Winston and The New Neighbors

Autumn is one of Winston’s favorite times of the year.

He enjoys a good romp about in camouflage and thinks it’s great fun to lose himself in a field of dried grasses and leaves.

But that’s not the only reason.

Once the field across from us has been harvested for the final time of the summer, a rancher brings his Big Black Cows* (this is the technical term for the breed) to graze on the grassy gleanings for a few weeks.

Winston is curious about those cows, and apparently, they feel the same way about him. Fortunately, there is a good-enough old fence that keeps the cows on their side of the deal.

What keeps Winston on his side of the road is the fact that he’s not allowed to cross the street without holding an adult’s hand. (That, and the very effective “awareness collar” we use to keep his silly puppy bones off the road and in one piece. There has never been an animal yet that has LESS native car sense than Mr. iGreet-UPS-With-Vigor.)

There is much that Winston does not know about cows, so every morning he heads out to the end of our driveway to see what else he can learn by frank and focused observation.

What Winston learned this fall about cows:

1) They eat pretty much all day long.
2) When they aren’t eating, they wander back and forth along the fence line in single-file.

There were other things that could have been learned about cows, but these transcended Rick’s ability to translate into terms a 15-month old neutered male puppy could wind in.

Not that he wasn’t keen to get his head around the concept.

Witness the power of the canine redirect.
When the conversation had gone about as far as it was going to go in that particular direction, a brisk “Hey, Winnie! Get your slobber ball!!” was as good an answer to a mystery of life as a bone.


*I love making stuff up about life in the country, and as there is so much that I don’t know, this provides me with hours of free entertainment. For instance, since I haven’t been able to inquire in person yet, I have made up my own explanation for why one of our neighbors thinks it’s a good idea to drive huge wagon load after wagon load of still-steaming cow poop past our house. It’s a two-part hypothesis.

1) Someone who owns cows does not care to have the poop stay where it lay.
2) Someone else needs the poop for something (methane revenue? fertilizer? cow-poop statuary?) and doesn’t object to the odor.

Living in the country is more complicated for some of us than for others.

7 thoughts on “Winston and The New Neighbors

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  4. sandi Fentiman

    Good thing Winnie isn’t brown AND white! You’d totally lose him when the snow falls–where there’s tall grass. Even though I had Cheeco on his “extension leash”, he still blended in that one time.

    I would wager the cow poop smells just as bad as horse poop. I had to shovel some when we were still in Ontarrio (Brian and Jan’s farm).

  5. Debra

    Amazing how Winnie blends into the scenery! And very interesting your synopsis on “why the poop”… pray tell us the reason when you find out my dear!

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