ALSATIAN DOGS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22487, 4 February 1935, Page 10

ALSATIAN DOGS

TO THE EDITOR Sib, —The first Alsatians I saw were at a Dunedin show a few years ago. They looked as wild-eyed as Wirth's circus tigers. But when the owner of one came and patted it on the head and stroked its back it looked quite pleased and settled down. At the jsame show there was a fox terrier, and it looked much wilder still, and snapped and snarled at everyone who stopped to look at it. I understood the Alsatians were sheep dogs, but I thought them too big and clumsy to travel on the mountains in the Lakes district, but then there is plenty of flat and easy country. A man in the interior gave £lO for one which a friend brought from Australia. This is a quiet do*, but the owner is now viewing the situation with mixed feelings. Other breeds of dogs are not the angels that many people think they are. In the sixties a sheep dog bit a small boy on the nose, and recently another sheep dog bit a small boy on the arm. In the earliest sixties, at Wanaka, a kangaroo and collie cross and a collie went out worrying, and all the station hands were out on horseback for some days before they caught and killed them. On Earnscleugh Station, about the same time, two sheep dogs went out on the run and rounded up a flock of sheep, and kept them there till they died of starvation. At a much later date, in Wanaka, three valuable sheep dogs had over three weeks' spell while their owner was. getting married. They celebrated the occasion by doing a little sheep worrying in a nearby paddock. In the early days of dogging rabbits, near the head of the Serpentine, the pack turned on to their owner, and chased him into the hut. If he, opened the door they were waiting to get oat him, and looked as wild as wolves. When he opened the window they tried to jump in. Then from the window he shot several of them before the remainder were cowed down. A friend told me that several years ago he used to hunt rabbits with a pack of 12 dogs. There were two collies, two greyhounds, one carriage dog (spotted), two staghound crosses, and lurchers. One collie was a very good sheep worker, but as he had a mania for biting sheep, even after his tusks were sawn off, he was handed over to the rabbiting camp. During one Christmas week the dogs were tied up, and then when they were let loose they made straight for a cow and chased her a good distance away and then home again, by which time she was knocked up and fell down, which made the pack wilder than ever, for now it had a chance of cowardly bullying, and they started worrying her. The owner had a tough job in flogging them off.—l am, etc., Richard Nobman. Lawrence, January 31.