A tale of two litters

Merlot (age two days) and his mother, all puppies in this litter are alive and well - see the last paragraph

By in large the British treat their dogs as if they are members of their families, indeed their dogs regard themselves as such. A generalisation with undoubted exceptions such as genuinely working dogs, I know.

The urban French I imagine are much the same, less so their country cousins. M Bernard, the friendly farmer who owns the vineyards and farm neighbouring our maison secondaire in the Charente Maritime, is a charming man who has offered us nothing but help. He speaks zero English but at least speaks French slowly so I understand much of what he says. His mother, in her late eighties lives at the farmhouse (he lives elsewhere).  The dogs on his farm are farm animals and treated as such. An elderly yellowish Alsatian cross guard dog is chained to a tree. A couple of labradors, a black male and yellow bitch seem to run free. They regard themselves as having an easement into our garden so as to avail themselves of its facilities. He also has a couple of spaniel types who are given their head when the shooting season starts in September but otherwise seem to live in a pen behind the farmhouse. All dogs seem to live in harmony with free range flocks of sheep, geese and hens.

A couple of years back an aggressive boxer/something cross joined the menagerie. Rocco and I had a couple of confrontations with him during our September holiday. The next month, whilst the English lady, who looks after our house whilst we are away, was talking to the farmer, the dog ran out of the farmyard and bit her on the leg, an entirely unprovoked attack. The farmer drove her to hospital. She stopped looking after our house, but for other reasons. Representations to the local mayor (Mairie) of the commune failed to get any resolution. An English woman bitten by a French farm dog gets little sympathy from a Mairie, himself a farmer. Rural France is run by and for its farmers. You might add this is also pretty much true of the EU. 

Clearly we couldn’t let the house out to holidaymakers with this dog on the loose. The following spring, the first time we were back in France after the attack I went over to the farm. I had mugged-up on as many variations of ‘Your dog must be under strict control or put-down’ as my schoolboy French could manage. Fortunately, the new lady now looks after our house, volunteered to join me, she speaks very good French. There was no sign of the dog, the farmer was out and we met his elderly mother. Her farm kitchen, earth floor and pot of stew hanging over the fire in the hearth, was straight out of a nineteenth century Zola novel. I was able to present her with a Dundee cake I had bought and after talking at cross-purpose for a while, we brought-up the subject of the dog.

“Oh, that dog was shot in the winter,” she said, “it attacked one of our farm workers.” It turned out to belong to the son-in-law of the farmer’s girlfriend.

Last year when we were again out opening up the house for the season, the farmer waved me over to talk about our barn, which we keep locked-up. I was not sure what he was on about but opened up the large barn door for him. It turned out that his Labrador bitch had found a way in and had just produced a litter of puppies behind a mountain of straw. The farmer and one of his men removed the straw and a few hidden empty oil barrels and got the puppies out, we provided a large cardboard box and admired the litter. The farmer seemed uncomfortable with our interest. When I saw him the next morning I asked after the puppies. They had been drowned. One can't help concluding that this is cheaper than having the bitch spayed.

Merlot and sisters

On a happier note back when the renovation of our house was underway we were over in May for a conference with our builders. We stayed in a gite owned by a British Airways pilot and his wife who had retired from flying. The have a pair of splendid retriever labradors one of which was due to give birth. We ended up taking the soon-to-be dad out for a long walk so that his partner could have some peace. We came back to admire six splendid tiny retriever labradors. They were all spoken for except one fellow, now called Merlot, who has stayed with his parents.