
Happy New Year to all of our readers! We hope that you all had a warm and happy holiday season. Bill and I had our ups and downs for a variety of reasons. I came down with a terrible flu, and on top of that we lost a couple of our beloved animals in the days just before Christmas. Our oldest ewe, Vinnie, died 11 days before Christmas. She was retired from lambing, but had such a personality (and nice fiber!) that we kept her around just because we liked her so much. We don’t know exactly how old she was, but she lived a long and comfortable life. She just stopped eating, and would not come into the barn with the other sheep. She became weaker and weaker, and finally laid down one night and couldn’t get up. It was hard, but Bill swiftly put her down, painlessly.
The other loss was our dear old guard dog, Nellie, who died just a few days before Christmas. This blog is a tribute to her.
The other loss was our dear old guard dog, Nellie, who died just a few days before Christmas. This blog is a tribute to her.
Nellie probably never knew how lucky she was. In the Spring of 2007 Bill traveled to the Oregon border to pick up a dog from a breeder he had found in a magazine. He was expecting to pick up one male dog and be on his way, but when he arrived, there were two puppies. One was the dog who he named Casimiro, and the other was a small little female. Bill asked about her and the breeder said that she was a runt and deformed so he would probably just “get rid of her”. Bill couldn’t bear the thought, so he brought her home, cleaned her up and nursed her back to health. She was skinny and her hind end was so weak that she couldn’t walk. The two pups were inseparable, and little Nellie gradually gained strength and started walking. She grew a little, although she was only about half the size of a normal dog of her breed. She didn’t let her small stature deter her from her duties, though. She was always very suspicious of people – it took her almost a year to trust me enough to let me pet her – but her guarding instinct was fully intact. She was just over a year old when I met her, and shortly after that I happened to be there the first time she saw a lamb being born. Bill asked me to pay close attention, because he did not know how the dogs would react. I hung around in the pasture that day, and pretty soon a ewe went into labor and had a lamb. Nellie was nearby, watching, and even though she had never seen this before, she came over and tried to protect the lamb from it’s own mother! I watched for a while, and the ewe would not be deterred. They went around and around, and after about a half hour, they got it sorted out. The ewe bonded with her lamb, with Nellie sitting up on the hill watching them closely. She was a quick learner, and after that her behavior was to position herself near a ewe who was lambing and then let them bond while she chased away any of the other curious sheep who would come over to see what was going on.
She was very attentive to the entire flock, but always paid special attention to the lambs when they were young. I recall one time when we had a small group of “bummer” lambs (ones whose mothers can’t or won’t nurse them), in which case I bottle feed them when they are small. I was in the pasture about 100 feet away from the fence and had just finished feeding. Nellie was up on the hill behind me. Just then a big truck drove up to the barn and couple of guys got out. It was the electrical PUD crew who were doing routine inspections of their power poles, one of which was near our barn. Casimiro raced to the fence and started barking like crazy, so I got up and walked down to talk to the crew. I noticed that as soon as I left the lambs, Nellie quietly got up and came and sat right next to them. She did not bark, or get excited, but she was on alert and never took her eyes off the strangers until they were gone.
Nellie was devoted to her flock, and to us, right up until the very end. In early December, she lost her appetite and stopped eating. I took her to the vet, and he said that she was anemic and that most likely her body had stopped making red blood cells. Given her advanced age, there was no treatment that would accomplish anything, so we made the decision to take her home and let her spend her last few days in the barn. We set up a lambing pen with a nice straw bed and a heat lamp, and gave her water. She was in full view of the sheep and other dogs, and was comfortable and happy to see us when we would visit several times a day. She held on for a couple of weeks, which was extraordinary. I had to go to Seattle the week before Christmas, and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be there when I got back. I visited her one last time and said my goodbye. When Bill got home that night, he went in and spent some time with her, then went out to do some snowblowing. When he got back about an hour later, she was nowhere to be found. He could see that she had pushed through the gate on the pen. It was pitch black, and snowing, but he put his head lamp on and searched the pasture until he found her. She had gone up to her favorite spot, just past the willow tree, and laid down and died.
RIP Nellie. We will remember you always.
RIP Nellie. We will remember you always.