Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Every morning after I let the dogs out of Widget's House, I stand by with pooper scooper equipment in hand to follow them around while they do their business.  (With snow on the ground, if you don't scoop right away, the poop can disappear on you really fast.  I'm thinking about writing a book called "Poop Scooping in Northern Climates:  Everything You Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask.")  Blind Cedar, our beautiful Lab/Husky mix, loves to track me as I make my way around the nearly one-acre yard hunting for soon-to-be buried treasures.

Cedar has started losing his hearing in recent months, and what sounds he can detect often confuse him — it's like he can't get a directional "fix" on where the sound is coming from — so he often spins off in a different direction.  Consequently he is now using his nose mostly to stay on my trail.  Once he finds me, he'll come up to get some loving, then wander off again for a while.  Pretty soon he seems to start thinking, "Hmm, where did he go?" and he'll begin sniffing out my trail.  (When you wear muddy, manure-covered barn boots, it's really not that hard to pick up the trail!)

I took that photo of Cedar above this morning while I was making my rounds and he was closing in on me.  It looks like he's three-legged, but he's not, as you can see from this shot I took a few minutes later from the porch of Widget's House:

That's blind Brody in the background, wondering what's going on at the porch.

Cedar used to hate having his photo taken, and he would always act a little weird — ears down, like he's spooked — when he heard the shutter click.  Now that he's mostly deaf, he can't hear me take his photo any longer, which is why I was able to get these shots, all with ears up!  Here's the last one I took, after I had finished scooping and he decided to sit and meditate for a while:

Handsome boy!