Saying Goodbye to a Working Dog

There is a particular kind of grief that does not get written about much, because the people who feel it are not generally in the habit of discussing their feelings. It is the loss of a dog that worked.

A good stock dog is not a pet in the way a house dog is a pet. They were a colleague. They knew the gates, the routine, the sound of the truck, which cow was trouble. They saved you hours every week for a decade, and when they are gone the work itself feels different — slower, clumsier, lonelier.

Around Amarillo and across the Panhandle, plenty of families have buried good dogs on their own land without ceremony and gone back to work. That is a perfectly honorable way to do it. But a fair number of people find later that they wish they had marked it somehow, and did not know they were allowed to.

The grief is real, even when it's quiet

Working dog owners often describe feeling caught out by how hard it hits. There is sometimes an assumption that a practical relationship produces a practical grief. It does not. In many cases the bond is stronger than with a house dog, because it was built on hours of shared work and mutual reliance rather than on sitting together on a couch.

It is also a grief that includes a loss of capability. When an experienced dog dies, you lose the animal and you lose what the animal could do. Both are worth acknowledging, and neither is sentimental.

Burial on the place, and when it isn't the right call

Burying a dog on family land is traditional out here and remains common. If you go that route, a few practical points learned the hard way:

• Choose a spot you'll keep. Land changes hands, and families who sold a section later regret the grave being on the far side of a fence they no longer own.
• Dig deep — at least three or four feet — and away from water sources, wells and any low draw that runs after a storm.
• Winter ground in the Panhandle can be genuinely difficult to break, and summer drought bakes it just as hard. There are weeks when digging is not realistic.
• If the dog was euthanized, ask your veterinarian about the drugs involved before burying on land where other animals, including your own dogs or scavengers, may dig. This is a real consideration and most people have never been told about it.

Cremation is what many families turn to when the ground is frozen, when they're leasing rather than owning, or when they want to keep the dog with them through a future move. Ashes can be scattered in the pasture the dog worked, kept in the shop where he waited, or split between the two.

Ways people mark it out here

• A post set at the corner of the pasture they worked, with the collar on it.
• Their name burned or stamped into a board in the barn where the leads hang.
• A stone at the end of the driveway, or beside the shop door.
• Ashes carried out with you on a last pass through the section, scattered where they liked to run the fence line.
• Keeping the collar hung on the rear-view mirror or the gun rack — a thing a lot of people do and few mention.

The other dogs

Working dogs live in packs, and a pack notices a death. Expect the remaining dogs to search, to be off their feed for a few days, and to be unsettled during the work they used to do together. Letting them see and smell the body helps many dogs settle faster than removing the animal out of sight.

Give the younger dog time before expecting them to step into the role. Experienced hands generally say the mistake is pushing a green dog into the older dog's job too quickly, out of a wish to fill the gap.

Telling the kids

Ranch children are often more matter-of-fact about death than town children, and are frequently treated as though that means they don't need anything. They do. Being direct — he died, he was old, we'll bury him this evening and you can help — respects that, while still giving them a part in it. Letting a child choose where the marker goes is a small thing that stays with them a long time.

And if you are the one who is more shaken than you expected to be over a dog you would have described as a tool: that is what a decade of shared work does. It is not weakness. It is the reasonable response to losing someone you relied on every single day.

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