Family’s farm pets remembered

Our family has kind of always been pet people. At times we have had several pets with us. Right now my wife Nancy and I are only keeping our house cat, Miss Mia. Miss Mia was named after her vet, Dr. Mia Winters, who in 2008 was working at the Oak View Animal Clinic in Pea Ridge. Our Miss Mia was also given that name because when I asked her what her name was, she said, “meeaw.” So her name became Miss Mia.

My very first pet was “Brownie,” a collie mix who came to live with us on the farm in the late 1940s. Brownie had been my cousin’s dog, but they were not really prepared to keep him at the time, so they asked if we’d like to have him. My Dad thought he might be useful on the farm, because he was partially trained to work with cattle. Brownie easily adapted to our place, and was soon quite at home at our Pea Ridge farm. We kids liked having a dog around. Brownie was friendly and seemed to like playing with us boys. As a cattle dog, however, he didn’t turn out so well. If you told him to go get those cows moving, he would run and bark and nip at their heels, and get them going all right, but he never seemed to get the idea that you wanted him to herd them in a certain direction and take them to a certain place. As soon as he had them scurrying in one direction or another, he would come running back to you, looking for you to brag on him and pet him on the head. Brownie was a good pet, but he didn’t maintain his concentration and sense of purpose long enough to be a good cattleherding dog. We didn’t really know how to train him to do better at his job, so we basically kept him around as a cow stirrerupper. We never succeeded in getting him to stay with them and herd them where we wanted to go.

We always had milking cows on the farm. Dairy herds normally didn’t change members a great deal over time. Our cows would stay as part of the herd until they were elderly. Every year a cow would have a new calf. So, some of our cows and many of our young calves became pets. When I was about 8 years old, my Dad gave me a new calf as my own. My new calf was a mostly Holstein heifer calf, black and white, but I didn’t wait to see her before naming her. As soon as Dad told me I had a new calf to be mine and to care for, I named her Daisy, sight unseen. The name would have suited a Jersey calf or a Guernsey calf better, but the name stuck, and my Daisy became my new responsibility. At the time, Fred McKinney, at Webb’s Feed and Seed in town was keeping a calf in a pen at the store, and he challenged us school boys to a contest to see whose calf could grow faster. Fred’s calf always did better than mine, but my Daisy did very well.

When I was in high school in the mid-1950s, my cow Daisy had become our milking herd’s boss cow. Although she was only 3 years old, she was a strong cow and had a strong will, and she became the herd leader. I had also obtained another cow, a registered Guernsey, whose name was long and complicated and now I can’t remember it. Both of my cows had minds of their own.

In 1954, we had decided to build a milking parlor and begin selling Grade A milk for drinking. The night when we first did the milking in the new milking parlor, with its spanking new concrete floors, we had quite a time getting the cows to walk on the strange new surface. My two cows, when pushed to go onto the new concrete, both jumped the fence and escaped, and didn’t get milked that night. However, next day, I guess my two rebels had had a change of heart, and both relented and carefully walked into the strange new place where they could eat some good chow and unload a load of milk. My cow Daisy, in fact, soon began insisting on being the first cow to enter the milk barn at each milking. If other cows got into the holding pen before her, she would come through the pack, shouldering her way past the others, to take her place as first in line for the milking.

When I was at home on the farm, we also had many cats. All our cats, in fact, were descended from one mother cat who showed up one day and adopted us. We were never able to tame her enough to get close to her, but all her offspring, and their offspring, and their offspring were our pets. My sister Donna especially loved kitty cats. Even before Donna became old enough to become the kitty cat supervisor, we boys had begun naming our cats after St. Louis Cardinal baseball players. We didn’t have any Fluffies, we had Stan Musial, Red Schoendiest, Enos Slaughter, Rip Repulski, Ken Boyer, Alex Grammas and so on. All were barn cats; our mother didn’t do house cats. But all were pets. At one point in the late 1950s, our farm cat population numbered 35 cats, all fat and healthy, all named for baseball players, and all well petted.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and can be contacted by email at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.