They don’t bark at family (France)

One of the things I noticed during an early stay on the French farm was:  the farm mistress didn’t look up at the sound of every approaching car.

    The farm is on a ridge parallel to, and north of, the Pyrénées, with a stunning view of the mountain range when the atmospheric pressure is right.  They are hidden from sight most of the time, so that you can’t even tell they are there.  If they are fully visible in their snow-topped glory, then it’ll rain the next day (or so).

    The nearest neighbours are:  a couple 1km away down by the A21, the main road leading to the Pyrénées; and also 1km away but in the other direction, the village idiot [as he’s called by the locals] and his brother and sister-in-law further inland.  Only the postman would drive up to the house.  Or the neighbours, or friends and relatives, maybe a customer to buy wood from the little sawmill on the farm.

    For a farm that is out on a limb, they get quite a few visitors, being so popular and hospitable.  This means more cars driving up to the house than its secluded location would otherwise attract.

    The dogs only bark at outsiders.  So, if one can hear a car driving up to the house and the dogs (there were nine of them at one point) don’t bark, it is someone known to the family.  It's absolutely amazing how they manage to remember which car sound is a new one (to them).

    Even though I only went once a year, during the long summer school holidays, staying only three weeks each time, the dogs remembered me every subsequent visit.

    On my very first visit during the Easter break in 1996, I’d arrived at midnight, having taken the Eurostar to Paris, then the TGV all the way to Agen, and then an hour-long bus journey to Auch, 6 kms from the farm, being met there by the farm mistress (my student's mother).

    As I stepped out of the car, I found myself surrounded by six dogs who emerged suddenly out of the dark, even at that late hour.

 

    One of them, Pastou* (pronounced “pa-tu”), stood up on his hind legs and put his front paws on my shoulders.  I stepped back to try and make him drop his paws, but he simply walked forwards with me as I stepped back.  That was my first reception.

    After that day, I got to know the rest of the canine members of the family:  Patoche (meaning “paw”), Fleurie….  All hunting dogs.  All brown and short-haired.  And short-legged.

    On my visit in 2012, I was invited out by a British girl who’d married a local man down the road.  We went into town: to the market, to the little museum, then for a coffee.  After that, we went back to her place for dinner and a chat, before she drove me back to the farm around 11 pm.

    The farm owners go to bed around 9 pm, so I asked her to drop me off at the bottom of the last stretch of the drive up, so that the dogs’ barking wouldn’t disturb the sleeping human occupants.  I had a wind-up torch on me, but I didn’t need it as there was a full moon.

    It wasn’t until I reached the front door of the farm house that I realised the dogs had not barked at all throughout the 100-metre walk up the drive.  

    It was dark, they only saw me once a year, yet they somehow knew it was me.  They presumably had a mental record of my footsteps (from the daytime) over the three weeks of my stay, rather than the sound of a car engine.  Amazing.

    I felt so honoured — to have been accepted by the dogs as family!

(Gers, S.W. France, 1990s)

* Pastou, ironical name for a hunting dog!  From googling: The term “pastou” [pronounced pa-tu] is derived from the word “pastre”, meaning shepherd in old French and designates a shepherd’s dog as it was understood in times past.  Unlike a herd dog, the role of the guard dog is not to drive the sheep but rather to protect them from wild animals or feral dogs.

**This blog supplements the blog "Chinese sayings:  35 (吠非其主)" 

https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/01/chinese-sayings-35_27.html 

The village idiot:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2012/05/village-idiot-france.html 

Why the postman never calls twice:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-postman-never-calls-twice.html 

Dino the dirty dog (in more ways than one) (France)

“Dino is an ugly dog.”

Those were Colette’s first words to me about him, poor boy!

He doesn’t look anything like the other dogs on the farm, which are all hunting dogs, numbering at least half a dozen at any one time.

The hunting dogs are brown, short legged, short haired, extremely sociable and get on with everyone else, both four-legged and two-, looking you straight in the eye each time.

There is one that bares its teeth as it waddles up to you, wagging its backside (yes, backside, not tail), which Colette said is meant to be a smile — the baring of teeth, that is, not the wagging of the backside, although tail wagging is a smile when it comes to dogs.

Dino, on the other hand, stands out for miles:  scruffy.  His matted, tangled fur always has clumps of something embedded, and he is constantly scratching.

He is of an indeterminable shade of black and dark grey, has shifty eyes, and wears a perpetual sheepish and apologetic look as if he’s just done something bad (which you have yet to discover).

He’ll get up and shuffle away as soon as you approach, whether you’re going up to him or just passing by, as if he’s afraid of being targeted.  The just in case approach.

He must’ve been beaten a lot, probably for no reason, which might also explain the perpetual sheepish look — he’s come to think he is always in the wrong.  (Reminds me of Billy — see link below for blog entry Bung Deetle Bung Deetle)

Dino had come to the farm as an orphan.  His owner had died in a house fire, which had destroyed everything else but Dino.

Right from the start, Dino failed to fit in, by rubbing the other dogs up the wrong way — more specifically, up the wrong end by sniffing their underparts. 

They took umbrage at this newcomer taking such an over-familiar approach, and warned him off with a few growls at the back of the throat and some rising hackles.

Which should’ve been clear enough to Dino, except that he doesn’t seem to read body-language messages too well, and went ahead with his never-say-die way of doing things.

The growls would grow in volume and duration, then turn into bites, but still he’d go back for more.  If one dog didn’t like his bum sniffed at, Dino would move on to the next, undeterred.  Colette called it sexual harassment.

At one point, Dino teamed up with the loner hen for company when farm mistress Jeanette gave up on putting her back into the poultry pen after several breakouts.  (See link below for The loner hen.)

They’d go for walks together, exploring various parts of the farm: Dino in front, followed by the hen (she does have much shorter legs, after all...).

Until the loner hen got eaten one day — by one of the hunting dogs.

So Dino went back to bum-sniffing, which eventually erupted in a massive retaliation, when the other dogs sank their teeth into him and rolled him about in the mud.  So that’s where he got his matted fur from!

Jeanette is a real sweetie with people, very good-natured and easy-going, but you’d hear her constantly barking at Dino, many times a day.  Without looking out of the window, I’ll know from Jeanette’s ticking off that he’s either been doing some sniffing, or stealing some dog’s food.

He’s not perpetually hungry, though.  One day I found him sitting down with a bun on the ground right in front of him.  As soon as he saw me coming out of the house, he picked it up between his teeth and walked away from me.  Fair enough, he thought I might want to take it from him.  This happened every time I went anywhere near him.  However, hours later, that bun was still uneaten.  So he was just guarding it for the sake of stopping anyone from taking it from him.  Strange dog.

(Update, 10 September 2025:  my brain is so slow, it's just occurred to me that he might've been deprived of food at his previous place, so he'd developed yet another "just in case" strategy, i.e., hang on to whatever food that's in hand for the rainy-day period when there'd be no food.  This would be in tune with his shuffling out of my path whenever I approached or walked past – just in case the passer-by decided to hit him, which I think might have been his experience at his previous place.  This is all only my own conjecture from his behaviour and body language.)

On my way back to London, as the plane was landing, I heard a hoarse raspy sound, a throaty sort of woof woof that was Dino’s bark.  He had stowed away and was following me back!

It turned out to be the speed brakes of the plane rasping.

Caught a bus from where the airport bus dropped me.  As it approached South Kensington Tube station, lo and behold, right ahead was a huge sign that I’d never noticed before, which said:

DINO’s [Italian restaurant]  

No escape from the scruffy dog even back in London.

(France, September 2010)

Update (October 2011):  Coming back on Monday 03 October from my visit to the farm this summer, I took the same bus via South Kensington as last year, and found that Dino's has now become Muriel's Kitchen.  Wonder if it's because they'd read this blog entry and didn't want to be associated with a scruffy dog...?

Bung deetle bung deetle:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/07/bung-deetle-bung-deetle.html 

The loner hen:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/07/loner-hen.html 

See also Aptly named dog:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2012/01/aptly-named-dog-france.html