Croft's Shetland Sheepdogs

 

                                                                                                                                                                              

& Drentsche Patrijshond

       Our dogs in Portugal!

On these pages we have pictured our dogs and cats in the enivornment we live in here in our "new" country. They have the opportunity to a very free life, since it is very easy to let dogs run free. It is huge areas all over, you can walk for hours, without meeting other people or animals. It is a law...when a fenc is closed, you have to respect it. Then you stay out because of the cows or sheep beeing there.

We do wonderful trips every day, and it is health-treatment for humans and dogs!
Hope you will enjoy our girls!

We have had many strange experiences...... It is a huge amount of new places and small roads in the forests...it is just to pick one. On places we are not known, we have got some surprises.

Because of mud, we chose for a new spot, and Dronnia disappeared suddenly. We heard her, and found her in a big pale of cow-bones. They had slaughtered a cow, and let the remains stay in the nature to rot. She came so proud with a leg-bone, her contribution to the daily food-supply. And next day she came with a sheep-bone, even with the fur on. We throw it into the fields, over a fenc, and a week after she ran immediately to an opening in the fenc and caught it again. The shelties tried to take it from her, without any luck.

Because of heavy rain, we found another spot close to the village Alcacovac.  A nice parking for the car away from the mainrodad, and we started on the daily walk.

Suddenly they all were gone, and we found them, yes, digging into a dead sheep. I scream and yell of course, since I hate those things. Charles just look at me and says, let them be dogs :-). But it is a limit......I carried away a bunch of shelties in my arms, barking and cursing...No kisses for mamie that day....

We needed to go back to the same spot one day after, since our usual "safe" place along the lake, were closed for sheeps. We parked the car at the same spot as earlier, and avoided the path with the dead sheep on. Back to the car, the shelties were gone again. Then somebody had put out a cow-stomac at the parking, and filled it up with a lot of nice things...for dogs. Thanks heaven, it was fresh, since it was not there the day before. It was put out as an atraction for foxes and other animals they hunt.
Then I said, we never go there again.

The first pictures are from Orique where we stayed from October until Christmas.  We had a wonderful river to walk along, with big fields on both sides.
We had a favourite-spot by an old millhouse, where we could sit for hours to fish or just enjoy the nature. From the caravan we could just let the dogs loose, and we walked with them down to the river.

When the first pictures are taken, we need to tell that we brought with us 3 bitches that recently had litters in Norway. They are totally out of coat on pictures from the first months.

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