A Tribute to My Farm Dogs
Me with Tess
I’ve wanted to write this blog for some time now but just couldn’t put it on paper yet. The memories were a bit too fresh and honestly all new to me.
Late last fall, one of my farm dogs was hit by a truck and killed. Tess was my beautiful white Great Pyrenees and truly was “my” first dog. She was going to be 5 years old and I had visions of her becoming the best sheep guard dog of all time.
Turned out she wasn’t….she was scared of the sheep (and cattle) and plopped down on her back for a belly rub for just about anybody who visited the farm. You might have seen Tess in a video we did for our Farm Club last summer.
Shortly after we bought Tess in 2006 we bought Lily. She was a cross between Great Pyrenees and Anatolian. Lily was more of your “down to business” farm dog….running after hawks, standing guard on her turf, but very sweet to our family and returning guests. As fate would have it Lily and Tess were sisters, sharing the same father, but came from two different breeders from two different parts of Iowa. I mean what are the odds?
Little did I realize that 2 dogs act differently than 1 dog. Half the time they stayed on the farm, sleeping, barking and acting like one would expect from a farm dog. The other half of the time they acted like teenagers with a new driver’s license. They would be gone for hours….stomping creeks, digging holes and harassing skunks (on more than one occasion….but to my surprise dogs only smell like skunk for a day or so)!
The second sad part of this story is that Lily met the same fate as Tess 2 weeks ago and was hit by a truck and killed. I guess they weren’t
Lily Taking a Drink on a Hot Day
meant to be apart: 2 sisters reunited. Lily never was the same after Tess was gone. You could see it in her eyes. I was blaming myself. I should have locked them up. I should have trained them or disciplined them better. I guess in my heart I wanted them to explore. In my eyes a dog doesn’t deserve to be chained up or locked away.
So this is my tribute and my goodbye. They had a great life on our farm. They will always be the Wallace Farms official mascots. We will miss them dearly but at least they’ve got each other now.
God only knows what trouble they’re up to.
