West Pitt Farm is a group of holiday cottages near Tiverton in Devon. I’d been there many years ago with my previous Vizsla, Murphy and the family. Murphy and the family are now all gone but I decided to take Orca there for a weeks fishing. He’s just had his first birthday and is still very much a puppy but his training is coming on well and I didn’t envisage any problems.
We arrived on Friday afternoon and were soon settled into out little cottage. It was a totally different environment to being in Greater London and Orca seemed to be a little worried about the quietness of everything (about 5 cars a day go past the property). We had a wander round, watched a bit of TV and settled down for a good nights sleep. I found that he was more settled with the bedside radio on quietly, I guess it masked out the strange noises of the countryside.
Next day we had a pleasant day fishing, there was nobody around and he lay in the sun for most of the day except for a couple of episodes of barking at passers by.
The following day, Sunday, it was a similar plan. We were just settling down to fish when the property owner walked behind us carrying a sheet of plywood. The dog barked at him. The owner then proceeded to use a nail gun to fix polythene to the plywood. Each time he fired the gun the dog barked. When he walked back behind us again, the dog barked at him again and the owner deemed it “unacceptable”. I’d tried calming Orca, shouting at him, smacking him, I’d run out of ideas. I decided to do the only thing possible, to pack up and leave.
West Pitt Farm is advertised as “dog friendly”, I can’t say the same about the owner. If he’d have taken a more relaxed attitude and come over to say hello to the dog they’d have become friends. He didn’t seem to appreciate that he’d startled the dog who was in a very spooky state of mind at the time. Now Orca is a typical Vizsla, quite a small one in actual fact. He’s not vicious and wasn’t barking in an “I want to eat you” manner, he was simply scared by the man.
On that last day we’d actually planned to fish in a different one of the West Pitt Farm lakes, much further from the cottages but when we looked the lake was covered in blue-green algae which can cause illness in humans and death in pets and farm animals if they drink it. There was no way that I could fish there with a silly pup going off on discovery missions around the lake.
At £425, that was a very expensive day’s fishing. With a dog whose behaviour was unacceptable, I found myself in an impossible situation. Given a choice between sitting indoors in a tiny one bedroomed cottage or returning home to everything that is familiar (and friendly) there was only one option.
What would you have done ?
Hardly as if your dog was barking all through the night, was it? I think a lot of dogs would bark in the situations you described. ‘Dog friendly’ does seem to be a very widely used description which doesn’t always mean as much as we may think.