Does this dog look "rurnt"?

She does look kind of guilty.  My friend Tracey said I should blog this -- so this is for you, Tracy!

Trixie Lou and Ophelia

When I left our little pooch at our friend's house (not Tracy) for the weekend while we traveled up to Maryville in east Tennessee for our daughter to interview at the college for some additional moulah, I said, "Don't let her out in your backyard with your chickens, because she can't be trusted with them -- I don't let her out with ours and I haven't had time to work with her on training her to stay away from them".

Trixie Lou McMuttsly was given to us by our across the street neighbors last summer when they had to move to Pennsylvania to take a new job pastoring a church up there.  They had found her abandoned near the house they were staying in for free in Alabama during their year of unemployment while they tried to sell the house here.  They named her Trouble and ultimately brought her back here when they had to vacate the free house.  She was cute but crazy, and spent a good bit of time standing in the street barking insanely -- running away if you tried to pet her.  After some time at doggy reform school, and a renaming to Trixie, the neighbors convinced us to take her last July, as our 14 year old mini dachshund had been put down the previous December.

"I know you like to play with strings, please play with me?"

Does this look like a murderer?

If Belle won't play, maybe Ophelia will

She gets along great with our two cats and other dogs.

exhausted

But I wouldn't trust her with chickens.

My friend said she thought it was snowing, but then she heard her dog, Huckleberry -- an Australian shepherd kind of dog whose greatest pleasure is to protect baby goats and herd chickens -- barking up a storm.

Huckleberry had Trixie cornered and pinned with his paw, but it was too late.  3 of the 4 chickens were injured beyond help.  The fourth, Foxy Gigi (so named because she was the only survivor of a fox massacre of my friend's mother's 20something chickens -- picked off one by one on successive nights -- several years ago) with wisdom beyond what one would expect from a tiny chicken brain, hid out up in the coop safe from the mayhem.  She wouldn't come out for three days.

Despite Germantown being a suburb of a major metropolitan area (Memphis), back in the 60's and 70's when I was growing up, a rural lifestyle was just beneath the surface of this bedroom community.  Most of my friends parents or grandparents had come from and still had connections to "the country".  Fathers and brothers hunted.  And farms, with chickens and cows and acres planted in cotton, surrounded the Brady Bunch style subdivisions that were being built.  And everyone had dogs.  Dawgs.  And everyone always said that if a dog got a taste of blood, especially chickens, "that dawg is rurnt" (ruined).

I don't think I'll be letting Trixie Lou in our backyard.  And she can count herself lucky we don't live in the country and our livelihood doesn't depend on our stock or hunting.