I was snoozing away in the kennel when the boss came and banged on the roof and said his editor had just got in touch to say it was the last column of the year and seen as I’d done it for the past few years, I’d better get on with it.
The boss thrust a half-chewed pencil and a couple of bits of paper at me, wished me good luck and stomped off back to the house.
In case you don’t know me, I’m Ditch, the dog he found as a young pup after I’d been dumped in the water table on the roadside. I was so small I fitted in his hand.
Even he thought Watertable would be a silly name.
It was speculated for a while that I might be a rottweiler, but I turned out to be a large hairy sheepdog.
He tells me I’m not the best dog he’s ever had but I’m not the worst either.
Just as well for him because for the past few years it’s been just the two of us running the farms.
Sue, my daughter from an act of gay abandon, hung around for a few years but because she was scared of sheep never did any work. Eventually she was rehomed and now spends her days on a cushion in the local saddlery and goes on holidays with her new family to Taupō.
He’s fond of the saying, “If all of your dogs are no good, the problem might not be the dogs.”
I think the boss told you that I was very crook earlier in the year.
I nearly died. I had something called autoimmune haemolytic anaemia, which means my own immune system thought my red blood cells were foreign invaders and was killing them off, leaving me very weak by the time he thought to take me to the vet.
They had to get a large police dog to come in and give me blood for a transfusion to save my life.
Then I was on all sorts of drugs, including chemotherapy, for months.
It cost him a fortune.
Mind you, he hasn’t been in the greatest shape himself.
When I got crook, he’d only just got his arm out of a sling from a broken collarbone after he fell off his two-wheel motorbike while looking at deer running through his young trees.
Ever since then he’s been limping around moaning about how sore he is with hip arthritis in both hips.
He’s on his own so he can’t knock off for a few months to get something done about them and anyway he’s not bad enough for the public health to even put him on a waiting list, he hasn’t got health insurance and reckons he hasn’t got $65,000 now to get them done privately.
So he just limps around grumbling away but no one takes any notice.
He’s also worried about events and turmoil in China and how their economy is reacting. Points out how critical it is to the primary sector here. The threat of a recession everywhere else in the world is not helping either.
Currently there is a sharp fall in beef and sheep meat prices, which is taking farmers by surprise and comes with a decent amount of trepidation. The meat companies don’t appear interested in mutton at all and he hears there are concerns about other products like velvet. He feels sorry for the new entrants who will be experiencing this for the first time in their careers as it has been a great run for a decade. Older hands like him have been through worse and understand cycles better, but it’s still not fun.
He’s got a modest-sized sheep stud and has lost three good clients to pine trees just in this year alone and wonders how this trend can be halted without impacting on balance sheets and equity.
Farmers are going to have to tighten their belts given the high cost structure, and that tightening will impact upon our support industries.
However, he points out how much feed everyone has, which gives the ability to run into the new year all the extra stock that we seem to have ended up with so it could be worse.
And he is fond of pointing out that although we think we have problems, it’s a hell of a lot better than living in places like China, Ukraine, Russia, Haiti and Iran, to name just a few of at least 120 countries.
He tells me a lot of stuff like this.
Look after your dogs over the festive season and don’t feed them a ham bone like he did to me once. It was a nasty experience.
Have a great festive break yourselves, enjoy time with family and friends and make sure you get at least some sort of break for your own wellbeing.
Ditch.
