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Aussie
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Back in the Bundy days.....there was Sax. The female Dobberman. The absolute best dog I or my Family ever had.
I was living with my parents at the time...in a separated Flat sort of area. They went off to Victoria to visit elder Brother at Puckapunyal. Came back after two weeks and the Old Man said he had taken over Sax from a neighbour of Brother, as neighbour had been assigned an overseas post and could not take her. She was, I reckon, nine months old. Mum and Dad get back and tell me about it.
So, we build a big wide and shallow box which fitted neatly into the back of my brand new Toyota Celica Hatchback and off we go to Brisbane airport to pick her up. There she was. Amazing. Black and tan with that never-ending sheen on the black. Beautiful looking dog.
In she gets into the box and sleeps all the way back from Brisbane to Bundy, a four-hour drive.
The Old Man walked her around the boundary of the half-acre block we lived in and she learned, pissed out her markers. Those were the days when dogs still were allowed to roam free in the neighbourhood, and I wish those days came back.
Thing is....while Sax, as she grew, knew what the Home Boundaries were, they were not for her, just for other pooches. She would greet any human arriving with great delight (I put that down to the time the Old Man spent with her telling her that people are okay) and while she would give a woof in a notification for us, she would then lick the crap out of the human visitor.
But, she did have one vice.
Bloody chooks.
A short distance neighbour had chooks and Sax treated that place as her smorgasbord, and it cost my Old Man plenty in reparations replacing chooks she had.....umm......encountered and despatched. So, ultimately, the Old Man got her, somehow to leave the bloody chooks alone.
She was great. Call her, she would come instantly. Kids could crawl all over her whatever and she loved it.
But.
She knew, as I said, what was her zone. One boundary of the property was a creek. On the other side of that creek was a potential intruder.....pooch. Mongrel bitsa and a tad bigger than Sax. She always had an eye on that bloke.
He had balls. No matter how many times he came into the Sax territory and she beat him off with his tail between his legs, and until she died at 14, they kept the game going. He would cross the creek, she would attack, she belted him, off he went, rinse and repeat.
One day, she walked into the House, lay down on the carpet beside the Old Man then sitting in his chair, and went to sleep.
Vale, Sax, best of them all.
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