Recona

The little blond dog is still here, and her name seems to have stuck as “Recona.” We really like her because she just sticks around where ever we are, and for the first time since we’ve had horses we have a dog who will go trail riding with us and stay out of trouble. She just follows along, learns which horses don’t like to be followed and stays out of their way, and stops and rests when we stop. Yesterday we rode Tony and Es up to the vista, and we had to stop a couple of times so Tom could chop some deadfall out of the trail. The first time she tried to get a little close to Tom chopping, but when he told her to back off, she did.


At the vista, we stopped for a good 15 minutes to watch a couple of Swallow-Tailed Kites doing their courtship ritual right at our eye level in the valley overlooked by the vista, and Recona just rested in the trail the entire time. Any of the other dogs would have been off getting lost in the bushes, but she just waited til we were ready to go, and then led the way home.

If you want to see any more about swallow-tailed kites, click here, which is where the picture came from.

The only problem we’ve had with her is with our closest neighbors, Marta Uno’s family. We just found out that most of the dozens of chickens that are always over here belong to them. A few days after Recona seemed to settle here, Delmy, Marta’s eldest daughter, showed up to tell us that our dog was killing their chickens. We’d seen Recona chasing the chickens in the horse pasture, and had said “good dog” because although the chickens don’t really bother us, they’re always in the horses’ feed when they eat, and they make a little bit of a mess, which doesn’t really matter since they’re in the pasture, but still, we think the dog is doing a good thing when she chases the chickens home. Anyway, we asked Delmy if the dog had actually killed any chickens, and she said no, but she was killing them. Just to be clear, we asked if they had any dead chickens as a result of the dog’s actions. Well, no, but she was killing them. We pointed out to Delmy that the dog wasn’t killing the chickens, she was just chasing them out of our pasture. Yes, Delmy agreed, she was chasing them out of our pasture and killing them. We then tried to explain that we’d talked to all the other neighbors about chickens on our property, and the agreement was that if our dogs kill their chickens on our property, it’s not our problem. Oh, so it was a problem that the chickens are always on our property. No, we tried to explain, it’s not a problem, but it’s also not OUR problem if OUR dog kills THEIR chickens on OUR property. And, we pointed out, Recona is just chasing the chickens, but if Lou or Nock goes out and goes after the chickens, chances are there will actually be some DEAD chickens, not just chickens in the process of being killed, and that isn’t our problem either. To further stress the point, we reminded them that Lou had killed our chickens, which was in fact our problem, but that’s why we don’t have chickens any more. All of this in Spanish, of course, although since Delmy and Marta Uno didn’t really want to be told that it wasn’t our problem and since we weren’t offering them any money to compensate for the attempted murder of the chickens, it probably would have been equally difficult to explain in English. Anyway, we left the conversation thinking they probably understand, and the kids do come over and try to get some of the chickens to go back home out of our pasture before school, and if Tom and Selwyn are working near Marta Uno’s house Recona is tied, but I guess we’ll see what happens if one of our dogs does actually succeed in the chicken killing process with one of their chickens.