Farm Dogs

If dogs run free, why not we?

Bob Dylan 1970
From the album “New Morning”

Farm dogs, at least those I knew and loved in the 1950’s and 60’s, led radically different lives than dogs today, their relationship to humans being then very different. Farm dogs were free. They led their own lives parallel to ours, and we controlled them little. Farm dogs took charge of their lives each day and chose their own path.

Take Henry Dunlap’s dog for example. Henry and Edna lived on the farm a mile south on the gravel road from us. They had a black, curly haired, short legged dog named Tiny. My parents bought our family a set of 1959 blue (cloth bound) World Book Encyclopedias and kept up religiously with the annual supplements. When things got slow on the farm, which they often did, I read those encyclopedias. From my favorite volume, “D” because of the full color pages illustrating breeds of dogs, I decided Tiny was most like a Cairn terrier. By the way the World Book at our house was the Google of its day. If we wondered out loud about something Mom or Dad would invariably say “look it up in the World Book. That’s why we got them.”

Tiny the Cairn like terrier mutt lived at our house. After they’d had Tiny for a year or so Henry and Edna added a pup they named Blackie to their household. They intended for the two dogs to be companions, to enjoy each other’s company. Blackie was born to the same mother, similar in size to Tiny but smooth haired (father unknown), a half brother to Tiny. When Blackie came to Henry and Edna’s place, Tiny came to our house and stayed. Henry came and got him a couple of times. Dad took him to their place once or twice. But each time he was brought home Tiny made that mile trip across the fields on his short legs to our house. In the end Henry said

“Looks like my dog Tiny wants to live at your place with your dogs, Dean. I don’t think he likes Blackie much.”

To which my Dad answered, “Yeah well let’s let him. He gets along fine here.” And that was that. Tiny chose his own home.

At our house at that time were two dogs in addition to Tiny; Tuffy and Ginger. Tuffy was non-descript. I made him out to be a mongrel collie, and while being a nice dog he didn’t strike you as terribly smart. Of that three dog pack that ran together then on the McClure farm Tuffy was a follower. He tagged along. Tuffy would later die under the wheels of a white Buick on the hard road.

Ginger was the leader. He had personality. By carefully studying the World Book plates of various breeds of dogs I put Ginger somewhere in the Whippet, Pointer, Boxer continuum. Very hard to tell. He was long legged and skinny, had a pretty reddish coat of short hair with a white blaze on his face, and one bum leg. Ginger just showed up at our farm one day. He’d been hurt and didn’t put weight on one back leg. He was a whiner with a low tolerance for pain. If there was a dog fight Ginger would be the first one to run away, yipping loudly. After his leg appeared to heal it looked OK but he still held the leg up, until he chased cars. Ginger was a ferocious car chaser and fast. He would get into a low crouch with both his front and back legs pumping in tandem and scoot, biting tires and staying with them halfway to Henry’s house. When he was chasing the car he used that supposedly lame back leg just fine. But when he gave up on the car and trotted back, he held it up again.

Ginger was also known to bring you presents. Sit down in the yard on the spring seat or a lawn chair and before you know it Ginger would be at your side with some kind of offering; a piece of corn stalk, a stick, the dried stiff skin of some long dead animal. He would put his gift on your leg, or drop it at your feet and look up at you with sad black eyes. If you ignored him Ginger would whimper. Sustained like a howl, but soft like a growl, he almost seemed to talk. He’d go up and down the scale. Wish I had recorded it and could play it for you. We would say to each other “Ginger’s talking again.” To get him to shut up we’d get him to come closer and put his head on our knee. There we’d pet him, check for ticks, pull out any burrs that he’d picked up in his travels.

We were good to our dogs, but respected their freedom. They never came in the house and we never put them on a leash. Until the county required rabies shots and registration, thus dog tags, we never put collars on them. Dad thought collars were a danger in that dogs could get hung up on a fence or in brush. But he paid the dog tax willingly. The dog tax in McLean County funded a program where farmers could be reimbursed if dogs killed their farm animals, typically sheep. We kept sheep. (Title of an early blog post.) There was always a chance we might need to collect from that fund.

Tiny the short legged terrier ran furiously to keep up with Ginger and Tuffy, but couldn’t, due to the length of his legs compared to theirs. If you called the dogs from where they were far down in the pasture, Ginger would arrive first, Tuffy next, and after some time Tiny pulled in, panting and worn out. Tiny’s fate was to always be behind. But his size gave him advantages. I once saw the three of them chase a rabbit into a culvert (steel tube placed in a ditch to form a flat place to drive over). Tuffy guarded one end of the culvert and Ginger the other. Both were too big to climb inside. But bringing up the rear was Tiny, who without hesitation ran straight into the culvert, chased the rabbit out Ginger’s end, who clamped it in his jaws. That was the end of the rabbit.

Dogs back then rarely went to the vet. The rule at our house was that you couldn’t call the vet until Dad decided, and we all knew you couldn’t call the vet for a pet. Farming was a business, vets were an expense, and you did not call the vet for an animal that didn’t make you money. Fluffo, a shiny black cat that I befriended and tamed, once got caught up into the belts and pulleys and tumbling rods of the speed jack that ran the corn elevator. Tore her up pretty good. Her legs were OK but she had a patch of fur and skin hanging off her belly and lost most of her tail. She immediately retreated into the safety of the narrow crawl space under the “old house” an ancient storage shed fashioned from what was the first family home on the farm. Like dogs and the culvert, that space was too small for us to climb into. We could see Fluffo under there, licking her wounds, but not reach her.

“Please Dad can’t take her to the vet?” I cried. “Fluffo could bleed to death.” We were sitting on the spring seat in the front yard.

Dad put his arm around me. “You know the saying that cats have nine lives? There’s a reason for that. Cats know how to take care of themselves. They hole up. Fluffo will either get better or she won’t. You make sure she has food and water under there and I’m betting she comes out OK.”

Dad was right. I pushed a saucer of milk with dog food in it (we never specifically fed the cats) under the old house with a stick every day and after a week or so Fluffo emerged. She was never quite the same mind you, the concept of OK being relative, but she survived.

Because pets never went to the vet few if any of them were spayed. As a result, the farm community was replete with puppies and kittens. Female dogs went into heat and when they did you could anticipate a crowd of male dogs hanging around for days and days competing for her affections. Apparently the scent of a bitch dog in heat is so powerful that it will draw male dogs from miles away. If you owned a male dog he might be gone for up to a week. The farmers we knew were good natured about it.

“Your dog’s been at our place for three days,” Mom would tell one of the farm wives at the store in Danvers.

“We wondered where he’d gotten to.”

“He’s not going to come home happy because we put Lady up in the haymow. We had a hard time giving away her pups the last time and that was less than a year ago.”

Lady was a prolific and beautiful long haired Irish setter looking dog who would go away to whelp her pups and in doing so hide them from us. Cows did the same thing in the summer when on pasture, go way into the timber to have their calves. We would follow them from a distance to discover the spot. I once did the same thing with Lady and found a little nest filled with puppies in the long grass among the willows, which grew in a swampy area south of the house before we built the waterway. I didn’t tell anyone for a while. I visited those puppies every day.

Lady died young, hit by a grain truck on the hard road. The truth was most farm dogs died in accidents rather than old age. Freedom presents great risk. I don’t remember a farm dog dying of old age ever.

Champ was a cow dog, sort of a long haired border collie mutt. He had the herding instinct built in. We got him as a pup from the Larson family North of Danvers. When I was a baby they tell me we once owned a good cow dog named Ace, who would help drive the cows. Ever since Ace died on the hard road our family had looked for another. Long after his death we would only have to loudly say “Sic ‘em Ace” for the cows to hurry along, looking behind them, fearing a dog at their heels.

Word would get out that pups were available and families would discuss their worth. It was a small community, so often you would know one of the parent dogs. Most often you knew the mother and no one was sure about the father. There was conjecture, based on the look of the pups, but no proof. Fatherhood was a guess, motherhood a fact. The Larson’s female dog was known to be good with cows, so Mom took me over to the Larson farm and we picked out a pup to be brought home after it was weaned. The farm dogs were all ours collectively but because I picked Champ out of the litter and he was on the farm when I was young I thought of him as mine. He was black with a shaggy white collar in the way of collies and four white paws, soon to be three.

Not long after we brought Champ home he had an accident. Safety for humans was lacking on farms then let alone for animals. The dogs had free reign and were always underfoot, no matter what was happening on the farm. My pup Champ found himself under the rear tire of a neighbor’s John Deere tractor which was pulling a load of corn from the field where it was just shucked. It crushed his back leg.

I was at school. Knowing my attachment to our new pup my Mom made sure in this instance that Dad consented to him being seen by the vet. The vet, whose office was in Tremont, assessed Champ’s injury this way in his report over the phone in the evening after chores were done.

“I’ll never be able to set that leg and have it heal normally. Somebody else might, but that would mean getting him to some university hospital or big city. Dogs are four legged but get along just fine on three, especially when they lose a back leg. My idea is to amputate that hind leg. I think he’ll grow up just fine.”

Mom relayed all this to us at the kitchen table, pausing from time to time with her hand over the mouthpiece, repeating the vet’s words. Mom was sort of the speakerphone of her day.

“Ask him how much it will cost and tell him we’ll call him back tomorrow after we decide,” Dad said.

Apparently either the price was right or Mom leaned hard on Dad to spend the money because the next day after chores but before breakfast Mom called the vet, again in our presence, and announced he could cut off Champ’s leg and return him to us as a three legged dog. The vet said he’d already done so.

“He’s been such a good dog around here that I decided if you had told me to destroy him I’d keep him for myself with three legs. I don’t think you’ll be sorry for doing this.”

We brought Champ home and kept him in the basement while he healed. The vet suggested feeding him fresh liver and gave us powdered vitamins to add to it. We gave him a pan of milk each evening. He came along fine. He did have to learn how to walk again. He would move his front feet forward, hop with his one back leg, and then stand there swiveling that stump. He finally learned to just keep hopping on his back leg, and when he did life got a lot easier. Over time he could run just as fast as ever, although he fell a lot learning. It was difficult for him to get up after lying down, and hard for him to crawl on his belly likes dogs do. While he was learning I would take him the long way through gates so he didn’t have to crawl under fences. But that one back leg grew very strong and he adapted.

Champ was a great cow dog. We drove our herd of jersey cows across Illinois Rte. 9 every spring and summer day to permanent pasture and the pond. That meant twenty five cows or so crossing a fairly busy state highway twice a day. We put two people on the road with red flags, usually Mom and Dad, but it was much safer if the cows hurried across that hard road. A good cow dog moved them along by nipping at their heels, get them all running. That what Champ did. He drove cows as naturally as he ate and slept. Seemed eager to do it. Didn’t need training or telling. You could leave a gate open and he would lie in the middle of it all on his own, guarding the opening by driving any cow or calf away that tried to pass through.

I would play with him in the yard to his herding instinct. I walked slowly towards him, trying to sneak past, and he would go into a crouch, his head close to the ground, eyes glued to me. I’d walk slow, a step at a time, and so would he, one paw rising up and going down slowly, then another, then a tiny hop of his back leg. After a time I would run past him, crossing an imaginary line Champ had set, and he would chase me, get in front of me, and establish another line I shouldn’t cross. He was never mean. I loved that dog so.

I was away at college when they told me Champ died. It was winter and there were ruts in the snow on the driveway. Champ was old and a lot slower than his younger days. Somehow Champ got in a rut behind the Schwann man who was delivering the monthly supply of Butter Brickle ice cream and frozen fish sticks. That day instead of going forward toward Rte. 9 the Schwann man backed up to get on the blacktop. This time Champ was run over proved to be his last. Dad said he was pressed flat there in the rut, probably not able to get up and out of the way in time. He reported that it didn’t look like Champ struggled at all. He told me this over the phone in my dorm room. I felt a little numb, and was glad I wasn’t there to see it. But I was grown up then.

The dog’s death that hit me hardest as a kid was Ginger’s. It was summer and I was home from school. I was in about fourth grade. Dad was mowing the alfalfa field, which meant we’d be making hay in three days. He was mowing with the John Deere, Bait Correll mowed with his Allis Chalmers, and Paul Mehl was using our Minneapolis Z to pull the crimper. Back then farmers used sickle bar mowers to cut hay, a long bar extending perpendicular to the tractor behind the big rear wheel. The mowers were ground driven by gears. Triangular knives moved back and forth behind pointed guards, skimming the ground, cutting the tall green hay stalks. The stalks fell backwards like tiny trees. Sickle bar mowers made a soft noise like the sinister hiss of a snake. They were mean and dangerous machines.

Dad cut the first swath, Bait the second, and Paul raced around with the crimper keeping up with both. They would cut twenty acres of hay in an afternoon, working their way around and around the rectangular field till it was done. I wanted Dad to let me run the crimper but he said I was too little.

Just before milking time Dad pulled into the barnyard with the John Deere. Instead of heading towards the gas tanks, where he usually parked the tractors, he stopped by the big front yard where I was playing.
“David, I need to tell you something.”

He came over and sat on the spring seat. I sat beside him, a little puzzled. Dad was usually not that direct.

“A bad thing happened in the hay field. I mowed into Ginger. He was hurt really bad and he couldn’t live.”

“Couldn’t live?”

“The mower cut his legs.”

“Couldn’t you stop?”

“No. I tried. He came around the front of the tractor real fast. He was chasing a rabbit. I was looking back at the mower and saw him out of the corner of my eye. I reached for the clutch and hit the brakes as fast as I could but before I could get it stopped he was into the sickle bar. He bled a lot.”

“Did he die right then?”

“No. But he was hurt too bad to live. No vet could have fixed what that mower did to him.”

“So you killed him?”

“No. Bait came up behind me, saw what happened, and offered to do it for me. It had to be done David. He’s a good guy Bait. He knew how much we liked that dog.” Dad’s voice cut short.

“I’m really sorry David. Ginger was special. I would have done anything to keep from hurting him but it just happened too fast.”

I had been looking at my Dad the whole time he was talking. My Dad had pale blue eyes and a tan face. A tear came out of the corner of his eye and ran down a crease in his face by his nose. He took a red handkerchief out of the back pocket of his bib overalls and blew his nose. I had never seen him cry before.

“How did Bait, you know… kill him?”

“He hit him in the head with a wrench.”

Bait was a strong guy who did things right. I didn’t think then, or since, killing Ginger that way was cruel. I’d seen my Dad, my brothers, and other farmers dispatch animals quickly and humanely before in the same way. They never knew what hit them. I imagined Ginger went the same way.

“Where is he now?”

“I left him in the field. After milking I’ll go down and bury him there"

“Can you take him to the willows? I know a good spot.”

“Sure. We can take him to the willows. You can go with me.”

After chores were over Dad and I rode down on the Z with a gunny sack and a long handled shovel. He dropped me off by the willows and brought Ginger back in the sack. All I could see was Ginger’s pretty head, that white blaze between his eyes. I showed Dad the spot in the willows where Lady had her pups and he dug the hole there.

Over fifty years later, my dog Ally would die old of an overdose of phenol barbitol in a vet’s office. That day, Ginger died relatively young of an overdose of 12 inch Crescent wrench in a hay field. The effect was the same, as was the emotion. I cried. Dad put his arm around my shoulders.

Farm dogs were free, their world was big, and life in the country was sweet. But it was dangerous and typically short. With freedom came risk. I don’t know which is better, life on a leash or a life lived large. But I think those farm dogs I knew and loved, given the choice, would have wanted to run free.