Animal Farm

They say animals are much more instinct driven than humans – and therefore less influenced by socialisation. In other words nature usually wins over nurture. But I have ample evidence to the contrary right under my own roof!

At my farm, on Canberra’s outskirts, there’s a mini-mouse plague (i.e. small in scale, not ‘Mickey's’ girlfriend :) and I just found my cat, Tom, teaching my dog, Dodson, how to catch, tease and make a meal of a mouse! No kidding!

Dodson, named for the Aboriginal activist-priest, Pat Dodson, is a little black guy, boofy-haired with a white beard, tender-hearted but possessed of a ferocious bark. He’s quite unhappy with the world at the moment, thanks to veterinary interventions following a recent allergic reaction – trigger unknown – and complicated double ear infections. Poor little dude has been subjected to shame and starvation – shaved back to skin, ears tied back in a bandage to stop him scratching; he looks ridiculous and he’s constantly shivering from the unfamiliar cold. And while used to meals of fresh chicken and tasty bickies, he’s been forced to endure a staple diet of supposedly low-allergy biscuits that smell of nothing and presumably taste like cardboard. Problem is, he is as stubborn as the neighbour’s mules and he’s refused to eat for five days. Today when I took him to the vet for a check-up, the scales revealed he’d lost 25% of his body-weight in a week!! No wonder he was angry enough with me to destroy his bed and eat one of my gloves – he was starving! Which is why I suppose he was willing to undergo socialisation by his feline ‘sibling’ and resort to eating mice. His luck is about to change, though – alarmed at his sudden weight loss, his vet has now prescribed a home-cooked diet of $17.99/kilo kangaroo fillet cooked risotto-style with rice. Well, he is half poodle.

Tom is actually a Serbian refugee cat – quite seriously. He was abandoned by Serbian ‘diplomats’ who left for Belgrade without him. He came to live with me…but it was not an easy transition. Tom was overwhelmed by my, now sadly departed, St Bernards and went bush for two months…he was lost for dead. But in a great tale of feline endurance, Tom learned to live like a bush-ranger and was eventually discovered at the back of my garage, under the debris of renovation. Poor Tom had been locked-in for days without food or water and he was in a bad way – averse to human contact. But, with careful, tender encouragement on my part, aided by multiple food bribes, placed strategically closer and closer to my house, Tom eventually crossed over. One day, while he ate, I seized a moment to touch him, sensing he was ready. He could barely contain his delight, rubbed himself all over me in response and followed me inside. He slept under the covers with me that night (after a very thorough wash!) and has rarely left the house since. That was nearly eight years ago and Tom is now an elderly gentleman…quite mad and very fond of sleeping on my head, but a great little bloke to have around.

In my backyard dwells not another dog, but a goose called Bruce. Bruce moved into the house-garden six months ago, after a fiendish fox invaded his enclosure and ate his entire family. Recently, he’s started knocking on the back door with his beak and squawking whenever any of the 'insiders' show their faces in the vicinity...I swear he wants to come inside! I guess he thinks he's a dog - he lives in the backyard after all.

Bruce isn’t the first of my farm animals to suffer from an identity crisis, I used to have a sheep (named Becky by some friends’ children) who used to knock on the front door with her hoof and actually did burst into the house one day! The local farmers were amazed at the way she followed me around and came when she was called. Meanwhile, I have a Scottish Highland Cow called Wallace (after the great highland warrior, William Wallace) who thinks he’s equine, not bovine. He follows the horse(who answers to Dancer) around like a lovesick puppy and, despite having deadly weapons for horns, he’s completely down-trodden by Dancer.

I’m sure there are loads of analogies to be drawn from these stories and applied to human behaviour, but I’ll leave those to your imagination.

But let this be the lesson of the yarn: you can absolutely teach an old dog new tricks!