drugs, and hidden currency, seek out agricultural contraband, used by termite exterminators to find termites, sniff out cancer, and even search for drowned corpses on open water. So, smelling refried beans through an unopened tin can is easy for a dog.  

And then there’s the jaw power involved in getting the beans out of the can.

I don’t think as a fantasy writer I need to dream up incredible powers for my characters. I can just give them the normal gifts of a dog and they’d be pretty incredible.

Goat Tales

            I took one last swipe at the floor with the mop and looked at my handy work. Standing on the back stoop, the screen door propped open, the bucket set on the step next to me, I’d mopped my way out of the now clean and empty house. Moving day. I glanced through the kitchen into the living room, the front window sparkling in the early morning light, the rug vacuumed, shampooed and smelling free of any doggy odor. The house, bare of any trace of our residence was cleaner then it had ever been while we lived there.

            Bruce peeked past me. “Looks good,” he said as he picked up the bucket of dirty water and dumped it into the flower bed.

            I carried the mop, paper towels, and bucket now full of cleaning supplies to the back of the truck. Bruce followed the vacuum in his hand.

            The tailgate was down, exposing all our tightly and systematically packed possessions to the world. Bruce slid the paper towels in an empty pocket of space, making the packing job even tighter. I lifted the vacuum into the one empty corner of space in the back of the pick-up.

            “It can’t go there,” Bruce said, “that’s the spot for Anabel.” Anabel was our goat.

            “Where’s it go then?” I asked trying to envision the diagram Bruce had drawn weeks before that neatly displayed how every box, piece of furniture, sock, shoe, pot or pan would fit into the truck for our 1000 mile move from Illinois to Virginia.  He’d even duck-taped his shoes and socks inside the back bumper in order to not waste any space.

            He didn’t answer right away, so I turned my head to repeat the question. Bruce stared at me and then grinned. “I forgot about the vacuum,” he said.

            I looked at the 2 foot by 2 foot space neatly cleared in the right back corner of the pick-up. Just big enough for a little goat to stand, lie down, turn around. Just big enough for an old upright Hoover vacuum to fit. Obviously, not big enough for both.

            I wanted to leave the vacuum. We’d paid twenty-five dollars for it at a garage sale five years before. I figured we gotten out money’s worth. But, it still worked.

“We can’t leave a perfectly good vacuum,” Bruce argued, which is how we moved a 1000 miles with Bruce, me, two dogs, and a goat all riding in the cab of the truck.

            Two miles down the road, Anabel’s little cloven hooves were digging into my bare legs. Despite the heat, it wasn’t a good day to be wearing shorts. Bruce drove. Piper, the border collie, curled up at my feet. Finn, the golden, lay on the bench seat between Bruce and me. I folded Anabel’s back legs under her, making her sit like a dog. As I bent her front legs under her, trying to get her to lie down, her back end popped up. When I pushed her back end down, her front end came up. About the third try, pushing down on her back with my chest, I managed to get her to lie down.

It lasted about fifteen minutes. Piper stood up to change places with Finn. Finn stood up to go down on the floor. Anabel stood up to join in the fun and we started the whole process over. Tiny round little black and blues were appearing on my legs.

About the fourth time the dogs decided to change places, we pulled into a rest area. We leashed up the dogs and Anabel and headed to the dog walk area. Leaving everyone with Bruce, I headed to the bathroom. When I came out, a small crowd was gathering around the dog walk area. I wanted to get in the truck and leave, but I was attached to Finn and Piper.

The dogs, tails wagging, stared happily at the growing crowd. Anabel was standing on her back legs, trimming the bottom leaves off a young maple. Bruce handed me the leashes and headed to the rest room, when a woman came up to me.

“What kind of dog is that?” she asked pointing at Anabel, while Finn pulled on the leash trying to lick the woman’s hand.

All fiction writers are liars, Garrison Keillor says. At that point, I wasn’t writing much fiction. But I was tempted to say "she’s a rare European Goat Dog.” Instead, I told the truth. “She’s a goat.” The expression on the woman’s face was still worth it.

Animal Friends

               When I was in graduate school in Animal Science most of us were fascinated with animal behavior. We could sit watching calves run around playing all day. And we did occasionally sit on barn roofs for hours watching sheep graze. That no one would actually pay us to study animal behavior never stopped us from being fascinated with it. And we were all jealous of Temple Grandin who actually found an economically viable use for paying attention to how animals act.

Animals aren’t saints. Bulls have killed people, not to mention picking on other animals in the herd. And for every race horse that has had a goat as a friend, there’s probably a horse who has injured or killed a smaller animal. But animal friendships still fascinated us. And with all the books currently out that mark friendships between unlikely species, it would seem it isn’t just us nerdy animal scientists who find animal behavior fascinating.  The odd couples give us all hope.

                Our neighbors had an old blind horse and a donkey, who led the horse out to pasture every morning and brought her back in at night. The donkey never acted like she particularly liked the horse – but still she led her around. And the horse was always calmer with the donkey nearby.

We have a cat who always slept with our old Golden Retriever. When the dog died, the cat kept trying to make overtures to our new Golden pup. But the new dog was just too rambunctious. The cat though still goes and sleeps in the dog room, settling for sleeping on a chair near the dog. 

                But the most unusual friendship I’ve seen was when I was kid. We had a blind barn cat, who in and of herself was a marvel. She was a long-haired black and white who’d been born blind and she lived her whole life in our barn.  She never ventured beyond the barn, but within it she could find her way anywhere. She knew where there where nesting spots in the hay mow, where the feed was put out, where the other cats hung out, who to avoid. She knew which stantions had cows in them and which were empty. She knew where you could cross the gutter and where to avoid falling into the gutter. She knew the routine, when milking was, when the cows went out and came in, when the cats were fed.

                So, it wasn’t surprising that when she had kittens she knew the one stantion that was empty and where a pile of hay had built up in the manger. And there, between Rhoda, a white Holstein with black circles around her eyes, and Jessie, a young mostly black heifer, she made a nest for her kittens.

                For the first weeks of the kittens life, the Blind Cat, as she was called (barn cats don’t get very exotic names, after all) stayed with them. We brought her food and watched to make sure the dogs weren’t bothering her. But she kept her kittens well covered and wasn’t above smacking a dog nose with an open paw.

                When the kittens were about a month old, the blind cat started leaving them occasionally. She’d walk about the barn or join the other cats to be fed. The kittens could see by then, and they were beginning to be able to climb over the slope of their nest and tumble out. And that is when Rhoda the cows babysitting duties began.

                Rhoda had been watching the blind cat and her kittens since the day they were born. She’d lay down, her head stretched out on the manger floor, her nose almost reaching the cat’s nest and watch the cat and her kittens for hours on end. But when the cat started leaving the kittens for short periods, Rhoda took protecting them seriously.

                If the dogs came near the nest to investigate, Rhoda butted them away with her head. If the kittens crawled out of the nest, Rhoda pushed them with her nose, rolling them back in. When they were big enough to run around, she let them play in her manger, running around her head for hours on end.

                I can’t say that any of the kittens ever paid any attention to Rhoda once they were full grown. But for the two months that they were in that nest next door to her, she stood guard over them and their mother every day.

 

Pulled through Life by a Great Pyrenees

               Scientists believe, according to Dogs Decoded by PBS, that millennia of genetic selection to domesticate dogs, has also made them more puppy like. Dog owners want a perpetually baby faced animal. Someone we can coo baby talk to even when they are hobbling toward the grave. But here’s something you don’t need to be an animal geneticist to figure out. Dog breeds have been bred for particular traits which can make them interesting pets when their skills are no longer being used. Anyone who’s ever owned a Border Collie, but not sheep, knows this.

                A Border Collie without work to do is a dog in need of valium. No, I’m not suggesting drugs for dogs! But it’s a good idea to have a plan for how you are going to use your new Border Collie’s energy and intelligence when you fall in love with that cute face. Otherwise, you’ll be wondering why your dog is bringing you that slobbery tennis ball for the 12,000^th time in an hour and trying to keep your family all together in one room.

                But this isn’t about Border Collies, it about Great Pyrenees, one of the most likely dogs to end up in a dog rescue organization. Great Pyrenees are bred to guard sheep.  Originally from the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, they’ve protected flocks of sheep from bears and wolves for generations. With a thick white coat, they resemble a sheep and are very cold tolerant. The size of a Saint Bernard, they are also fiercely protective of their flock, who they are usually raised with from puppyhood. They are very territorial, and their territory is usually very large. And that’s the reason many adult Pyrs end up needing to be adopted by a new family. They love to run away.

We got Bear, our first Great Pyr, from the pound when his previous owners decided not to come pick him up after the last time he ran away.  Bear ran away from us the second day we had him, despite being on a leash. He waited till I wasn’t paying attention, something he was very good at, and jerked the leash right out of my hand. He had a sixth sense about the best time for make a dash for it. And the first escape established a pattern. He loved to run away in a snow or ice storm and he always headed for the nearest trailer or trailer park.

                I raced up the driveway after him, watching the leash bouncing along behind him. Bruce and I chased the dog through a trailer park, finally losing sight of him about a mile from our house. We went back and got the car, stopping long enough to call the dog warden and tell him the dog was at large. We drove around, making a larger and larger spiral from the epicenter of our house, but never caught sight of him. A pellety snow and ice mixture began to fall and the temperature dropped to the teens.  

We headed home to warm up and not three minutes after we got in the house, the dog warden called. “A woman’s found your dog,” he said.

Bear, with a layer of ice on his heavy coat had decided it was time to warm up. He stopped to scratch on some nice woman’s door and asked to be let in. We collected him and brought him home.

                Along with being territorial and being obsessed with roaming that whole territory regularly, Great Pyrs are nocturnal. Obviously, if you are going to protect your flock, you need to be up at night when the wolves, coyotes, and bears are looking for an easy meal. And you need to hear the smallest whisper of a coyote moving through the grass anywhere remotely near your flock. Better yet, if the coyote knows you are there, they might even decide to give your flock a wide berth and head onto a different hunting ground. And barking throughout the night is always a good way of letting someone know where you are. Bear usually started barking about five minutes after we went to bed.

                Who knew what he heard or smelled; a deer crossing the creek a mile away, a coyote in the next county, a mouse out in the barn? He’d bark intermittently for hours throughout the night. Sometimes, after an hour of barking he’d be quiet for an hour or two, only to start up again around 2 or 3 in the morning. The rest of our dogs, a Golden Retriever, a Border Collie, and a Newfoundland, never barked. They knew Bear had it covered.

                When we moved to a new house, we didn’t have a fenced yard at first. We went for the quick and easy red-neck dog containment system. We hooked a chain to a cement block and tied Bear out. Bear viewed the cement block with disdain. What after all did we think he was? A chihuahua? He roamed our twenty-four acres dragging the cement block behind him. Two cement blocks slowed him down a little. Three finally seemed to keep him in the yard.

Until, that is, a dog ran down the road in front of our house. Hearing Bear barking, I looked out the window, only to see him running down the road with three cement blocks bouncing along behind him.

Have I mentioned that Great Pyrenees are very territorial? Fortunately for the other dog, the cement blocks slowed Bear down.

How to mess up a goat in a few easy steps

It’s pretty easy to mess up an animal psychologically. A lot of animal behavior isn’t instinctual. It’s learned from good old mom. Without her around, or an animal of the same species, it’s easy for any animal to not know exactly what it is. I’ve had a sheep who thought it was a goat, a goat who thought she was a dog, and of course, dogs who thought they were human. Which is why, when Anabel, a day old orphaned goat came to live with us, we proceeded down the road of a psychologically messed up “kidhood.”  Anabel survived, and even I think forgave us, but not without some deep scars.

 

We were living in Urbana, IL at the time in a little development with a postage stamp yard where you weren’t supposed to keep livestock. We decided to raise Anabel in the house, thinking no one would actually see her. Bruce and I had both grown up on dairy farms after all. Calves warming up in the kitchen, horses sticking their head in a window to say hello, chicks in the bathroom, were pretty commonplace. Anabel, we reasoned, could stay in the basement at night and when we weren’t at home. In the evening, she could run around the house with the dogs. No one would be the wiser.

 

Here are a few interesting facts about raising a goat in the house. A baaing baby goat sounds a lot like a bawling infant. That the neighbors never called the police about the screaming baby we kept locked in our basement might be disturbing in retrospect, but at the time I was just relieved.  Also, you can diaper a goat, but because of the way its butt slopes, as soon as the diaper is wet the weight of the thing will make it slide right off. And then there’s the fact that the plastic on a disposable diaper melts every time it comes close to a wood stove, which it does when it’s on the butt of a scampering little goat.

 

Anabel was happy though. She trotted around after the dogs sure she was one of the pack. That they didn’t know how to butt heads with her, didn’t stop her from trying. She came running to the kitchen whenever she heard milk replacer being mixed up. She followed the dogs, waiting to be fed whenever they were. She went out into the yard with the dogs, learning to pee and poop outside right alongside them. She was housebroken in a few weeks. 

 

 Jumping isn’t something goats need to be taught. Playing king of the hill is in their DNA. By the time Anabel was three weeks old, she could jump in one bound on to the dining room table. That she slid straight across the slippery table, wiping out everything on her way, and fell off the other end, was not a deterrent. There was no piece of furniture or counter that was safe. She never made it to the top of the refrigerator, but that wasn’t from a lack of trying.

 

Ruminants, grazing animals with four compartments to their stomach that allow them to digest cellulose, are divided into grazers and browsers. Grazers, like cows, eat mostly grass. Browsers, like goats and deer, eat mostly “browse” better known as shrubs, leaves, bark, twigs, and other things that are chewy and crunchy. Sheep fall somewhere in between eating both grass and browse. The myth that goats eat tin cans comes from the fact that they were often caught chewing on the paper on the tin can. Paper for a goat, is right up there with the crunchiest leaves; something to savor.

 

Anabel understood the concept of browsing, which made her death to my one and only philodendron. Unfortunately, a lot of house plants are poisonous. I moved the plant onto the top of the refrigerator and tried offering other things to Anabel to eat. She was over a month old by then and big enough to start eating things other than milk. But she turned her nose up at everything. We tried it all, grass, grain, shrubs. She just turned her head away and screamed for her bottle.

 

I put grain in Anabel’s milk, thinking I could get a little food into her that way and introduce her to a little texture. She refused to drink it at all. Most animals learn to eat solid food from watching their mothers eat, but Anabel had no mother to show her.  The dogs were the closest thing she had.

 

She nosed the dogs’ kibble, but never eat it. I tried putting hay or grain in the dogs’ dishes, but the dogs wouldn’t eat it and neither would Anabel. Other than the house plants, she wouldn’t consume anything vegetative. By the time she was two months old it was apparent she needed to eat something other than milk to keep up with her growth. Plus, if we locked her in the basement, she screamed non-stop. And if she was upstairs, the furniture, knick-knacks, anything on any surface, was soon flying through the air and landing on the floor. The dogs thought it was great fun, but the house was a disaster.

 

So, we did what all good parents do. We decided to send Anabel to boarding school for remedial training. We had friends that lived out of town and had a pig, dogs, ducks, and horses, but unfortunately no goats. Anabel went to live with them. She started with the pig as a tutor, who by the end of the first week had her eating grain. Moving up to grass and hay was a little more difficult. But by the end of a month, the horses had gotten her to start nibbling on bales of hay.

 

By the time Anabel was six months old, she was almost normal. Well, at least she was eating normally. She still had no idea she was a goat. She didn’t meet another goat till she was over a year old, which was a very traumatic event. But that’s another story.

Some Things I've learned from Dogs

A week after Finn, our eight week old Golden Retriever pup came to live with us, Bruce and I headed east from Oregon to visit family in New York State. Finn nestled on the brown plaid vinyl seat between us, as we drove the rust colored Chevy pick-up through long stretches of empty country. Within a day, the three of us settled into a traveling routine. By the time we reached Wyoming, Finn was truck broken.

The flat, gray-green sagebrush-covered landscape rolled on in every direction; the flat horizon relieved by an occasional tree, or a cow grazing among the sage brush. Finn broke the monotony by changing positions, or rushing to the window to watch the scenery race by. When he needed to go, hid place his paws on the door, press his nose to the window and whining to go out. To take a nap, he’d climb up my shoulder, tight rope walk across the back of the truck’s bench seat. Then plopping down with two right legs dangling over the front and the two left behind, he’d fall asleep straddling the bench seat. Draped over the seat, he’d sleep as we made our way across Oregon and Utah.

            On the third day of the trip, in the middle of Wyoming, Finn woke up from a nap and climbed onto my lap. He placed his two front paws on the window and began to whine. “He needs to go, Bruce” I said.

            Bruce stared straight ahead, his eyes never leaving the interstate that stretched out ahead of us. “There’s a rest area coming up soon,” he said.

            I patted Finn’s head thinking of all the stories I could tell him about driving cross country with Bruce. The first time Bruce and I headed west, I marveled at his organization. None of this “get in the car and go” for Bruce. He pored over maps; planned out the route; memorized the interstate numbers; calculated how far he could get on a tank of gas. Every exit to get gas was predetermined. Every rest area to stretch our legs and go to the bathroom was scheduled. Finn had my sympathy. I’d crossed my legs across many a state waiting for the scheduled rest stop.

The “Rest Area - 2 miles ahead” sign came into view. “Soon,” I whispered to Finn, who trusting that relief was in sight, curled up on my lap and tried to sleep.

            A huge green sign announced the rest area. An orange slash across the sign, proclaimed its closure. A couple large orange barrels blocked the ramp, emphasizing the impenetrability of the place.

Bruce didn’t take his foot off the gas. He drove by at 60 miles an hour. Finn, sensing relief slipping away, jumped up and looked out the window. He barked as the rest area slipped out of view behind us.

            “Bruce,” my voice sounded like a screech even to my ears, “he has to go.”

            “The rest area’s closed,” Bruce said. “I can’t just stop.”

The countryside rolled by us devoid of roads, houses, or cars. “Why on earth not?” I said.

            “A car might come,” he answered.

            My eyes scanned the horizon; not a car in sight. I looked behind us. No one followed for the miles that rolled out flat and unbroken behind us. We hadn’t seen another car all morning. “It’s Wyoming, Bruce” I said.

            “I’ll pull off at the next exit,” he answered.

            “It’s Wyoming, Bruce. The next exit could be two hours away.”

            As if in answer a sign came into view. “Dead Indian Road - 10 miles”, it read.

            “We’ll pull off there,” Bruce answered, satisfied that that was a good solution.

            Finn stood up and circled on my lap. I pet him ineffectually. “Should have warned you buddy,” I thought, “bladders and stomachs don’t usually figure into Bruce’s calculations.” I hoped he wouldn’t pee on my lap.

            As if resigned, he put his paws on my shoulders and pushing with his back legs, climbed up to the back of the bench seat. “Good” I thought, as Finn tight rope walked across the back of the seat to the middle where he usually slept. “He’s going to lie down and sleep a while.” But when he reached the middle of the seat he kept walking until he was balancing on the back of seat right behind Bruce’s right shoulder.

            “What’s he doing,” Bruce asked, as a sizzling sound filled the air, the acrid smell of warm urine floating across the cab. “Stop him,” Bruce yelled, as I watched a dark wet patch spread slowly across Bruce’s shoulder and down his back and arm. Dark yellow urine pooled on the vinyl seat, and rolled slowly toward me. I pressed myself against the door, looking around for something to dam the flood. Finn stood balanced behind Bruce’s shoulder, the stream of warm yellow urine flowing on and on and on. I watched enthralled, amazed that such a little dog could hold so much pee.

“Stop him,” Bruce said again, but I was trying not to laugh, while I pulled a roll of paper towels from behind the seat and mopped up urine.  The pee followed a seam in the vinyl and spilled onto the floor of the cab, avoiding me all together.

Finn finally stopped, turned and walked back to me. He climbed down off the seat and curled up on my lap for a nap.

I mopped ineffectually at Bruce’s soaked shirt with a paper towel. “Maybe you can stop at the next rest area to change,” I said, as Bruce’s unsmiling face stared straight ahead.

I learned more from Finn that I’ve learned from most people, so here’s hoping I can write story animals who are nearly as entertaining.