Little Falls Herald

TOM PLUMPIS LETTER.
"THE DOG."

There are several different breeds of dogs, and it matters but little what kind of a dog a fellow may have, it is always a good dog, if you take the owner's word for it, for a sensible person would not feed a worthless dog, and put up with his worthlessness, fifty-two weeks every year, during the life of a dog.

Dogs are usually night prowlers, but you may ask one hundred owners of dogs, or a dog if their dog visits their neighbors at night, and ninety-nine of them will say no, and they believe they are telling the truth, for the dog was at home when he went to bed, and was there when he got up, and that seems reasonable proof that his dog is not a night prowler, but the majority of dogs do visit of nights their nearby comrades.

What is everybody's business, it is said, no one attends to, and the taxing of dogs is everybody's business. There should be a tax on dogs sufficiently high to tax all worthless ones out of existence, and the tax on bulldogs should be high enough to put the whole breed out of existence, for the reason that fighting is all they are fit for. If a man of a belligerent nature is compelled to do his own fighting instead of being allowed to keep a beast to do it for him, his love of it is apt to grow less instead of greater.

There are few living things among God's work, endowed with the capacity to determine correctly by scent, the different things that a dog can ferret out. A dog can trail his owner through the streets of a crowded city, yet his master may wear a pair of shoes made of the same kind of leather that hundreds of other men wear in the city. He also can trail his owner's horse, through the streets of a city, and the streets may be paved with stone, and the horse may wear shoes made of iron, the same as hundreds of other horses may wear.

The hunter may have a deer wounded, and the blood may have ceased to drop from the wound, yet his trailer can follow this particular deer, although it may follow in the same path a dozen others have passed along that same day.

There are few people who do not love dogs. If I were going to get married, one of the essential prerequisites would be that the woman should be a lover of dogs. I mean she would have to be a lover of good dogs.

A man's disposition may be learned from his dog more accurately than from a member of his family, provided the man has owned the dog a sufficient time for the dog to acquire his disposition.

The majority of dogs are not trained in the line that they are by nature fitted for, and therefore are worthless. It is wrong to try to train a dog along a line that his breed does not fit him for. It is wrong to try to train a dog unless you know how, and few people know how, and some who know how have not the required patience or time. If a man undertakes to train a dog, and the dog knows more than the man, the man will fail.

Don't ever whip your dog unless he needs it, and after you have whipped him do not let him run away from you but caress him and he will love you.

It is very annoying to go along the highways in the country and have dogs chasing you at every farm house. An easy and effective way to break a dog of that habit is to load a shot gun with fine shot and watch your dog and when he starts for the road tell him to stop, and if he fails to do it give it to him. It catches him in the act and the second dose will not be necessary if a good job is done at first. Once when old Dave Muckelroy was painting the cornice of his house, while standing on a ladder he looked over on the hillside and beheld his old sow standing in the warm sunshine. He said to his boy to take the dog over there and set it on the hay for he knew she was studying deviltry. The hog ran towards the house with the dog hanging to one ear, and tried to pass between the ladder and the house, but there was no room and in the fall Dave got an arm broken and hurt internally, which lasted him eternally, and he always thought if the dog had not been after her that she would have killed him, and Dave may have been right in his belief.

There is no living animal on earth so obedient to man as the well-trained dog. A well-trained dog would starve to death in a butcher shop, and the shop full of all kinds of meat, if the dog's master was present and forbid his eating. I doubt if a human being would be so devoted to a brother or a father.

If there had been a faithful dog with Rose Litka she would not have perished in the woods of Morrill, with persistent men hunting for days for her. A faithful dog will not desert his master when lost, but he will desert anything but his master. Back in the eighties Miss Anna Cobott came to my house in the middle of the night and asked me to go and find her brother, Frank, and Joe Slobie of Alberta, who were lost. I asked her in what direction they had gone before getting lost. She said towards Rum River looking for cattle. I told her to take no trouble about them as I would find where they crossed the river and trail them, but that I could do nothing until daylight. She said there was a dog with them but he had got back home in the fore part of the night. I knew the dog was young, or that he did not love the boys, and I as yet have not found out which of the two it was, but I guess it was a sprinkling of both. I started out in time to get to Rum River by daylight and found the boys and followed the river to its head. I found them and took them to where they were acquainted, and started to digging potatoes. I had not worked long until intuition told me some one else was lost, and my duty was to hunt them, I went east through the now township of Lakin, Morrison county. I could hear howling and went in that direction, and found the old gentlemen Cobott and Dally, the fathers of the boys. They had been in the woods all night and were a sorry-looking pair. Their clothes were torn and their flesh lacerated in several places. When I told them the boys were at home their eyes filled with tears of thankfulness to me. But the dog, where was he? There were bears in the woods them days and he may have been afraid of them, for the boys were not armed. The boys said he howled and howled and he howled, and lagged way behind, and then he howled no more. If there is a happy hunting ground beyond this world for dogs I think that dog will turn back before he gets through to it.

I knew a remarkable dog in the state of Illinois back in the sixties. This dog was of the Newfoundland variety. He belonged to a lady who was remarkable. She was born blind, and her face where her eyes should have been was smooth. In other words she had no eyes. She was a fortune teller, and there are people yet alive there who had great faith in her ability to tell correctly the past or future. She lived in the city of Salem on a thickly settled street, where one hundred or more different individuals passed daily. This Newfoundland's business was to open the gate and door for all people who went there to get their fortunes told. It was said and generally believed that the dog would never open the gate unless the person who was approaching the gate intended to go in. I remember he opened the gate for me.