HOW YOU SEE IT! Mates of a different kind
WITH BRYAN LITTLELY AND SHAUN
I haven’t been gripped by any egg shortage, with a steady flow of the brekky favourites coming from my parents’ production facility, the chook house on their neighbouring farm.
But I have only myself to blame if I was short of eggs. I could readily keep chickens myself. In fact I do… just not the egg laying kind.
I might be the only bloke who has a pet rooster. Rupert Hey Hey is quite the character but apart from adding an essential farm noise to our operations, his only other real job is to give us a daily job of feeding him scraps and making sure he is locked up at night so that the foxes don’t get to him.
It is a job not even begrudgingly done by my wife and daughter who expressed utter outrage when they first met Rupert Hey Hey (they added the Hey Hey part) when I picked them up at the airport from a return overseas trip with the rooster in a box.
I wouldn’t have ever thought you could feel a sense of companionship with a rooster, but it is possible. Rupert, with his quirky ways, has shown that. I’ll miss him if ever a fox does get to him.
A dog, though, is more likely to earn the mantle of best mate, I think in the majority of people’s view. At least in the eyes of dog owners. It is true, dogs give unconditional love.
Heartbreakingly, I lost my best farm mate, Hodgie, this week when he made a fatal error on our farm road.
Hodgie, a gorgeous brown kelpie with a “Michael Jackson” one glove white paw, was an Animal Welfare League rescue dog… full of energy but terrified of the rescue rabbit Salvador we took in around the same time. We would discover that he was not actually terrified of the rabbit, but of the rabbit’s cage. Hodgie had not had the most loving start to his life.
He was my shadow on the farm. Loved nothing more than to be out running across the paddocks. Even though I could count on one hand the successful cattle working episodes he had, I never stopped him from trying.
Often when I went away for work, including my work in Port Douglas on Newsport, I would get a picture sent from my family of Hodgie waiting for me to come home. I was away from home when Hodgie was accidentally killed and I dread my return tomorrow and not having him greet me as he usually does.
Rest easy my mate. You are a good boy.
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