The Story of Floss

 

David Bancroft may have moved from APN’s The Daily Examiner to its Rural Weekly, but he turns up from time to time on the newspaper website which was his old stomping ground.

 

This is his story of the faithful farm dog Floss in two parts:

 

POOR Floss loved to chase vehicles - tractors, cars, the milk truck - just about anything. Her downfall was she was very bad at it and despite incident after incident and hour upon hour of trying to teach her to stay away, she persisted and failed.We were aware of at least a dozen times when she was run over, but believe there were many more as she would often turn up with a surprise injury.Floss was of mixed breed, a mongrel, an ugly but loyal companion with enough cattle sense to be of help on the farm….Still, she became somewhat famous. An ABC television crew came to our place to do a feature piece on dairying. My father's face featured for about five seconds; almost all the rest of the footage was of the dog….

DESPITE being perhaps the ugliest dog I've ever seen, Floss was a great mother and companion.

We never knew her breeding, but from her shape and colouring, she may have been part dachshund, part whippet and part kelpie.

If you're going for appearance, it's not a promising combination.

Together with the multiple road traumas she experienced from chasing vehicles (described last week), the end result was not pretty.

But she was a brilliant mother. She had 13 pups in her first litter and never had fewer than that.

It was a mad scramble for them all to get fed but, ugly as she was, Floss was also perhaps the most patient mother I've seen.

It was a bit of a struggle giving that first litter away, but after that we had no problems. They were in demand.

She produced terrific working dogs, which, happily, looked very little like their mother.

But finding homes for the pups created a few problems of its own.

When the last of the pups from that first litter was rehomed, my mother started losing shoes.

My mother initially thought she was just being careless but as more went missing, she investigated.

And she found Floss had commandeered the lot and taken them back to her den.

She was only interested in my mother's shoes - they had become her surrogate litter.