Columnist Dan Needles and Dexter.
My dog Dexter lived outside for his first five years. He roamed over 400 acres of sand hills on my mother-in-law’s farm, where he was supposed to keep the place free of coyotes. That was something of a lost cause because coyotes outnumber sheep three to one in Dufferin County. But Dexter dutifully trotted around the fence-lines every day and woofed at incoming cars the way a farm dog should. The rest of the time he took shelter in the barn, even on the coldest winter nights, for that is the ancient rule governing farm dogs.
When Grandma came home to our farm to spend her last days, Dexter came with her. Initially, I thought there was going to be a problem because he didn’t go inside and she was too ill to come outside. And he was very big.
He is supposed to be a purebred Akbash, a fierce livestock protection breed that lives with the flocks year-round in the rugged foothills of Anatolia. My wife assured me Dexter was not much of a fighter. Still, I was nervous about owning a watchdog with all the traffic that comes to our house. My vet told me not to worry. “There might be a little bit of Akbash in him. But I would say he’s at least three parts Walmart Greeter.”
I thought he might run off, so I tied him up for a couple of days. But he looked so miserable I let him go to see what would happen. He loped off, jumped a four foot fence, crossed the hayfield and disappeared into the woods. Thinking he might be on his way back to Dufferin County I got in the truck and zoomed out to the highway. There was no sign of him. When I got back to the house, Dexter was sitting on the veranda looking perplexed. He said I shouldn’t run off like that without telling him where I was going.
“You know, you can come in the house,” I said.
“Oh no, I never go in the house,” he said.
“Why don’t you come in and see Grandma?”
“Well . . . maybe . . . I guess . . . just for a minute.” He hopped over the threshold, perhaps for the first time in his life, and sniffed the room.
“Do you have central air?”
Over the next few weeks, Dexter crossed several more thresholds. He came into the shower and got a total makeover with lavender flea shampoo and a Hawaiian pineapple conditioner. I combed enough hair out of him to make a whole other dog and when he finally dried off, he turned a very fluffy snow white. He looked like something you might win at the fair. I got him a new red leather collar, a dog license and several shots. He decided the couch was easier on his elbows than the wood floor and learned to climb stairs. Each night, he flopped down on the floor beside Grandma in the master bedroom to keep watch.
“You’re spoiling that dog,” said Grandma with a little grin. It occurred to me that the rule about farm dogs may have been written by men. She kept her hand on the dog’s head until the day she died.
With Grandma gone, Dexter stayed at the foot of our bed. He learned that cats were friends, not food. At first, he objected to birds flying over the farm, but that eventually wore off. He seemed to like corn and gluten-free lamb and rice dogfood with added Omega-3 and I found his head was just the right height for carving chunks of salami into his mouth from the kitchen counter. He took them very gently and always said, ‘Thank you.’ He patrolled the perimeter of the farm every morning, slurped out of the pond and then settled into the couch in my office like melted sugar.
My brother-in-law came home from his Alberta ranch that fall to ask if we needed him to take the dog off our hands. But then he saw Dexter flaked out on the couch in front of the fire with a cat sleeping on him.
“You’ve completely ruined that dog,” he laughed. “He can never go back.”
This is exactly how it goes with evolution. Every so often a species takes a sudden left-hand turn down a one-way street. It happened to humans after we discovered farming. Once you’ve tried Neolithic, it’s really hard to turn the clock back to Paleolithic and live on nuts and berries in the woods.
- Dan Needles