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.