Farm Pets

We always had a nice dog on the farm. The one I remember most was Lad, a beautiful black and white Collie that Uncle Sile bought as a puppy and gave to us kids. Lad was a wonderful companion and playmate. He would follow us everywhere and was always ready to play. He was also a good friend to Burrows dog, old Pup, who was twelve-years-old when Lad was growing up—and was still called “Pup”.

Lad never came into the house. He usually slept in a box in the coal house, but on extremely cold nights (below zero), Dad would bring his box into the wash house, which was a tad warmer with both doors closed. And Lad never had any commercial dog food. He was expected to catch rabbits and things like that for his main diet. With our big hungry family there were seldom many table scraps left over, but Lad did get some meat scraps when we butchered and the chicken carcass when we ate roasted chicken. He usually got his fill of skim milk, but sometimes he had to supplement his diet by eating at a hog trough.

Another dog I remember well was the puppy Pluto. One spring day I was riding my bike about a mile from home when I discovered a litter of six little German Shepherd puppies that had been abandoned in the ditch. My friend, Harold Shaffer, lived nearby, so I got him to help me find homes for all six. We each picked out one puppy to adopt and I named mine Pluto. And Pluto became my buddy. I fixed a little box onto the handlebars of my bike that Pluto learned to love to ride in and we went everywhere together. I taught him a few simple tricks; he was a fast learner and loved to “ham it up.” Unfortunately, Pluto had a kind of wild side-- and as he grew up he got Lad to join him in nighttime roaming. More than once that fall when we were driving home at night we saw Lad and Pluto running along the road a mile or so from home. Dad told me that a single dog usually stays pretty close to home, but that two dogs are likely to roam at night. Then one day a neighbor who had found one of his lambs killed in his pasture came by to examine our dogs to see if there were any traces of wool in their teeth. Both dogs proved to be “clean,” but a few days later I came home from school to find Pluto gone. Dad explained to me that two dogs were one too many and that he had given Pluto to good friends, a former neighbor who now lived about twenty miles away. I never saw Pluto again.

We had a few cats on the farm, but they were all “barn cats.” They lived in the cow barn where there was an old pie tin that we usually filled with fresh milk at milking time. We really didn’t pay much attention to them except for giving them milk until Mary Grace came along. She gave each one a name and started carrying them around and then we started to know them individually—as “Buffy,” rather than “that yellow one.” Mary Grace always had a wonderful touch with animals.

In fact, the farm animals that Mary Grace raised were always pets. I remember one summer, when she was five or six, she raised four pigs and a dairy calf together in the northeast box stall in the barn. She spent a lot of time talking to them and playing with them and making sure they always had plenty of good feed and fresh water. They loved her. When she let them out into the barn lot they would follow her around like a quintet of baby chicks following a mother hen. And even when she wasn’t around, that calf and the four pigs always stayed together as a group as they roamed the barn lot. And Mary Grace’s pigs always grew faster than any other pigs on the farm. She had lots of friends among the animals.

Although these were not exactly pets, one year we had another odd pairing—a chicken and a duck. That year a ‘setting hen” came out of hiding with a single baby chick. At the same time we had an orphan baby Mallard duck, so we put the little duck with the mother hen and she accepted it and they were raised as a little family. When the two were old enough to be on their own they still went around together—ignoring other chicken and ducks. The chicken, a young rooster, had some kind of a problem developing feathers and was half naked. A family friend wrote a clever little poem about “Quack and Quiver,” but I can’t find a copy of it.

When I was young there were about thirty huge, old silver maple trees that had been planted as a wind-break along the north and west edges of the farmstead--thus the original name “Maple Row Farm”. There were six more of these old trees in the yard. They had a diameter of four or five feet and were hollow inside, so every couple of years one of them would be blown down in a heavy windstorm. One summer as Dad and Charlie Winters were cutting up a tree that had fallen in the yard they discovered four baby raccoons that had been living in the hollow tree. Donald and John immediately adopted the four babies and made a little house and a pen to take care of them. It was great fun for four or five days since the little raccoons were so cute and playful. But then the little critters disappeared, one by one. We never knew whether the raccoon parents had found a new home and came to reclaim their babies—or that something was eating them. In any event, we had a lot of fun with those baby raccoons for a few days.