BOB IS A dog who made a huge impact on me. I met Bob during my gap year, when I was travelling around the world with Duncan. Duncan and I met at agricultural college and became great friends, and we now work together as business partners at Bemborough Farm. Back in 1988, though, we were young lads with no responsibilities, who decided to see a bit of the world before we settled down to full-time work. Being farmers was a great help: it’s not too difficult to find jobs on farms if you are happy to be a labourer and get stuck in. If you add in some skills, well, you can earn enough to keep funding your travels when you move on.
That’s how we arrived in Katanning, a small town two hours’ drive from Perth, Western Australia. We’d worked ourselves into the ground for six weeks with a sheep-shearing gang, travelling to different farms to help the shearers. It was exhausting, hot and pretty relentless work.
So we were hoping for something a bit easier as we rattled into Katanning in our beaten-up, ancient Ford Falcon XB (a model only made in Australia) and made our way to a farm which we had been told was looking for seasonal staff. The farmer had one question for us: did we prefer livestock or machines? It wasn’t difficult to answer. I, like my dad, have always been a livestock man. Duncan is the arable man, and that’s the machine part of farming (it’s how we still divide up the farm work to this day). On this occasion Duncan certainly made the right call, and found himself having an easier time than I had working with the sheep. He spent all day driving a huge, state-of-the-art combine harvester, with a lovely air-conditioned cabin.
I, on the other hand, was asked to drench 16,000 Merino sheep. That number may not mean much to a non-farmer, but if I say I have a flock of 700 sheep at Bemborough now you get an idea of the scale of these outback farms or ‘sheep stations’. (The largest has about 60,000 sheep – imagine going to sleep counting that lot!) Drenching was a familiar process to me: you have a pack on your back full of the necessary liquid worm treatment and a pipe with a gun on the end with which you squirt a dose down the throat of every sheep. But 16,000? I couldn’t imagine any flock so vast.
Nowadays drenching is scientific; we take dung samples from our sheep that are dissolved into a solution so they can be examined under a microscope to assess what is known as a faecal egg count. An expert is then consulted on exactly how much of what chemical to use to treat our sheep. Back then, it was a matter of getting a dose of worm treatment into every single sheep, and without Bob I simply wouldn’t have been able to do it. It would have been a two, or possibly three, man job, so Bob, who worked for nothing more than his daily feed, definitely earned his keep for the farmer. Bob was an Australian sheepdog, known as a kelpie. He was not the first I had seen on my trip, as the farmers rounding up their flocks for the shearing gang used them to help pen the sheep, and I’d watched in awe as these agile, enthusiastic dogs moved the sheep around quickly and expertly.
Kelpies are great yard dogs, handling huge mobs of sheep (the Australians talk about ‘mobs’, not flocks, and, with the numbers they handle, it’s a good word …) Kelpies are brilliant at moving the sheep and packing them into pens. They can bark on command and when they are penning the sheep they jump up on to their backs, moving from the front to the back of the mob barking and packing the animals in tighter.
At every sheep station we went to with the shearing gang, the farm owner (known in Australian slang as ‘cockies’, because the early settlers, like the cockatoos, made their homes along the edge of water courses) used their own dogs to get the sheep into the sheds for shearing. The shearing sheds over there were purpose built, with stands for as many as ten shearers (we generally have shearers who bring their own mobile stands, with a maximum of two or three). As roustabouts, or unskilled labourers, we had to do everything apart from the actual shearing: picking up the fleeces as soon as they were off the sheep, lying them flat on a table, picking out the dirty bits, then rolling them up and throwing them into the right bin for their grade, which was determined by a professional grader. It was hard work keeping up with the shearers, but if there was ever a pause we were expected to sweep up the shearing area, so that it was spotless and clear of any locks of wool.
The cockie would use his border collies to bring the sheep in from the paddocks, and Duncan and I would push the sheep into the catching pens. That was when I first saw a kelpie jump on to the back of the sheep. I’d heard about it, but never seen it. They squeezed the sheep in, but with pens containing as many as 500 sheep the dog had to be brought out quickly: if his presence made the sheep rush to one side they could crush each other.
I was fascinated and really impressed by the dogs’ skill and hard work. Kelpies look a bit like dingoes and lots of Australians believe they are indeed descended from the ancient wild dogs that have lived on the Australian continent for at least 3,500 years. However, it’s actually more complicated than that. Kelpies are almost certainly descended from collies brought over by early settlers, but there is scientific evidence that dingoes interbred with them, probably way back in the early nineteenth century when Australia was newly colonised. The interbreeding may have been accidental at first, but seeing the result some shepherds and farmers probably deliberately bred dingo into the mix. There is no real way of knowing because keeping dingoes or dingo-cross dogs was illegal, so nobody ever owned up to doing it. When sheep were introduced to Australia the dingo found them easy prey, and was therefore public enemy number one. There was a bounty for killing them, and a hefty fine for any farmer keeping a dingo cross. So naturally farmers were deliberately vague about their dogs’ pedigree.
But DNA tests in recent years have shown that modern kelpies have 3–4 per cent dingo genes. That’s only a small percentage, but perhaps enough to account for the differences between traditional collies and kelpies. Bill Robertson, a well-known breeder who organised the DNA testing, believes the dingo contributed ‘the spirit, the grit and the ability to handle heat’ to the character of the kelpie. I think most of us who love collies would be reluctant to credit the dingo with the spirit and the grit, as we see plenty of those qualities in our dogs, but the ability to handle heat is a vital addition to working dogs in Australia. If, as most experts believe, the first kelpies were collies brought over from Scotland (the word ‘kelpie’ means water spirit in Gaelic), the searing Australian heat would be something they needed to adapt to, and a dash of dingo blood almost certainly helped.
Bob had plenty of grit, but even he rebelled against the heat at times, retreating to the shade under the ute (utility vehicle) whenever he got the chance. As it was regularly 35 to 40 degrees as we worked together, I couldn’t blame him.
The sheep I was drenching were Merinos, which have very valuable wool. Over in the UK, the fleece is generally a by-product of sheep farming and we earn very little from the wool. Our wool is coarser, because of the climate, and we farm sheep to produce lambs for meat, rather than specialising in wool, but Merinos produce wonderful white fleeces, the best in the world.
Merinos are stocky, strong sheep, with claims to be one of the oldest domesticated breeds of sheep around today, coming originally from Spain but thriving in the Australian climate (other breeds brought in during the early years of colonisation simply couldn’t survive the conditions). They proved to be very good foragers, finding food in the scrubbiest, most parched landscape where the grass is brittle and doesn’t look as if it has any nutritional value. The rams have big, spiralled horns, and are tough old characters, as I learnt from experience. The sheer size of the Australian landscape means that these sheep are left to their own devices most of the year. They grow so much dense, close, fine, valuable fleece that it has become a major export for Australian agriculture. As a farmer working with livestock you often get covered in manure and interestingly it was noticeable how Australian sheep smelt differently from our sheep back home. Their dung is dryer due to the parched pastures that they graze on, and it is a smell that still sits in my memory.
Pete Dewar, the farmer’s son, took me out on the first day of my mammoth task to show me the ropes. Back home in those days when we wanted to drench the sheep we gathered them and brought them to our permanent handling pens in order to treat them. So it was a novelty for me to see the mobile handling pen that Pete towed behind the old Suzuki ute, a pick-up with a flat-bed back, and I made a mental note to tell Dad in my next postcard home how useful it was. We used to walk the sheep miles across fields to our permanent pens, which was stressful for the sheep, time consuming, and knackering for the dogs. This more efficient way of doing it was made necessary by the vast acreage of the sheep station, but I could see it would also be very helpful even on our English farm.
Pete and I drove out to one of the paddocks, set up the pen in a corner of the field and started to round up a mob of sheep. I was accustomed to paddocks of ten or twenty acres, but out there they were more like a thousand acres.
We circled the paddock in the ute, zig-zagging to gather the sheep together, Bob on the back of the ute barking. Because of the noise he made the sheep would draw together. We skirted the perimeter to make sure there were no dead or injured ones and then Bob, who was a lovely red colour with a thick coat, took over. He jumped off the vehicle and worked behind them very naturally, moving them along without any commands from me, doing his job. He didn’t need the standard sheepdog commands for ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘lie down’, and there were no whistle commands like we use with our collies, but if a sheep or two broke away the command ‘Go back’ sent Bob off to round them all up again. To the postcard I was mentally writing for Dad I added, ‘We really need one of these amazing dogs.’
Bob’s next job was to get the sheep into the pen, and then he leapt on their backs to the command ‘Get up on them’, packing them in tight, and funnelled them through into a narrow race, where I could drench them one by one. On the command ‘speak up’ he would bark, which underpinned his control of the sheep, and ‘That’ll do’, told him to stop immediately. It was a very efficient system: without him I would have been running up and down in the baking heat trying to push them through by myself (which is why it was a job that one man would not be able to do on his own).
Occasionally, if the sheep were too far apart, Bob would fall into the race and instead of leaping from back to back towards me, he would end up having to weave under their legs as the sheep leapt forward to avoid him and often ran over him. He would let out a whimper as he made his way through them, but still managed to pack the sheep in tight. As soon as they were in I shut the back gate. Bob would clamber out and flop in the shade under the ute until I called him out to help me fill the race again. It was easy to drench them when they were so tightly packed as they couldn’t move away from the drench gun. This made it easier to put the gun into their mouths and helped stop them leaping about, which could have caused damage to their throats. It is a very labour-intensive job but needs to be done carefully and accurately for the welfare of the sheep.
After the first day with Pete showing me what I was expected to do, I was on my own. I had a map, and Pete told me which paddocks I’d find the sheep in, I had the ute and I had Bob. It was exhausting work in that interminable heat, and with flies hovering around the sheep and me. Flicking away flies is known as the Aussie salute, also known as the Barcoo salute (after the Barcoo River) or the Bush salute. It’s an automatic gesture to keep bush flies away from the nose or mouth – or at least, that’s what you hope.
I had to wear long sleeves and trousers tucked into my boots. I also wore an Akubra, the traditional wide-brimmed hat made of rabbit fur felt, named after the aboriginal word for ‘head covering’. I needed to protect myself carefully from sunburn, not just the flies.
Driving out to the paddocks where Bob and I worked was an incredible experience. In the throbbing heat of the day – and it was hot from dawn onwards – the hard, dry ground shimmered, the noise of the parrots was a raucous din, and the sight of them was blinding in the harsh light. There were flocks of galah cockatoos with their vivid pink faces and breasts and soft grey back plumage chattering constantly and calling to each other, and smaller flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos. These are white with soft yellow feathers under their wings and on their tail and a flash of acid yellow on the crest of their head, and every bit as noisy as the galahs. They flocked on to the ground pecking around for seeds and insects, or perched on the silvery eucalyptus trees. As we bumped along in the ute I’d see grey kangaroos, hopping along beside or in front of us. For a young man in his early twenties alone in this landscape this was all amazing, and made even better by the constant presence of my mate, Bob.
If the noise from the birds was deafening, the din was increased by Bob’s excited barking. He loved working and he couldn’t wait to get started. His racket drove me mad every morning, but by the time we returned after a hard, hot day working, he would simply lie down and keep quiet behind me on the flat bed of the ute.
On my first day I drank the whole of my water supply from its big polystyrene container by midday: this was a mistake I didn’t repeat, as I was a couple of hours’ drive away from my base and couldn’t pop back for more. I made sure from then on to fill more of the huge plastic containers to sling on to the ute every day. When I took a break of any sort, even to just have a swig of water, Bob made his way to the shade of the ute and in the hottest part of the day I had to coax him out to carry on working.
Most of the sheep were ewes, like a flock here, but there were also mobs of wethers, which are large, castrated males who were kept solely for the huge, valuable fleeces they produced each year. Castrating them was supposed to make them calmer and easier to handle, but they were still big beasts with minds of their own. At least they and the ewes did not have sharp horns like the rams, who really were my toughest customers.
One day I was drenching a hundred enormous rams in forty-degree heat, and I literally found it impossible to touch their backs, the fleece was so hot. They did not want to move and Bob was more stubborn than usual, refusing to come out from the shade of the vehicle. The flies were driving me mad and I genuinely feared I would die of heat stroke.
That was when I realised that perhaps Bob was trying to tell me something. The old Noël Coward song (which no doubt my famous grandfather, the actor and comedian Leslie Henson, sang sometimes) about mad dogs and Englishmen being the only creatures foolish enough to go out in the midday sun was clearly true, and Bob was certainly not happy being cast in the role of a mad dog, however bonkers the Englishman was. I loaded him back into the ute, bumped across the rough paddock back to the shack where Duncan and I were living and settled in the shade until about 5pm, when the heat was abating. At this time of day Bob jumped willingly on to the back of the pick-up, and off we went again, working late until the job was done.
I never asked the Dewars whether without me they would have done the job in the cooler evenings; perhaps they laughed at me attempting it earlier. From then on, I was on the late shift.
Dotted around the massive station were deep man-made ponds, which were called dams. At over 30 yards long by 15 yards wide they were more like small reservoirs and were built to provide water, a very precious commodity, for cattle and sheep. Despite the fact that the water was pretty dirty and slimy, it was very tempting. At the end of a long day in the heat I often plunged into the cool, if filthy, dam that was closest to our home. It was big enough to have a good swim, as long as you weren’t too particular about the colour of the water. At the end of a long, dusty day, it felt great.
The dams were full of crayfish, or ‘yabbies’ as the locals called them. They were regarded as a pest because if they burrowed into the walls of the dams the water would leak away. But they were a treat for Duncan and me. Pete Dewar taught us how to catch them. The yabbies were meat eaters with a great sense of smell and so were attracted to lumps of meat wrapped in a net. When this was thrown into the dam on the end of a rope and weighted down the yabbies would try their best to get to the meat, getting their claws tangled in the netting, so all you had to do was leave it for an hour and then haul them out. We would catch them, cook them and eat them with relish.
Our home was a shack, about the same size as a mobile home but raised on stilts, at the side of the farmhouse. There’s an established tradition in the outback for building raised homes because they are better ventilated and cooler, as well as deterring some of the snakes and spiders (although not all …) There were fly screens at the windows and door, and we soon learned to keep these closed. We had two bedrooms and more or less all we needed. We cooked our own food, which meant a fairly basic repertoire of chilli and spaghetti Bolognese, so the yabbies were a welcome change. We had to do our own shopping, but the nearest town was a good drive away, so the farmer’s wife would sometimes take a list of what we needed and bring it back when she fetched her own supplies.
Bob slept in the yard with the other dogs: there were a couple of other kelpies and a couple of border collies. They were kept on long chains, and had barrels to sleep in out of the heat and trees to give them shade. Dog pellets were thrown to them, and sometimes they got raw meat – chopped up sheep or kangaroo meat.
For the month I worked with Bob, I came to adore him. He wasn’t a demonstrative animal, but I think I earned his respect. He worked devotedly for me and I realised how impossible it would have been without him. Our weeks at Katanning passed very quickly, as Duncan and I were both working long and hard, and the time to move on came quickly.
Back home from our adventures, Dad was very receptive to my new ideas. He was always very open to new advances in farming and, besides, I think he wanted to encourage me, as he relished the idea that I would one day take over Bemborough Farm. He could see that I loved the place as much as he did, and that my travels may have broadened my farming experience but they had also cemented my conviction that this was the place I wanted to live and work.
We bought a quad bike and the mobile handling pen system. Next on the list was the kelpie, and that was down to me. If it was to be my dog I had to research and find it. At that time, in 1989, there were not too many kelpie breeders in England, but I saw an advertisement for a new litter in Hampshire. I drove down and instantly fell in love with a little red bitch, choosing red because she reminded me of Bob. The mother of the litter had been imported from Australia, so this little one was a first generation English kelpie.
I called her Bundy, naming her after the famous Australian Bundaberg rum – I’d enjoyed a few rums while I was out there, and she was a lovely dark rum colour. She was a smashing dog from the first day I had her. I taught her to ‘speak’, and she was an excellent yard dog, and great at getting the sheep into the pens. She was not so good out in the fields: some kelpies are on a par with collies in the paddocks, but it’s rare to get one that does both jobs equally well.
By the time I bought Bundy I had moved out of the farmhouse and into a bungalow on the farm. It had been previously used by the stock manager, but when he left there was no need to replace him, as I was now working full time and Mum and Dad wanted to give me some more independence.
Bundy moved into the loo. Just like Nita had spent many happy hours sleeping in the downstairs toilet at the farm, Bundy accepted that her bed was next to the plumbing in the bungalow. Unlike the kelpies in Australia and the sheepdogs on our farm, she slept inside, but she never ventured into the living rooms. She was half-house dog, half-outside dog: house-trained and great company, but definitely a working dog, who liked nothing better than joining me at the crack of dawn to get on with my farm chores.
She was very good natured and quickly got on with the other dogs on the farm, Raven and Bill, working well alongside Bill. Dad and I both thought she was a real success and I was keen to breed from her. There were not too many kelpies in Britain at the time, but I found a kelpie dog living not too far away and he served her. I didn’t take her to be scanned: I realised she was pregnant because she was getting bigger and coming in to milk. When I knew she was near her time I didn’t take her out to work with me, but left her curled up on her bed.
When I got home she wasn’t there, and I realised I had left the door from the kitchen into the rest of the bungalow open. Normally, Bundy would not have gone through, but on this occasion she had found her way into my bedroom and was under my bed. I’d left a book I was reading on the floor next to the bed and Bundy had ripped it up and made a nest for herself under the bed, where I found her proudly licking one, really large, puppy.
I searched around all the other bedrooms and the living room to see if there were any others. Then I sat with her waiting for more puppies to come, although she was showing no signs of still being in labour. After a couple of hours I rang the vet and he told me that it was possible for a bitch to have one large pup, although it’s not common. It’s a great credit to Bundy as a mother that she raised her pup really well: I now know that singleton puppies can have a hard time, not having the warmth of their litter mates and sometimes gorging themselves because there are no others competing for the mother’s milk. Apparently, there is a risk of such a large puppy getting stuck during the birth and a Caesarean being the only answer. But Bundy had delivered him on her own, showed no signs of having had a bad time, and was looking after him devotedly. What a star.
We called him Red because he had the same colouring as Bundy, and when he was old enough to leave her I gave him to Duncan. Duncan, like me, really liked the kelpies we met in Australia. At this time, he had a farm tenancy on Bryher, the smallest of the inhabited Scilly islands, with his wife Becky. Red took to his new life with enthusiasm: the island is only one and a half miles long by a mile wide, and Red regarded it all as his territory. He was a lovely, friendly dog, and everyone on the island knew him. He would go down to the quay to greet the boatloads of tourists when they arrived and stood proudly on the bow of Duncan’s launch when they went to St Mary’s to go shopping.
Red eventually moved back to Bemborough Farm when Duncan and I took over from my Dad and his partner, John Neave (who was known to me and my sisters as our lovely ‘Uncle’ John throughout our childhood). By this time the farm had expanded, after I’d convinced the landowners that I was serious about remaining at Bemborough. My private life had also changed: the bungalow had gone from being a scruffy pad that I shared with two mates in which I often had late-night parties, to the first home for me and my girlfriend Charlie.
With Dad and John both looking forward to retiring and with Cotswold Farm Park rare breeds centre to run as well, I needed help. Rather than employ someone, I knew that the best move was to go into partnership with Duncan, who was not only a great mate but also had all the skills needed to complement mine. Before Duncan moved to the Scilly Isles he had worked for an agricultural mortgaging corporation and got a really good grounding in business management and financial budgets, something I have to admit is not my strength. He was also happy to take on the arable side of the farm while I ran the livestock and Cotswold Farm Park. After spending a year travelling with him, living in each other’s pockets, I knew we would work together well, an instinct that proved to be completely right.
He and Becky and their two children were happy to move back to the mainland, and Red came with them. He did not spend too much time on the farm (the usual problems of a dog among bitches …) but I was surprised that when he and Bundy met, neither of them showed signs of recognising the other – or perhaps I was just not tuned in enough to see it.
By the time she met Red again, Bundy had had another two litters. Again, when I decided to breed from her, there was the problem of finding a suitable father. Wherever I went, if I met anyone who was interested in or had kelpies I discussed it, and one day I met a chap from Northumberland who agreed with me that the best way forward was to import kelpie semen from Australia and to get our bitches pregnant by artificial insemination. As a farmer I’m familiar with artificial insemination in animals, and I wasn’t worried about it. We contacted an Australian breeders’ association and we both bought some straws of semen (narrow PVC tubes into which semen is sucked, and then frozen in liquid nitrogen). We chose semen from a dog called Bonang Tommy, a black and tan dog from Bonang, Victoria, with a list of trialling wins to his credit. His CV said he was good at backing (jumping on the sheeps’ backs) and at barking on command, and that he had a good breeding history.
The straws of semen were flown to Edinburgh, where they were stored at a laboratory that has the facilities and specialises in artificial insemination, waiting for Bundy to come into season.
When she did I was about to contact the lab to supply me with my straws and the vet to book in the insemination. In the meantime, I took all the sensible precautions, locking her in the bungalow when she was not by my side, but I underestimated the determination of a testosterone-driven dog. They can scent a bitch in season from as far away as three miles in the countryside, and one whiff and they are transformed from obedient, gentle dogs into crazed, lustful creatures who will stop at nothing to get to the object of their desire. In this case, a wooden back door was no deterrent to a black and white collie belonging to one of our neighbours: he simply gnawed his way through it until he had a hole big enough to get through to Bundy.
I was really annoyed, but I didn’t rush her to the vet for a scan and an injection to end the pregnancy: I let nature take its course, crossing my fingers and hoping the marauding dog had not scored a bullseye. Of course he had, and nine weeks later Bundy gave birth to a litter of ten kelpie–collie crosses. I was relieved that it was a large litter (kelpies normally have between four and seven pups), as it meant the one single pup she had first time was not a pattern. They were delightful, Bundy coped very well with them all, and I didn’t have any trouble finding homes for them. Nowadays, kelpie–collie crosses are sought after by shepherds and farmers, but back then the kelpie was still a little-known element. I let my neighbour know what I thought of his dog, the father of this litter, but the truth is that I understand how hard it is to physically restrain a dog when there is a bitch in heat in the area. It underlined to me why I prefer bitches.
As a responsible owner, I couldn’t breed from Bundy again until the following year: bitches should be given at least one season rest between litters, and only irresponsible owners (and dreadful puppy farms) would put a bitch through birthing again in less than a year. When the time came, I kept her very safe until I could get her to the vet for insemination. I’m used to seeing it done with cattle, when the insemination takes place vaginally, but the vet explained that with smaller animals like dogs the best way was to anaesthetise her, cut her open and put the semen straight into her fallopian tube. She said it was more efficient, and it certainly worked.
Bundy gave birth, this time to 12 pups. A really big litter; some red, some black and two yellow ones. I hadn’t seen yellow ones in Australia, and I wondered if somewhere in the past either Bundy or the father had some yellow Labrador genes. I rang Pete Dewar in Australia and he put me straight. Apparently yellow is a perfectly normal colour for kelpies, but they are not popular in Australia because their skin is pinker, more susceptible to sunburn, and their pale pads and noses can get sore in the sand and dry ground. Yellow ones, as a result, are usually not kept.
But the heat wasn’t a problem in England and I so liked the look of my little yellow pups that I decided I would keep one of them. I called her Ronnie, full name Ronnie Barker, even though she was a girl.
Then I faced a dilemma. Twelve was a lot of puppies to feed, and Bundy only had the usual eight teats. How would she cope? I rang the vet and he said the best option would be to keep six or eight, and to be fair on Bundy I should get rid of some.
So I got two washing baskets, put all the puppies on the kitchen table, and started to sort them out. The ones I was keeping would go into one basket; the others, who were going to be put down, would be consigned to the other. I favour bitches, naturally, so they had a good start. Clearly the bigger ones had a better chance of survival, and so the small runty ones had to go. It was agony, as I debated their futures, changing my mind over and over again.
In the end, I had four ‘rejects’, all boys, and I found myself muttering my apologies to them. ‘Sorry, little one, I wish I didn’t have to do this.’ They were tiny, blind, nuzzling each other as they squirmed around looking for their mother’s teats.
It seemed so wrong, and I hated being the one who decided their fate. Although I am used to dealing with the deaths of animals, it doesn’t come without sentiment, and I had a lump in my throat as I looked at the little ones whose life was going to be over so soon.
‘I can’t do this to you,’ I finally said to one little black fellow, lifting him up and putting him in the other basket. Then, when I looked down at the last three, I said: ‘D’you know what? I’m putting you all back with your mum. It’s survival of the fittest, and you are going to have to take your chances …’
They all snuggled up to Bundy straight away, and she was delighted to have her brood back, licking them enthusiastically.
‘It’s up to you now, old girl,’ I said to her and I went off to bed, leaving her to it. I expected that some would not survive, but at least it would not be my choice.
Why did I doubt her? Bundy was a natural mother, and when I came into the kitchen the next morning she had her pups neatly sorted into two groups, six of them feeding from her and the other six asleep. She must have been exhausted, because no sooner was one shift of pups full of milk and drowsy than the other lot were waking up and demanding food.
I told the vet what was happening, and he advised me to start feeding some of them with a pipette, as he was afraid Bundy would not have enough milk to keep this up. She hardly had time to feed herself, let alone rest. So I bought a pipette normally used for feeding kittens, and some powdered puppy milk replacer. Now I was also part of the feeding production line, on duty every four hours to top up those hungry little pups.
At this time Charlie and I were serious about each other, but she was still living and working in London, coming down to stay with me at weekends. It was hardly a lovely romantic time, as she was also roped into the feeding rota. On the vet’s advice, as soon as the pups could lap from a bowl we weaned them. Every single one grew into a healthy, good-sized dog, and I was able to sell them all – apart, of course, from Ronnie Barker.
One of the pups, Sledge, went on to be a renowned sheepdog locally, and I would bump into him and his owner at various times. I shudder at the thought that he may have been one of the boys I put into the ‘wrong’ basket … Another one I kept in close touch with was a little bitch called Tui, named after a kiwi beer, who went to the stockman who was working on the farm. Some of the others went to nearby homes, so I saw them from time to time. The other little yellow one went to a guy who eventually bred from her, so Bundy’s line definitely lives on.
A little time afterwards it occurred to me that I was paying to store the rest of the imported semen at the laboratory in Edinburgh. I did not intend to breed from Bundy again: she’d had three litters, which I feel is enough for a bitch. Nowadays the limit imposed by the Kennel Club is four litters over a lifetime, but at the time I was breeding with Bundy it was six, which most reputable breeders felt was too many. I was never into breeding as a living: I breed from my dogs because I feel it is good for the bitches to have a litter, and because I like the idea of keeping the genes of these wonderful dogs going, for myself and to share them with others. Of course, I do sell them as it covers the cost of breeding.
I would never be able to use the semen on my next kelpie, Ronnie, as it wouldn’t be sensible to get her in pup to her own father. So I put an advert with my phone number in Farmers Weekly: For sale, kelpie semen. Two or three evenings later the phone rang and Charlie answered it.
‘It’s for you. It’s about the kelpie semen,’ she said, handing the phone to me.
‘Oh, great,’ I said. In my usual way I launched into an enthusiastic description of the semen.
‘It’s from a really good dog in Australia, Bonang Tommy. He’s won lots of trials, he’s got a great breeding record. We’ve had a wonderful litter from the semen, twelve healthy pups …’
The man on the other end of the phone tried to interrupt, but I babbled on. Finally, I said, ‘Tell me about your bitch. What colour is she?’
He spoke flatly, finally able to get a word in edgeways: ‘I don’t have a dog. I don’t want to breed dogs. I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m your Dell PC man, I’m coming to install your computer …’
Kelpie semen / Dell PC man … It was an easy mistake to make. But it must have sounded very bizarre to the computer expert, and he gave us a couple of odd looks when he eventually came to install the new PC.
Bundy lived to a good age of 12, but eventually, following numerous operations to have lumps removed from her mammary tissue, she became seriously ill and passed away. I grieved for her: she’d been a great mate, a good worker, all I have ever wanted in a dog.
Ronnie was a smashing little pup, and she, too, grew into a great dog. She was not quite as good as her mother when it came to working the sheep, but handy enough, and a good companion. She and I bonded well, and I still feel emotional when I remember that we nearly lost her when she was two years old.
Ronnie went to the vet for her annual injections, and in retrospect it’s clear she had an infection and was running a temperature at the time. The injections then caused a complete breakdown of her immune system: Vaccine Induced Autoimmune Disease is recognised by vets, with the symptoms being triggered or exacerbated by the vaccines. It happened very quickly after her vaccination and she went into a major decline the following day.
Our vet referred her immediately to the Bristol School of Veterinary Science, where they have state-of-the-art facilities and all the most up-to-date treatments. They had seen cases like hers before, but I was told it was rare. I was also warned that her survival was touch and go, and it was with a very heavy heart that I drove back home after leaving her there. She looked so weak and helpless. She spent two weeks there, on steroids, and all the time I was expecting the phone to ring with bad news. The house felt so empty without her.
At last, thank goodness, I was able to bring her home. She was skin and bone; she’d lost all her weight and muscle tone. I had to tempt her to eat, and I tried different foods: cooked chicken, beef mince, eggs and milk, rice, anything of which I could to get her to take more than a mouthful or two. It was a slow, steady recovery, and I very gradually weaned her off steroids, reducing the dose incrementally.
It was while we had Ronnie that Charlie and I had our two children, Ella and Alfie. Alfie, in particular, bonded with Ronnie; they were like two little mates. I loved seeing Alfie toddling around the farmyard with his faithful yellow shadow by his side. Ronnie, in the tradition of my dogs, also slept in the loo, and like Bundy she was half house dog and half farm dog; a pet but one who worked. I don’t remember teaching either of them to be house-trained – they were both naturally clean and it happened without much effort on my part.
Ronnie lived until she was ten, but she had a sad ending. She was coughing and wheezing, and was given a course of antibiotics by the vet. Then, to my dismay, she started passing blood, so I took her to the vet where an X-ray showed she had swallowed a needle which was causing internal bleeding. The vet wanted to operate immediately, but admitted there was no guarantee that the needle would be located.
I was reluctant to rush her into having a general anaesthetic and so decided to get a second opinion from the senior vet, who I knew well. He ordered a scan which included her chest and it revealed a large tumour, which was obviously the reason for her breathing problems. He told me that there was really no hope: she had four or five months left at the most, and that she would be increasingly uncomfortable and in pain. I didn’t vacillate. It was a very tough decision, but I knew it was the right one: I asked him to put her down. As with every dog I have had put down, the procedure is simple and they die painlessly. I held her in my arms, muttering goodbyes to a faithful, kind, hard-working dog, everything any owner could ask for. Then I carefully drove her back to the farm, for burial among all those other wonderful dogs at Buttington Clump. I cherish the fact that the dogs are buried on the farm: it feels right. This was their home in life and it is where they remain.
Alfie, who was four at the time, was very upset, and he really missed her. But farm children learn the cycle of life early, seeing animals breed, and then, eventually, seeing them die. For Alfie it was his first experience of grieving for a dog to whom he was very close, and I felt for him. But I also knew it is something we all have to learn to accept. I loved Ronnie, and missed her cheerful little snout pushing its way into my hand. But she had a comfortable end, and the alternative was not good.