Dog Politics

Some of you know buzz, our refined and genteel dog with puffy breeches and a fine white stately mane. He prefers not to get his feet wet, demands dinner to be cut up and secretly likes bath time. (His new farming alter-ego, the wild, rabbit-eating ball of burrs, does not make it back the 4 hour drive to Sydney.)

On Saturday, my grandmother brought her two dogs to stay, the last in a long line of rough, tough, lean and mean border collies who ate dog-meal from old hub caps, spent their nights chained to a tractor tire and were lucky to be invited into the house yard. These gnarled old dogs have killed feral cats, can delicately control the movement of 100 head of stroppy cattle and now have visitors to their new town home nervously calling out to Grandma from the front gate.

But this weekend...Gypsy, the timid savage, is keeping to herself in the furthest corner of the room.

Troy, the alpha male, is making himself quite comfortable and quite in charge of the humans.

Buzz is decidedly peeved. He has given up attempts to defend his territory and now claims to be 'King of Outside', at least whenever the other dogs are inside.

Disclaimer: When I gave out the homework last week, I had no idea that I was about to have the most average, run-of-the-mill, uninteresting weekend for a long while. That is if you exclude the SRF bits, of course.