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The inevitable passing of a dear companion

We all dearly love our dogs and die a little ourselves on the too-frequent occasions — given their short life spans — when yet another one passes on.It is particularly wrenching when the deceased was a “working dog,” a best buddy, a family member, a constant outdoors companion and frequent character in your outdoors columns.
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Neil Waugh and his beloved Ginger

We all dearly love our dogs and die a little ourselves on the too-frequent occasions — given their short life spans — when yet another one passes on.

It is particularly wrenching when the deceased was a “working dog,” a best buddy, a family member, a constant outdoors companion and frequent character in your outdoors columns.

When friend and colleague Neil Waugh, outdoors columnist for The Edmonton Sun, wrote the eulogy for his beloved Ginger in a recent column, he was bowled over by a tidal wave of sympathy from readers.

Ginger was a spayed female yellow Labrador retriever, 13 when she died recently, old for a Lab. She hunted everything but big game with Neil over the years, and accompanied him on most of his fishing. I’ve often said that the only good fishing dog I’ve ever known was a black barn cat named Fever. Ginger was close, but, being a Lab, she’d occasionally go swimming just when and where Neil wanted to cast.

Ginger could do it all, except take pictures, which didn’t matter, because Neil had so perfected the fine art of self-timing tripod shots of himself and his dog with their harvest that his Sun column readers got to know Ginger by heart.

Neil’s column got me thinking about the dogs in and of my life, going back to the many springer spaniels and Labs in our family when I was a kid in Brooks, where a good working dog was essential if upland game and waterfowl formed an important part of your annual diet.

Unfortunately, in those days, the show breeders had turned springers into nervous wrecks, if not psychopaths, and, finally, when I was 14, I talked my dad, the Guv, out of shooting our last springer for eating a pheasant he should have been retrieving to us. By next day that one got traded and our first Lab, Clancy of Avondale, a.k.a. Buster, was installed in the kennel. Buster was a genius with a huge vocabulary of English words but, by 12 or so, was too stove up with arthritis for hard hunting.

So the old man farmed Buster out to a friend and installed his replacement in our kennel. This farmer and neighbours surrounded a field on an early season crop protection hunt one evening. Buster took off when the first duck dropped and did not come back. At dark the old Lab was found in the geometric centre of the pea field, guarding a pile of ducks because he did not know anyone to deliver them to, his life-long master not being there.

Forty years ago I started on the string of five Brittany spaniels we have owned to date: Quince, Blue, Red, Raz, and now Beau. The average life span of the first four has been 10 years. Beau will be seven early in July. Shortest lifespan was Raz, who had to be euthanized at four years because of severe and steadily worsening epilepsy that caused him, and us, unbearable suffering. Owners, in my experience, are more saddened by the dogs they have to “put down” than by natural deaths, especially if it is a young dog.

Back in the bad old days, dogs would frequently crawl off and hide, to die of distemper, something virtually unheard of these days, owing to annual immunization shots for the dogs of owners who care. Good veterinary care has expanded canine life spans and eased the aches and pains of old age.

But each breed has its own “best before” date. As a general rule, the smaller the breed, the longer the life will be, and vice versa. Many really old dogs succumb to a leaky left ventricle and the alarming blue tongue of congestive heart failure. That was what took our Blue away at 12 years, plus, and what probably, ultimately took Neil Waugh’s Ginger.

Now Neil is looking for a new dog, as much like Ginger as possible, but worries about show breeders producing hunting morons. I got into and stayed with the Brittany because the show breeders have never really gotten into them.

When a really good working dog dies, owners often moan that they wish they could arrange a brain transplant into the young replacement. For a time I did that — sort of — by having a replacement in place four or five years before the old guy might be expected to die. The accomplished old working dog effortlessly did much of the training of the rookie.

My practical Guv believed that the best way to get over the passing of a beloved working dog was to have a replacement in the kennel by sundown on the day of the dying. That is not as easy to do now as it was back in the good old days of working dog — not show dog — breeders.

Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.