IT’S been a difficult year for dogs, and my two bearded collies take very little pleasure in this current heat wave.

Long-haired dogs and heavy rainfall don’t fit together and to cap it all I see our annual parish dog show is fast approaching. That means not just bathing, but a thorough shampooing and then being confined to barracks to dry off with no luxuriant rolling in the long August grass. 

Beardies are a Scottish breed and have an instinctive understanding of cattle, which is all very well in the hills of Galloway, but is less valuable in their reaction to game birds and livestock in lowland estates. The old dog ignores pheasants, partridges, grouse and especially sheep, but the younger dog’s exuberance and sense of adventure has, from time to time, landed us in trouble. When he was a puppy, his master (that was me), anxious to show him off in a more working environment in the woods, somewhat rashly ignored the collected Range Rovers and took to cavorting with the head keeper’s bitch springer just as the drive began.

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You can imagine the consequences. He was banned from all sporting activity until wiser behaviour was learned.

This meant either staying at home to learn new disciplines or coming out in the woods, but under tight control. This included learning social skills and discipline among all the other forestry dogs – that is, dogs content to sit quietly, always in the driver’s seat of a less salubrious pickup or veteran Land Rover, especially those bedecked with cock pheasant corpses. My boy learned quickly, which was just as well as there’s only one thing better than walking in the woods and that is walking in the woods with a well-trained dog.

Our local dog show perhaps lacks the allure of Crufts at the NEC, but at least a major part of the enjoyment is watching the owners as their dogs compete for a bag of superior biscuits. We don’t have a supreme champion, but to give you some idea of the competition, one of the classes is for the ‘dog with the waggiest tail’. My dog is a clear favourite for this – quite an achievement when you consider there are more dogs than people in this village.

Nearly all of the locals get on well, but my boy has a very well-developed sense of territory, so strangers are treated with a good deal of suspicion. That apart, he has a long-standing vendetta with the border collie from the farm, based on the farm dog riding about on a quad bike, but this is more for show than any noisier contest.

At the dog show all will be peace and tranquillity.

But then it will all be over for another year and it’s back to the woods on Monday. I checked with Rob the underkeeper for the shoot as to where might be no-go areas, so I will head for the hills and later on look at the clearfell harvesting operation.

Not a good place for dogs, even one as experienced as mine. Of course, there used to be planting, ploughing, draining and fencing in the high, wide and open hills, which were ideal for both dog and forester, but this is surely the reason why forestry dogs are content to snooze in the cab rather than risk getting involved in felling in any way. Work in the woods has become more and more mechanised over the years and therefore much less dog friendly. Every tractor cab used to have a dog in it, but it could now be a health-and-safety issue.

But then, down here, so is rural crime. A massive tractor just disappeared from a farm not all that far from here, taken in the middle of the night and turning up three months later in Turkey. Now, if they had a dog, none of this could have happened. And we had our little scare last week, when our quad bike vanished from the workshop where I had left it to be picked up by the local dealers for its latest service. One minute it was there, an hour later it was gone.

I rang around, but no one had seen it – not even the dogs. The dealer eventuality found it in the back of his yard, waiting for its turn in the queue. He had forgotten to tell me that this turn had come half a day earlier. By this time I had alerted our local police, got an incident number and looked up the Turkish for ‘quad’ in a convenient dictionary. But seriously, the whole event at least served as a warning.

To some. The dogs slept throughout. Their excuse was that they are used to the bike, so saw nothing unusual in it driving away. 

Woof. Woof, woof!