View from the North 40: The little doggy that still can

For the record, I’m not one of those people who thinks her dog is her child, but since this is going on the record I do have to say that my dog is as awesome as any child — even cuter than a good number of them.

Cooper is 10 years old, which isn’t remarkably old for a dog, but he’s definitely gotten to his senior years. He’s handling it really well, though.

Every once in a while he loses his balance for a brief moment but catches it again in a snap, then he looks at me like, “Did you see that? I still got my cat-like reflexes.”

The truly funny part about this is that he’s never been an athlete. He has all the cat-like grace of a 45-pound rhinoceros, but the little dog has dreams.

He is also going deaf, for real now, not just that deaf-like state in which he clearly has better things to do than come when called. Now when he finally hears me — and thankfully I have a loud whistle and big, arena-sized voice — he is so happy when the sound registers and he realizes we have some interacting to do.

Despite the signs of aging, he still has a perfectly good sense of smell. He always has been quite the scent-driven hunter of birds and bunnies — at a skill-level no rhino could compete with and far beyond his Schnauzer-mut breeding.

One morning this week, I found that a fox had visited the barn the previous night and left a calling card in the form of a pile of scat on my hay. (FYI, scat is just animal science speak for a pile of poop left to mark territory. Thanks, fox.)

For the record, I did not respond with a similar marking of my barn, though I would’ve been in the right to do so — my barn, my hay, and that fox shouldn’t have fouled my stuff, that’s wasteful. I used the pitchfork to scoop up the hay — scat and all — and haul it outside, far outside.

Walking back to the barn, I caught a glimpse of Cooper and his half-feral cat, Tony-O, who is the dog’s brother from another species. The pair of them were engaged in their favorite morning ritual: competing to see who could be the more obnoxious creature. That morning it was rushing at each other, pretending to pounce, and spooking each other into running off.

It’s an interesting game of cat and dog that doesn’t appear to have any rules other than don’t touch the other guy, and if you do get touched leave in a big huff like you are insulted on behalf of your personal space and the pride of all your species’ brethren. It’s a big deal.

I called the pair to the barn so they would smell the fox and know that a predator might be hanging around. It’s more important for the outside cat, but the dog also needed to know to be on the alert — he is chief of homestead security.

The pair pouncy, chasey, zig-zagged their way to the barn, where things turned all business.

The two spread out and thoroughly searched the area. I don’t know what the fox did to the side of the hay bale, but Tony-O adored it. He plastered himself to the side of the bale, rubbing all over one spot. Yeah, it was a little creepy.

I consoled myself with the knowledge that, at least once upon a time, high-end perfume companies spent millions of dollars on acquiring animal scent glands as a base for the more expensive perfumes. He was basically applying a Chanel for man-cats body scent — yeah, still icky. I walked away.

Cooper, though, had disappeared. I found him outside, nose working the ground and the air as he tracked the delicate scent trail of that scat (which I had carried, carefully intact) to where I tossed it.

He found it with that champion nose.

Worried that he might try to pull a similar stunt to the cat’s, I called him off and started for the house. Obviously pleased with his own hunting prowess, he followed me back to the house in his perkiest rhino trot — happy to have shown off his mad tracking skills, happy, as always, to have been called to help.

(All that said, if the Blue Fairy showed up, I would be tempted to make the dog into a real boy at [email protected].)