Mapping Out Your Future With Mike


My life has always included dogs.

From the first mutt named Paddy to our current purebred Great Pyrenees Snowflake.

Life With Siberian Huskies

Let me tell you some stories about dogs. Let's start with a Siberian Husky named Princess. When I was a preteen we raised Siberians. Princess was our first breeding bitch. She wasn't all that pretty but somehow she threw great puppies. One of her pups finished well up the working class at Chicago back in the 1960's. One of her first litter, Racecrest Bandit was the breed standard in Canada for several decades. But Princess was dear to me personally for several reasons. She once chased a squirrel up a large tree about 15 feet vertically up the truck before she realized she could not defeat gravity. When I was in Grade Four, she took a litter of 5 pups on a field trip past the window of my classroom. I got out of school for several hours while I rounded up Princess and the puppies. Made me famous for almost a week. Lastly, our whole family swore that Princess spoke English. She could even spell. She considered my Mother's car her personal means of conveyance. That car was not allowed to go anywhere without her. If someone tried to make plans about a trip in the car. She would immediately go to the door and wait. We often spelled things we did not want her to know and after a while even that did not work. She was my initiation into smart dogs and she was the beginning of our breeding line for Siberian Huskies.

My wife DJ and I got a Siberian from my Mother's line we also called Bandit after the first Bandit had passed on. We took this dog to Princeton with us as I finished up my engineering degree. He was forever placed on the honour role for his contributions on spring day in Kingston NJ. Back in the early 1970's there was a movie out called Thief. The basic idea was that a burglar robbed houses during the day when everyone was at work. This is DJ's story. She was home alone upstairs in the two story house we rented 100 yards up the road from the Kings Inn (where I worked when I wasn't in class). A man came in our house and was calling several girls' names up the stairs. My wife stuck her head around the corner and said "No, what is that you want?" He said he had dropped off several girls at our house a couples of days ago and they had invited him to come back anytime. My wife explained that there was noone at the house by those names but he continued up the stairs. Just then, Bandit stuck his head around the corner. Bandit did a silly trick. If you wiggled your fingers at his nose then he would play snarl and act like he was thinking about biting you. Bandit was a long haired Siberian. To the uneducated, he looked like a wolf. DJ and Bandit came down the stairs and past the guy with Bandit nibbling on DJ's fingers. She kept walking to the kitchen and the man followed. Bandit sat beside her as they chatted. DJ suggested he check at the Kingston Post Office as the older ladies up there knew everyone and everything. He left. My wife locked the door and called me at work. To this day she remembers Bandit fondly. After graduation, we moved to Aylmer Quebec and my job required that I travel at lot. When I returned home, the Bandit, was so enthusiastic a greeter that he would jump over our 18 month old daughter to greet me. His tail would sometimes knock her down. He was a great dog but we did not have a yard and we ended up giving him to a dogsled racer. He raced point and did very well. He ended up being part of a government experiment. He was used a the stud for a breeding experiment with a bitch wolf. The puppies were amazing.

As the kids got bigger we yearned for another dog. But that's another story...

Life With English Setters

We moved from suburbia to a 50 acre farm. It was quite an adventure. In the back of our heads we had the idea that maybe we could take care of, maybe even train some standardbred race horses. That my wife did quite successfully but that's another story. With a farm we decided that we needed some dogs. In my lens, 'Dogs Are Family Too...One', I talked about giving our pride and joy away because he was a little too active for our small daughter. That was Bandit, a Siberian Husky. With all the burrs and whatnot in the fields, we decided English Setters would be a better breed on the farm.

Our first setter was named Misty. She was not the prettiest Setter but she did have a strong personality. Kinda like Princess from DAFT...One. Anyway, she was displeased with the idea of a litter and eventually took her revenge by having the puppies in our bed. Our live in helper swore she tried to prevent but...

Misty had three pups, a small litter. We easily sold two as they were beautiful pups and we kept one because he seems to be a mutant. He was literally twice as big at birth as the other two. We asked our horse vet if the two runts would live and he answered that they were not runts but the big one was an anomaly. We called him 'Just Plain Sam'.

So we had Sam and Misty at the farm. Sam grew to be over 100 pounds and was about 40 pounds heavier that a typical male English Settor. He had a beautiful coat with flowing feathers on his legs and tail. He also had amazing dewlaps. Misty bossed him around a lot but she also taught him to hunt. Many times I watched while Misty took same out to the middle of hay field before it was cut. Had him lie down in the middle. Then she would start around the perimeter, making the diameter smaller and smaller. Eventually she would scare up a rabbit. She would run it right a Sam who was hidden in the hay. When the rabbit arrived. Up sprang Sam and they had lunch. No noise, no barking almost like James Bond with precision.

Sam was never the favourite of my Mother. My parents came out to the farm one Summer Sunday to have dinner and enjoy the pool and farm and animals and grandkids...Mom cooked a prime rib roast beef. She left it on the kitchen counter while she checked on something in another room. No one had told her about Sam and counters. You seem Sam was so big that he was eye level above the countertop. When he saw something he liked, he just took it. Which he did. We had hamburgers for dinner. My Mother never forgave Sam. I don't he cared.

I am not certain if Sam was dumb or just did not give a dam*. We lived on a stone dust county maintained road, about 5 farms and 3 houses on a 2 mile road. The local town kids liked to use it for a short cut because it was straight and seldom had traffic. Sam liked to sleep on the wave road, in the middle of it. It was his road. The local cars and trucks knew Sam and drove around him or got out and yelled at him to move. The teenage kids did not know it was Sam's road. They came down the stone dust road at about 80 miles an hour and Sam did not even lift his head up. He just ignored them like he did everyone else. The kids saw Sam, hit the horn and finally gave up and steered for the ditch. I came back from the barn because of all the noise and went out to the road to see what happened. Sam was asleep on the road. The kids and their Camaro were in the ditch. They started to yell at me and I just looked at them. I asked them if they were all right and they said yeah. Then they asked me to help them out of the ditch with my tractor. I did not see much point in that and suggested that they drive a little slower. Everyone knew that was Sam's road.

We decided to get a bitch from another line of English Setters so that we could breed Sam. We bought a blue English Setter we named Calamity Jane. She was a hunter like Misty and the rabbit population dwindled to zero. But Jane's claim to fame was something else. Often Setter owners will brag on the 'soft mouth' of an English Setter. We had a pond in the middle of our racetrack and ducks and geese made it their home. Jane often went swimming and generally raised Cain with the birds. On day my wife was doing something in the front yard so that Jane could see DJ from the pond. The next thing we knew there was a loud commotion at the pond and Jane was trotting back to the front yard. In her mouth was a Mallard duck. When she got to DJ she wagged her tail and dropped it at DJ's feet. The duck righted itself, quacked loudly, and flew back to the pond. Jane turned and ran back to the pond to play. My wife never said a word...

People who live their whole lives in the city or suburbia miss out on a large piece of life. Rural and town life is even more limited if one does not share ones life with a dog, preferably two at time.

Life With A Border Collie

In the section about English Setters I mentions a bitch named Misty, a bitch named Jane and a male named Sam. When we moved from the farm in Milton Ontario Canada to Roswell Georgia an Atlanta suburb, we took all 3 Setters with us in the back on our pickup truck. We fenced our yard at our new home and the dogs were fine. We even breed Jane to a local stud and she had 3 puppies, just like Misty. And just like Misty she had two perfect puppies and one giant, this time a female. We quickly sold the two perfect pups and it because evident that the female was stone deaf. She was beautiful except that she was deaf and her eyelids were messed up. We had the vet fix her eyelids but there was nothing we could do for Bertha as far as her hearing was concerned. The older dogs died off as their age caught up to them and Bertha was left alone. That was when we decided to get two more pups. We bought Snowflake, the Great Pyrenees and Tippy the Border Collie. Stories about Snowflake are in my lens 'Life with a Great Pyrenees'. Tippy gets a story all her own.

I am certain you have heard that Border Collies are very intelligent. Well, we got Tippy to be my companion in my truck as I drove around between jobsites. I spent a lot of time with her and I always talked to her as if she was a person, not a dog. After a while, other people noticed that she seemed to understand everything I said. This did not surprise Tippy or me but seemed to confuse many others.

I told you about Bertha, because I want you to understand something. Bertha was stone deaf. She was so deaf that several times meter readers came knocking on my door to tell me I had a dead dog in the backyard. They could not wake her and were afraid to touch her. Now let me ask you a question, "How do you call a deaf dog into the house?"

When we had all 3 Setters, it wasn't too bad because Bertha learned to watch the others to know when to come into the house. But if she was sleeping, I had to go and get her. When Tippy arrived, all that changed. First of all she hounded poor Bertha with mercy to play with her. Bertha would go and hide to get away from Tippy. Whenever I wanted Bertha in the house, I would say to Tippy, "Go get Bertha", and away she would go. She would come back with a big smile on her face, proud of her accomplishment. I would then say "Where's Bertha" and Tippy would look over her shoulder and realize that Bertha had not followed her, she would give me almost a Gallic shrug and go and fetch Bertha once more. This routine amazed houseguests numerous times.

Tippy was never officially trained. We have a manual gate in the driveway which we usually leave open. When Tippy and Snowflake were let into the front yard, the gate was closed. If only Tippy was in the front yard, we did not need to close the gate because Tippy would run along the fence and the open gate line, back and forth, barking at something across the street. But she would not leave the yard if you told her to stay in the yard. The amazing thing is anyone in the family could tell her. The words did not need to be exact. Just anything that meant, stay in the yard...

Tippy passed on recently and is sorely missed. I miss her hiding behind my easy chair during a thunder storm. I miss her cowering under my desk when it thundered. I miss her licking my hand looking for attention all the time. I miss my best friend. Who says dogs aren't family?

Life With A Great Pyrenees

Our whole family loves Snowflake. She is about 11 years old and very demanding. Great Pyrenees are just a fantastic breed. They are affectionate while aloof. They truly are a guard dog. She has a giant voice which is exercised whenever something untoward is happening near our home. Like someone walking a dog at the street...

We have had many dogs in our lives. I started with a Heinz 57 when I was 5 years old. Paddy was my grandmother's dog. The only dog who has ever bitten me. When I was young and foolish, I tried to comfort Paddy when he had his paw caught in a screen door. NEVER APPROACH A DOG WHO IS IN SEVERE PAIN. Their instincts rule and they bite out at anything in response to the pain.

We have been fairly loyal to breeds through the years. The other breeds will be the subject of other lenses. My mother raised Siberian Huskies and I owned at least one Husky until I was 26. There were several years when we did not have a dog because the children were so small and friendly enthusiasm sometimes turned into accidental concerns. When we moved to a farm we got English Setters. We took Setters to Atlanta ten years later and still had one up until a year ago. Although we kept Bertha, our oversized deaf Settor, about 12 years ago we decided to change breeds. This was primarily because English Setters in Georgia are more like Pointers than the Setters in Canada. Anyway that's another story. We settled on a Border Collie, Tipper, to keep me company in my truck as I toured my construction sites. DJ chose Snowflake, a Great Pyrenees. DJ always preferred the large dogs and was bewitched by the Great Pyrenees puppies and Mother. By the way, I really do know how to spell Great Pyrenees, it's just that someone already took that lens folder name. Tippy stories another time.

The Great Pryenees have a long heavy white coat, including their tail. I mention the tail specifically because I swear it is prehensile. When she was about 6 months old, she would wrap around your leg as you patted her. Even now at 12, she uses it to keep you close when she wants some attention. Snowflake amazed us as she matured. She literally would herd our youngest child around the backyard or the house. Taking her lead from DJ or me as to where Liam should or shouldn't go.

Snowflake is a easy pet. She does not require a lot of 'maintenance'. Because of her heavy coat, she does take a long time to dry after a bath. The biggest issue is with her dew claws. It is my understanding that a Great Pryenees must have its dew claws intact if you wish to show the dog. At one point we had ambitions in that area so we did not have her dew claws removed when she was a puppy. Per se the dew claws are not a problem. The problem is the nails on the dew claws. They grow quickly and will actually grow back into the skin if not trimmed properly. If you do not know how to trim a dog claws, then have it done at the vets once. Watch closely, then you should be able to handle it yourself at home. Note that there is a line on the claw. Past that line you have clipped too much. Anyway, beyond the clipping problem, you need to watch out for the dew claws. When Snow shakes a paw or reaches up to get your attention, you know it.

The Great Pyrenees were companion dogs for sentries in the mountains of Europe. They were watchers and guardians. Snowflake certainly demonstrates that behaviour. She loves to just sit up on high ground and watch the neighborhood. In sleepy subarban Roswell, I am not certain what she watches, but she is most serious about the whole thing. She will sit aloof for hours on end.

We knew that Snowflake would be a big dog when we bought her and she settled in around 105 maybe a little small for a female. What we did not know was that she would be such a affection hound. As I said earlier, be on your guard. When a Great Pyrenees wants your attention, you will likely get a giant paw waved at you and eventually whacked into you until you respond. Most dogs lick your hand to emotion, Snow does not lick. She sniffs. She get really close to you and just sniffs quietly. Her single fault is not Snowflake's fault. We live in Georgia...red clay. Every Spring when we get the rainfall, she turns orange. She loves to roll in the mud and you can imagine she is no treat to bathe at 105 pounds and mounds of long thick white hair.

Anyway I must go for now, Snowflake is barking...Who would have thought it. I grew up and became a dog valet.