Ernie and Flame

We have a snow day. Yeah!

Having gained about four hour;s sleep that I badly needed, this is a good day for an update on our two new rescue dogs, Ernie and Flame.

Here's one of Aimee's pictures of Ernie and Flame. She has a bunch on her Facebook page. My own camera is so cheap, it isn't able to take good snaps of these guys. They move too fast, all I get is blur.

But in this case, they were relatively still for once.

Ernie is the more obedient of the two, which is not surprising. He was actually trained by his previous owners, and even came with a puppy school graduation certificate. Flame spend her previous life in a pen with two other dogs, one of which was a dangerous Rottweiler, and she doesn't have the same ability to pay attention to humans as Ernie does, although she has begun to learn her words "no", "sit", "go lie down" and of course her name. Training her seems easy enough and she seems to be picking it up.

Both are chewers of wood, and they've done a number on the paneling and trim around the inside of our porch. It will all need to be replaced, but not for a year or two until they've grown out of this chewing business. Until then we've smeared it all with that "bitter apple" stuff to prevent dog chewing.

They've also wrecked a couple of old pieces of porch furniture. Nothing important, just old junk that we kept on the porch to use occasionally -- mostly the old rocking chair that our friend Dianne found on the side of the ride years ago took the brunt. I think we got our money's worth out of it.

They are great friends and love to place chase and play fight, all day long if you'll let them. Now we have snow again, there's not so much scope for us to hang out outside with them, so they get to chase each other around when we take them for a walk. A walk to the brook and back is one big chasing game to them.

In the summer we can put the sheep fence up around the yard and let them run for hours on end.

They've been to the vet's numerous times for boosters and working and wotnot, and are both reported as thoroughly healthy.

Flame, the vet says, is a little cross-eyed, which makes sense because she does have this otherworldly kind of a look to her. It makes her seem quite intelligent because it's more of a human eye position than a normal dog's eye position. She is a very intelligent dog, and has all kinds of expressions and noises she makes when trying to communicate.

Ernie is less exceptional, but has a talent for moving sheep that is already apparent, and minds very well. He's definitely the more obedient one of the two.

In other news, Aimee received payment from the owner of the stupid dog that killed our chickens, the full amount she asked for. We know also know now who the dog belongs to. We're not going to say who, because there was at least an attempt at an apology letter in with the check, but we were still were left with the impression that the dog will be permitted to run again, which just isn't right. If this killer dog can't be kept under control it needs to be put down.

Then finally, there was a murder in our home town of Jackson, national news. Our college SAR team was called out to help with the search. A body was found in the neighboring town, off the same road where our bale house sits. The corpse was identified and a local man charged.

http://bangordailynews.com/2012/02/29/news/bangor/police-find-body-of-missing-fla-say-murder-suspect-owed-him-3000/?ref=mostReadBoxNews