Revised 12/15/2006
Linda's dog pack at Chez Benbrook has fluctuated quite a bit during our five years here. When we moved in, we only had Samantha, who was mostly sheltie (sp?) and mostly white. She was a super lovable dog whose thyroid gland went off-line, making her quite fat and lazy. One dark Wednesday night when Jim came home from tennis, she dodged the wrong way while greeting the truck and wound up getting rolled over. She didn't survive, unfortunately. A year or so before her death, we had acquired Taz as a companion for Samantha. After Samantha's demise, Angel was added to provide company for Taz. Both Taz and Angel are mixed breed female mutts, both with a lot of shepard in their heritage and both blond in color. Several years ago, Susie decided that she couldn't properly care for Betty, so we inherited her. She is pushing ten, like the other old dogs. We also have a relatively new addition, Dottie, who looks like a Saint Bernard, but down scaled a bit. She is the bane of the older dogs existence, pestering them mercilously to "play".
A lot of effort has been put into convincing the dogs that they should not stray from their own property and it has worked, for the most part. All still take umbrage when another dog wanders down the road in front of the place and they usually wind up chasing the stranger down the road apiece to reconfirm their territorial imperative. They are very sweet and lovable to all humans and the only danger that one faces upon entering the property is being licked to death. Some of our dog-timid neighbors complained about our "mean" dog pack, though, and I finally had to build a dog-proof fence around an acre-sized chunk of the backyard. The pooches don't seem to mind being penned up in an area that large and we breathe a lot easier when they start barking, knowing that they can't really get into trouble from inside the fence.
The fence also prevents Taz from hunting out cottontail nests in the spring and bringing home tiny baby rabbits as she used to love to do. Linda professes to miss being surrogate mother to a bunch of little rabbits, as expected. We released our one remaining cottontail from the spring of 1998 crop in the fall of 1998 and, so far as we can tell, she seems to be doing OK in the wild, if you can call our neighborhood that.
