Old Working Dogs Refuse to Be Put Out to Pasture

At 15, Cassie is deaf, arthritic and still determined to work sheep on the Vaux family farm at Ongerup, about 400 kilometres southeast of Perth. She belongs to roughly eight generations of working dogs that have stood beside the family over more than a century.

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She's normally gone at 10 or 12, but she still seems reasonably healthy although she's gone deaf so we're down to signals.

“She's normally gone at 10 or 12, but she still seems reasonably healthy although she's gone deaf so we're down to signals,” Kingsley Vaux said. Cassie can be difficult to redirect, he said, but she is also teaching the younger dogs. Her experience remains obvious: she knows the jobs she has done before and where the sheep are going.

Thirteen-year-old Bundy, a kelpie at Renae Parsons’s farm near Tenterden, also refuses to retire. He cannot do as much as he once did, but during one operation involving 3,000 sheep, he noticed that 300 were missing and went to bring back the stragglers on his own. Bundy dislikes being shouted at. If his handler becomes angry, he sits on the ute until she calms down, then returns to work.

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He doesn't like to be yelled at.

Trainer and breeder Jenny Parsons says the devotion farmers show their aging dogs challenges their reputation for toughness. She believes the relationship itself helps produce better workers: dogs need to want to work for their handlers, and “the better the bond … the bigger the try.”

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The better the bond … the bigger the try.

Vaux keeps a graveyard for the dogs that worked on his property. Each has an epitaph reflecting its character, from Beth the talker to Fudge the prankster, Quarter who knew left from right and Speckles who loved water. Walking among the graves, he said losing one is “bloody hard.”

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It's bloody hard when you leave one, when one leaves you.