We took in a stray dog of questionable ancestry back in '93. She was mostly some type of bird dog, the vet said, and around 7-10 years old. We owned 5 poultry houses, so I thought I would see how she behaved inside one of the houses with 30,000 noisy chickens. She stayed at my heels and didn't bother the chickens, so it became a routine. When I would get in the truck she would jump in the bed and go with me several times per day. Usually on the first trip of the day. I would walk through each house, once around the inside walls between the feeders and walls, and the next around the inner part of each house. My purpose was to look for chickens who had died, were obviously weak, or somehow deformed. These would be removed from the houses to allow the healthy chickens to remain healthy. After 2 or 3 weeks, the dog, who we had named Reddawg because of her color (we aren't very imaginative) started pointing to the culls (the weak and deformed) that I had overlooked. I thought that was pretty good, since I hadn't trained her to do this. Then one day I said, "Go get it, girl." She ran and picked it up and brought it me unharmed. She had a bird dog's "soft mouth."
We contracted with Tyson, and the representatives who saw this demonstration were amazed. It became routine for them to bring some the visiting higher-ups to watch her do her stuff. She was always a big hit.
Sometime around the year 2000, she got to the point she couldn't jump up into the bed of the truck, so I started letting her ride inside with me. After about another year she got to the point that she could only go through 1 house and then not even that and I had to allow her to retire. She continued to live on the farm until around 2006. She just disappeared one day and we never found her. If the vet was correct, she was around 20-23 years old.
That's the last dog we have owned. Over the years we had other dogs on the farm when she was alive, but they were all outside dogs. She's the only one we allowed in. She smelled like the chicken houses, but so did the rest of the farm, and we didn't mind.
We will never forget her.
Last edited by iandwk; 08-09-2010 at 02:07 PM.
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