One time the local highway patrolman told me this story about stopping the rendering truck. It was in the middle of the summer and was very hot. The rendering truck was full of bloated stinking carcasses and was weaving all over the road. The patrolman pulled the truck over and had this conversation with the driver, "Joe, what's the problem, you're going all over the road. Are you drunk?" "Hell yes, I'm drunk. You think I could drive this stinking outfit if I was sober?" "I see your point; I'll just give you a verbal warning but try to drive a little straighter."
The little blue heeler dog biting the cow in the picture (on the cover of his book) conjures up some memories, some of which are not all that pleasant. Virgil and Alice were clients and friends of ours, and along with their two kids, Wayne and Beth, ran a large ranch in the Sandhills. Virgil and Wayne had a typical father/son relationship in which Wayne was blamed for most of the problems that occurred on the ranch. Consequently, Wayne would take a lot of good-natured abuse about everything, sometimes deserved and sometimes not. You can't make any mistakes if you don't do anything, and you couldn't accuse Wayne of not doing anything; he always had something going. Wayne had just bought a new blue heeler dog and was demonstrating just how good a cow dog he was. We were going to vaccinate calves and were trying to push the calves up the alley-way to the pen by the chute. We were having a hard time moving them, and Wayne was going to sic his new dog on them. He hollered, "Sic 'em, Blue." Unfortunately, the first thing the dog saw to "sic" was Virgil, and he promptly latched on to Virgil's heel. Virgil let out a holler, kicked the dog off, and told Wayne to lock that mutt up in the well house.
The same dog turned out to be a pretty good cow dog but was really aggressive and could really cause me problems when I was pregnancy checking cows. I had to open a little gate in the alley-way and step behing the cow in order to pregnancy check her. The dog was always biting the cow that I was checking, causing her to kick, or even worse biting the cow behind me causing her to try to jump on top of me. I finally discovered a real good solution to this problem. I had some chewable tranquilizer pills that dogs just loved, and just before we started working the cows, I would toss four or five to the dog when no one was looking. In a little while he would stagger off and go to sleep for three or four hours and not cause any more problems. Virgil would notice the dog and accuse Wayne of buying a no good lazy mutt. Wayne would declare that his dog was sick and want me to treat him when we got through working cows. I told Wayne that I had seen dogs with this same affliction before, and had a special pill that would cure him. I would give him a vitamin pill, and sure enough he would be back to normal in another hour or so.
Wayne thought I was a wonderful dog vet. I finally had to tell Wayne what I was doing though, because every time I went out to their place, his dog would pass out, and he was getting a little bit suspicious. Wayne said he would really like to have a bottle of those tranquilizer pills. I told him it probably wasn't a good thing to keep giving them to the dog. He said, "Oh no, I don't want them for the dog, I want them to give to my teacher; it would really be neat if she would take a four hour nap every day." Bad idea, Wayne. First of all, it was illegal; second of all, people might not react to the pills like dogs; and last of all, they didn't taste as good to people as they did to dogs. I knew this for a fact because when I tried to give them to my kids, they just spit them out.
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