"The pig did it."

My husband and I were on our way home with our Christmas tree hanging out of the back of the car's trunk yesterday and we saw two dogs playing in the middle of the road. On a country two-lane highway, with the speed limit at 65, most of the cars we saw were driving either at or above that posted limit. We were driving slower because of the tree so it was easy to pull over right at the spot where the two dogs were.

There is a huge ranch on that particular road, complete with fancy stone fences and mega-bucks landscaping, and that property owner has scores of deer and elk and reindeer-like animals roaming on those countless acres. (Countless to us, but I'm sure that property owner knows his acreage down to the last millimeter.)  That old song "....where the deer and the antelope play...." comes to mind when we pass that property.

The two dogs were clearly having a grand time on that road, running and jumping and nose-to-the-ground exploring. Which is fine, but not when you're in the middle of a road. My husband pulled over to the side, right in the driveway of The Ranch, and when he called the dogs over to him, both of them happily came... a black/white Border Collie and a brown/white Pit Bull.  I was very leery of the Pit Bull, but she seemed as friendly as the male Border Collie. Both dogs were wearing collars and tags, and when the Border Collie calmed down a bit (he seemed happy to have found a person) my husband was able to read the number on his tag and use the cell phone to make the call.

The phone number went to a 'help desk' which had the dogs' information... they called the owner... the owner called my husband. She had been out looking for the dogs, couldn't find them, and had gone home to wait for them to hopefully find their way back. My husband told her he would keep the dogs with us, he explained exactly where we were on that road, and she said she'd be there in ten minutes. The Border Collie kept bringing rocks and sticks to my husband, waiting for him to throw them so they could be retrieved and brought back. Watching that black/white dog and my husband, I knew he was thinking of our old dog Gracie. (Same coloring, same intensity when playing with my husband.) We had gone to the health food store and had organic sourdough bread in the car, so my husband was rewarding the dogs' good behavior with bits of bread.

When the owner got out of her car, the Border Collie ran up to her and she said "If I wasn't so happy to see y'all, I'd be really mad at both of y'all."  The dog's owner explained to us that they had a new baby in the house and she and her husband had taken the baby to the doctor's for a monthly check-up."  When they got back to their property, the gate was open and the dogs were gone. They always close the gate, but they have a pet pig who has learned how to open up the gate, and does so frequently. For whatever reason, the dogs decided to go exploring, and off they went. The pig stayed right in the yard. We suggested to the lady that she get a pig-proof lock on her gate and we all laughed. She thanked us for stopping when we saw the dogs, for calling the number on the tags, and for keeping the dogs safe and off the road till she got there. We told her that both dogs really liked organic sourdough bread.

It was amazing to me that while we were parked off the road waiting with those dogs, plenty of cars just drove on by, none of them even slowing down when one of the dogs got too close to the road. This is supposed to be a dog-loving state. Those dogs were about ten miles away from their home, and in all of those ten miles, not one car stopped to get them away from the road? They clearly were not strays... they were healthy-looking and cared for, both wearing collars with tags.

Lessons learned..... those pet ID tags really work; Pit Bulls are only mean if they're trained to be because this particular Pit Bull was whimpering for her owner while the Border Collie was playing with my husband; and pigs are smarter than you would think.