The Outside Dogs of Misfit Acres

Before I continue on posting about my life on our small family farm, I thought I should introduce everyone.

Why do we call our place Misfit Acres? Well, everyone who ends up here is some kind of misfit, human or animal. Like the misfit toys on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that stick together and just want to be loved. Misfits welcome here.

We have four dogs. Our youngest dog is our granddog. She belongs to Ben our second child, now young man. We have inside dogs — Cookie the Pug and Lily the Smooth-Hair Collie (although Lily spends more time outside than Cookie) and we have outside dogs — Christy and Sugar.

Christy

This is Christy. She is 9 years old. She does not sit for photographs well. Christy is a lab mix. We adopted Christy for Ben from the K9 Stray Rescue League when she was still a puppy. The rescuers had found her and some of the other puppies walking on the side of a major highway.

Christy is such a misfit that she is lucky it was us who took her in. Ben did not want her for his dog not long after we adopted her. She needed lots and lots of training and he was just a kid, and she would often hurt him — being overly aggressive in play. We built a nice dog yard for our dogs, but Christy was able to climb up the chain link and hop over. So then we had to tie her to a tree inside the yard. Now, this is only for the dogs to spend time outside during the day. Our ‘outside’ dogs always sleep inside and come in at dark (or during bad weather) for family time. One day when I checked on Christy, she was hanging on the other side of the fence from her tie in. I thought she was dead. She wasn’t even injured.

We had to run an electric dog fence around the dog yard and put the shock collar on Christy to keep her from running away. She tested the collar every day and when the batteries went dead, she went for it. Thankfully, she got too fat and too old eventually to even think about climbing the chain link. And she settled down completely five years later when we got Sugar, our chocolate lab. Guess what we found out about Christy? She is a wonderful and loving mother dog. She loves our puppies and cares for them and they love her. All misfits have value and worth.

Sugar always scratching her ears

 Sugar is an AKC Chocolate Labrador Retriever. She too is a misfit. She has defective ears. Her ears are chronically inflamed and full of yeast. We keep this to a minimum by feeding only good dog food and regularly cleaning them. But, it is a genetic defect. Her coat really isn’t a good color either, per AKC standards. We cannot breed her. Sugar is a very sweet lovable dog, but very jealous of the new dog, Lily. This is because Lily is a bed dog, and gets to sleep with Grandma and Sugar wants to be a bed dog. But she cannot. Sugar could not learn how not to sleep on human legs when she tried to be a bed dog. Sugar could not understand why the humans did not want 75 pounds of dogs across their legs during the night, and could not understand why they kept yelling at her to move, Please!

Sugar is an outside dog with a severe case of denial. She will whine to come inside when the inside dogs come in during the day, but if she comes in with them she will sit at the door and whine to go back out to the dog yard. She is happy in the dog yard, but doesn’t know it. I think we can all relate to this condition. Being happy where we are in life and never knowing it.

Christy and Sugar checking today's lunch

Sugar and Christy are happy outside in their dog yard and always very excited to come inside the house as dusk settles. Then we can play ball in the house and tug of war with the humans and get lots of love and horrors of horrors, have our ears cleaned. They sleep in their crates at night and Sugar starts whining to go outside as soon as the sun comes up.

 In the fall when it starts getting chilly, we surround the dog house with bales of hay and fill the inside with hay. For daytime comfort – but if it is real cold, dangerously cold, they do not stay outside in the winter. This they do not understand. There is a lot of whining on those days. It has been a cool spring and so the hay is still there. Usually, it has been hot and we have removed all of the hay. The used hay makes good mulch except in the gardens — slugs and snails love to live in hay mulch. I learned this the very hard way. We use the hay as mulch down our paths into our woods. 

Sugar is a pretty good driveway alarm system. When our township wanted to pass a noise ordinance and give dogs only 10 minutes to bark, I had to write a letter. Sugar barks the entire time the UPS man is here and it can take longer than 10 minutes to get down our 950 foot driveway, drop off the package, get back in the truck and drive all the way out to the street. Sugar needed twenty minutes at least, I wrote and more if someone were robbing the house.

Sugar and Lily