As promised, Lucy is delivering stories for me to share with you all. Unfortunately, she won’t be as embarassed as Jacob will be in 15 years. Lucy, in case you missed it, is my lab pup. When I say “my” I mean it. Nate claims no ownership to her.
So far life with Lucy has been interesting. We are still working on the housebreaking and teaching her the ways of the Eckert world. She sits on command now, and is learning “stay” and “down.” This past week, I noticed Lucy caught on to “no.” She will now stop whatever she’s doing and look sheepish. When she really knows she is in trouble, she goes to her corner of the living room and cowers.
We’ve also been teaching Lucy about life on the farm. She will be primarily an outdoor dog when she gets older. I’ve been letting her spend more and more time in the barn so she learns to respect cows, barn cats, tractors and those who work there. Lucy learned an important lesson in farm life Saturday. I let her off leash so she could roam as she pleased. Lucy is fascinated with all the barn smells and spends most of her time wandering nose to the ground. While I was standing in the feed room and Lucy was down near the milkhouse I heard a yelp, followed by the laughter of Nate and his dad. Apparently in her explorations, Lucy came across one of Jacob’s barn kitties, Flo. Flo and Lucy have met before. The first day I had Lucy Flo took a swipe at her, nicking her nose and leaving a tiny drop of blood.
On this day, however, Flo got a bit better grip on the pup. According to my father-in-law, who had a fairly good view of the incident, Lucy took a sniff at Flo who let out a mighty hiss and attacked. As Lucy yipped and jolted away, she startled a cow who kicked and sent her flying as she was trying to escape the cat. Sometime in the fray, one of the two (I would assume the cat) put about an inch slit in her velvety puppy ear. Lucy didn’t want me to look at it. She was bleeding some and shaking her head which made it extra fun to try to examine. It was clean through the ear and didn’t appear that stitches would really do much to repair the tear. It was just a sliver away from being a full blown notch.
I bathed the poor thing once her ear stopped bleeding. She moped around the rest of Saturday and made the most of her injury. On Sunday the wound seemed to be healing and looked like it wouldn’t even leave a hole. But on Monday evening I found Lucy must have itched the healing gash, severing what flesh was holding it together. She now looks like the lower part of her ear is torn half off. On Tuesday I related this to my pet-loving co-worker, Kristen. I thought she’d have some sympathy for Lucy. She had a little, but also thought it was hilarious.
“She got her $%# kicked by a cat!” Kristen laughed. Yes, I guess she did. I don’t think Lucy was trying to hurt Flo. She just wanted to play with her a little. Still, I hoped Lucy learned a valuable lesson about being a farm dog: Don’t mess with anything that has sharper claws than you.
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