Farming. Yuk! I mean what is a dog meant to do when suddenly everyone is talking about moisture profiles and moisture probes and late varieties of wheat and barley. All that fussing, playing around with grease and hydraulic oil and seeding rates and it doesn’t even taste good. I know I tried some straight out of the hopper (that’s the container the big augar sucking thing goes into, it spits out the grain into the tipper). Anyway it tastes pretty damn ordinary. Some of it got caught in my back molars and I was coughing the stuff up all afternoon.

Lucky for me there was some entertainment this morning. A dead cow, ripe with the fragrant scent that us dogs love. Well I had a good roll around in the old animal hide while the two-leggeds mucked around with their grain.

When everything was loaded and we were off to check another planter I walked up to where ‘the team’ were talking machinery talk.

‘Oh Jack!’

‘Jack, what have you been doing?’

‘What?’ I barked in reply.

‘You stink,’ one of the men complained.

Really, a dog can’t even have a roll around these days without everyone having an opinion about it. I jumped in the back of the ute and gave my best profile… nose slightly raised, ears pricked but nonchalantly refusing to listen to a single command. I wouldn’t have been so offended except that a few days ago Jill, having a puppy break, found a rather large dead black snake. Now it was nicely aged and Jill did her best to wrangle every part of her body over it. When she finally stood up the dead snake had somehow managed to attach itself to Jill’s back. Anyone would have thought that my half-sister was a model the way she ambled up the road with the skin on her back.

‘It’s the latest fashion,’ Jill explained to me.

‘OMG,’ Nicole exclaimed, ‘look at Jill with the snake-skin collar.’

I walked away, anyone would think Jill had just stepped out of the pages of Dogs Digest (US version).  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that with the recent arrival of her brood she had a way to go before she graced the dog glossy alongside Elle McRuff and that fine-limbed British breed of a leggy gal who has a bit of a habit of putting stuff up her nose-no offence darl. Until next week, if it smells good… enjoy!