Thursday 28 July 2011

Muddy Dogs .... or Dog anyway

We try to be good dog owners and take our dogs for walks three times a day. Morning, lunchtime & evening. The lunchtime walk is more in the manner of a gentle leg-stretch combined with a check of the horses to make sure they're OK and still in the right field. It has to be fitted into a lunch hour so there's not too much slack time to cope with the unexpected ...

Like what happens when your 8 month old collie loses her tennis ball in the stream. Not the clean part of course, the swamp-like part. It's a very good swamp like part, complete with raised duck boards to stop you disappearing up to the arm pits in mud. The sort of swamp where you won't even be mildly surprised if an alligator slithered across the path in front of you and a bit of moss waved at you.


I foolishly watched the tennis ball float down the stream and thought that was that. I turned to go on with the walk and followed our other two dogs (the good ones). Load splash behind me. Dreading what I might see I turned around to be confronted with a collie puppy (?) enthusiastically searching for her ball, whilst chest deep in mud, not water, MUD. Deep. black, smelly mud - the real stuff.


The ball was long gone by this stage having followed the current, but collies are not to be deterred. Eventually, a long eventually with several re-visits, she was persuaded back onto the bridge.

Those paws are supposed to be white!
I'm sure it's down there somewhere ....
Once removed from the swamp the extent of the damage was accessed - was this by some miracle, a quick towel off, or was this going to be a full-blown bath?



Bath, definitely, bath.

So lunchtime went on a little longer than expected and we have a collie who smells of Evening Primrose.

However care will have to be taken on this evening's walk, otherwise she'll be straight back in. Collies have long memories and she knows she lost a tennis ball there. What was lost, can be found .... evening if Daddy is sobbing quietly on the bridge. He'll be happy once I bring the ball back, won't he?

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