Michelle Wrighton Fine Art and Photography

First of all I have to have a whinge about Telstra’s internet services for country clients.  I admit our wireless connection is reasonably good, but  is absolutely pointless when you can’t access the internet anyway because the 10GIG combined maximum Up/download limit per month before getting capped back to 1992 dial-up speed is absolutely, positively pathetic!  C’mon Telstra its 2010! Country people are not stuck in the dark ages without computers, how about doing your country customers a favour, get with the times and give us a few of the options your city customers enjoy!

LOL ok,  rant over for the moment anyway!  It is a genuine complaint, probably aggravated today due to grumpiness from getting very little sleep last night due to my daughters little standarbred mare Sandy having colic.   She is feeling a lot better today thank goodness.  I think it was a combination of new grass after the rains and a change in feed – although she was introduced to it slowly she is a bit of a piggy and stole some of Crickets in the morning.  She’s back on just hay rations for a few days and hopefully won’t have any more problems.

And as for Fostering Dogs 101…or How to fail Fostering 101 in four easy steps:

1) Vow and declare to never have any other breed than Border Collies.

2) Agree to look after my sisters one year old Koolie while she finds him a good home.

3) Before we get half way home decide we will keep him if he fits in with our four Border Collies.

Well the four Border Collies seem to be accepting him into the pack quite well, so it looks like our canine family now consists of 4 collies and a Koolie.  Not quite a Border Collie, but at least he’s a sheepdog:)

The Border Collie Brigade: L to R  Bolt, Zeke, Trinity and Taj at the front

And Flash the Koolie:

Update:  Unfortunately Flash was unable to stay with us, if it was just one or two things we would have worked through them, but he was constantly urinately  in the house (causing Zeke and Bolt to go backwards in their toilet training as well), he became very domineering over the young boys, Bolt in particular and was making him very nervy, he was going up/over/through fences to chase the sheep, horses and chickens (a habit he taught Bolt that we are still trying to break).  Unfortunately that would have meant long term confinement on a chain for Flash which is something that I do not agree with.  Luckily his breeder was able to take him back and Flash is now living on the farm where he was born.

Koolies (also known as Coolies/German Coolies) are an Australian developed working dog  predominantly bred to work sheep and have many similarities in personality and nature to Border Collies.  As they have been bred for working ability rather than for conformation show ring/beauty pageant looks, there is a range of variations in size, build and coat colour within the breed according to the terrain and type of work they were required to do.

Tags: Art - Horses, Art Dogs, border collie, colic, coolie, koolie, sheepdog

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Photography - All, Photography: Animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.