"If you take a dog which is starving and feed him and make him prosperous, that dog will not bite you. This is the primary difference between a dog and a man." - Mark Twain

During the summer of the mid-Seventies, we discovered her, following us on the way back to our trailer after feeding the livestock. She was so thin she almost disappeared when she turned face-on, and her hair was rough and wiry. Plus, she suffered from an extreme case of mange. But there was a look in her eye that was different from other dogs that strayed around our place with great frequency, and that look made us decide to adopt her.

Living close to a large creek, it was very common that stray dogs wandered close to our house. Unthinking and uncaring pet owners seemed to think that dumping their unwanted cats and dogs near the river bridge was somehow more humane than an outright killing, which would have prevented so much animal suffering from starvation and disease. So many usually-kind people unthinkingly give a puppy or kitty to a child, not knowing or not caring that a pet requires a commitment for the life of the pet. When the animal ultimately grows to be an adult cat or dog, and the owner of the animal tires of commitment, it is not uncommon for them to be dumped along a road or stream to suffer. Somewhere a parallel in human relationships and commitment to a significant other could be drawn here, but that is a subject for another discussion at another time.

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In 1968, my wife and I took new teaching positions in a nearby town to be able to move back to the farm and be with her family. We moved our 10x50 trailer across the road from Sue's home place, and were already involved in helping with livestock and grain production in our spare time. The family was in between dogs in the mid-Seventies, and Chipper just looked like the farm dog we needed.

We began feeding the dog, and treating the mange with daily applications of the famous Dr. Glovers Sarcoptic Mange Medicine, an old-fashion over-the-counter-remedy recommended by the elders in our family. When we began treatment, just petting the dog required gloves, as the coarse hair on the sick dog made fine cuts in the palm of even a farmer's coarse callous hands. We devoted a pair of cloth chore gloves to the task of applying the liquid mange cure, and began to see improvements in overall condition in just a few weeks. As the skin and hair began to improve with proper diet and daily applications of medicine, the spirit of the stray dog began to improve. We visited the local vet for shots, and hung the rabies tag on her first collar. She was officially adopted as our farm dog.

Since she was a stray, we braced ourselves for a quick crop of puppies, but they did not come until later, after neighbor dogs visited one day. Up until that time, we did not know about split litters, but later we had 6 bird dog-type puppies from the visiting male dog of one neighbor, and six Shepard-type puppies from the next neighbor dog down the road a few miles farther. After successfully finding homes for all the puppies except for the ones we kept, we had Chipper spayed.

As years went by, it was interesting to watch Chipper and Rusty, the male son with the Shepard mix, work at hunting together. The road bank cut in front of our homes had been riddled with ground-hog holes before Chipper and Rusty began to eliminate them, and skunks and Coyotes no longer bothered our livestock as they had in the past. The dogs worked as a pair, with the older Mother dog distracting the prey, while the younger son attacked with the prey's attention diverted. They kept many dangerous snakes from our home sites, those helpful farm dogs swept clean the groundhogs that once ate several acres of soybeans near the woods.

They both helped some in working cattle, although they weren't excellent herd dogs. Still, they could be trusted around livestock, as they knew when and how to keep from spooking the cattle, and often would draw our attention to a cow or calf that was not cooperating in our attempts to drive them to other pastures.