Friday 21 September 2012

Making the most of the weather


Murdoch and Angel
Last week Sue, Jan and myself met once again at the lakes with the dogs and as usual had a laugh a minute:o)  The weather was lovely and so was the food ( Ellie was very miffed about missing out on that, as it was a school day) and all the dogs behaved themselves even when they were joined in the lake by a horse and rider cooling off in 'their' lake !! My old girl 'Lacey' thought she was a puppy again (she's almost 11 years old) so I had to keep putting her on a lead so she would have a rest.  She's never been a very good swimmer but managed to splash around several times soaking me to the skin in the process :o)

Jan took some AWESOME pictures of them all - she really should do it professionally she's so good.

(All pictures below copywrite to Jan Anderson)


Lacey having a 'splashing' time
Ooli and Ebene waiting for the ball to be thrown


Ebene
Ooli being Ooli :o)

Ooli searching for the lost ball - he found it too!!  Clever lad.

BBQ



On 10th September we hosted a BBQ for the Barbet Club of Great Britain.  We had a brilliant turn out of people from all over the country accompanied by their Barbets.  I think that there was about 30 dogs in all including lots of puppies from the 2 litters that were born in UK this year.   They all had a fabulous time together as did all us humans :o)   We had a short meeting in the morning where we discussed the KC recognition, show dates in France for next year and arranging a visit to Wales for a weekend of training for the TAN among other things.   We were lucky enough to have John Daniels (animal photographer) attend and he took some great pictures under difficult circumstances - try keeping 30 plus dogs still for longer than a nano second :o)
Wendy did a grooming demonstration in the afternoon and I'm sure that several people came away with lots of tips.
As an added bonus, the event raised around £70 which has been used to start off the welfare fund - great result!!
Hopefully this will become an annual event so we can catch up with everyone and see the progress of the puppies.

There will be a full write up on the days events posted on the Barbet Club of Great Britains website with more pictures.

Jimmy setting up

Dori and Claude helping with the pool cleaning





Karen and me doing what we do best - chatting :o)

Claude and Ena
Ebene with 3 of her pups

Wednesday 5 September 2012

The Good Life

The time came again this year to say 'goodbye' to the lambs that we have had here for several months - we raise lambs, pigs, chickens and turkeys for our freezer on the smallholding and also grow a lot of fruit and vegetables to go with it.  Our meat animals live in our back field but as you can see in the pictures they come and have a stroll round the front too.   Lots of people say to me "how can you do it??"  I can't say that its easy to do this, but I am a meat eater and would far rather eat the meat from animals that I know have been well cared for and have had a very happy life whilst they are here, never being kept in dirty or cramped conditions as sadly a lot of animals are.  The most important thing to me though, is that they have a stress free 'end' as we have a great guy who comes here and does the deed so they never have to be loaded in a lorry with goodness knows how many others and taken miles to an abattoir.  Some of my friends will never understand and would far rather buy from a supermarket where its all in packets and doesn't look like a lamb, pig etc :o)  They always say how fantastic the taste is though - totally different than shop bought in fact.
 My grand daughter knows what animal all the different meats come from unlike most kids who have no clue!!  To be honest most kids don't even know what the names of the different vegetables are either, sad when you think about it really :o(

Nothing gets wasted as the dogs get all the paunches, tongues and a whole lot more!!  They also get all the bones when they've come back from the butcher - happy dogs indeed :o)

   
The next job is to get the turkeys big house and run ready as they are quickly outgrowing the one they're in at the moment.  Thats a job for tomorrow :o)