I said in an earlier post that Miley caught a large fox squirrel a few weeks ago. She had it in her mouth, and it was squealing very loudly. She trots up to me with all the pride in the world. “I finally got one!” she seemed to say.
But that squirrel figured out how to get out of her mouth, and once he did, he put up a heck of a fight getting away. Golden retrievers very often don’t know how to kill, so this squirrel was able to take to the trees.
A fox squirrel, for those you who don’t know, is a huge tree squirrel that can weigh as much as 2 or 3 pounds.
When my grandpa was illegally ferreting, he send his ferret into a hollow tree where a fox squirrel had taken refuge. That squirrel sent the ferret packing!
A golden, a Labrador/curly cross, and a liver curly eating blackberries:
I’ve never had a dog eat blackberries, even though they are very numerous on our property.
But I have had them eat watermelon!
After being lost in battle, Sabi survived 14 months on her own in Afghanistan.
From the BBC.
Sabi is listed as a Labrador, but she’s very likely a cross– but one that looks a lot like a St. John’s water dog.
In September 2008, the dog was part of a joint Afghan-Australian patrol in the Uruzgan Province. The patrol was ambushed, and nine Australian soldiers were wounded in the attack.
Sabi was MIA.
Because she had been gone so long, it was assumed that she was dead. After all, Afghanistan is a poor country in the midst of a long war. A pet dog from the West would have a hard time surviving there on her own.
She was in such good condition that it appears someone was caring for her.
She still has her retrieving instincts, which BBC reports suggests is something that is trained. In reality, she was probably selected to be a sniffer dog because she had such strong retrieving instincts and prey drive. The dogs are trained to associate the object they like to retrieve most with the scent of some object, and as a result, they will hunt down that scent in hopes of getting that object. It’s really not that different from dogs that associate the scent of pheasants or ducks with the objects they are supposed to retrieve. It’s just in the case of those birds, they naturally have that targeted scent.
Update: The Guardian reports that Taliban fighters actually kept her during these 14 months. She was discovered by an American service member named John recognized the dog as a sniffer dog.
The dog on the left is Badger, a purebred Labrador from the United Kingdom. Photo by Glyn Walsh.
When Labradors have a bit of white on them, I’ve always assumed that this feature was indicative of their water dog ancestry. However, I’ve never seen Labrador with as much white on its body as I’ve seen on dogs in the photos of the St. John’s water dog.
But then received this photo of this Labrador in the United Kingdom. His name is Badger, and he’s nothing like any Labrador I’ve seen. He’s the first white-marked Labrador I’ve seen that had these extensive white marking.
I have previously written about golden retrievers with extensive white markings.
But to see a Labrador with these markings is unusually moving. It literally is like looking at a modern St. John’s water dog. It is like an apparition rising out of the Labrador’s past to tell us what these dogs were once like.
I say he’s the first Labrador like this I’ve seen, but St. John’s water dogs had white markings. This feature appears in golden retrievers, Labradors, and other retrievers, although it is very unusual to find one with such extensive white markings.
You should note that the Labrador on the right has a few white hairs on its chest. Normally, that is the extent of the white markings one will on a retriever. (Of course, tollers are the big exception to this rule.)
I’ve seen newborn goldens with white blazes and large white spots on their chests, which then disappear as the puppy matures. I have also seen them white feet and white tail tips that very often last throughout the dog’s lifetime. (My first golden had a white-tipped tail. This feature always existed, but it did not become obvious until she grew older.).
It is very interesting to see these old features in our modern dogs.
Dogs like Badger cannot be as rare as is commonly assumed. If it is that pervasive in the golden retriever, which is a more distant descendant of the St. John’s water dog, it would stand to reason that it would be more common in the Labrador, which is much closer to the St. John’s water dog.
In the old days, dogs with such markings were “bucketed,” which means they were literally drowned in buckets of water as newborn whelps. Yellow and chocolate Labs and similarly colored wavy/flat-coats experienced this culling until a few people (like the 1st Baron Tweedmouth) decided to breed for these minority colors. I’m sure pups with white markings were also culled in this manner.
But even such rigorous selective breeding couldn’t get rid of this feature. It continues to pop up.
And it’s great to see a dog like Badger.
He allows us to see a bit what the past was once like. Before there were Labradors, there were black and white, smooth-coated water dogs from Newfoundland that looked a lot like Badger. I can see him sitting upon the prow of cod fisherman’s boat as the vessel sails into the rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks. He stares at the water with great intensity, waiting for the second that a fish appears on the line and he is given the command to haul it in. In the winter, I can see him wandering the uplands with his master, casting back and forth in search of ptarmigan to flush towards the gun.
He certainly gets my imagination running.
