Charley, our Jack Russell, goes to the library in Beverley with us everyday. Nearly everybody there speaks to him and of course they all recognise him whenever they meet him in the town. Jane and I think he is the most intelligent dog we have ever had. On his last birthday party, in our nearest pub, there were 8 candles on his cake. His dad, Buster, was also a great dog. He was very faithful to all of our family except whenever he saw a rat or a rabbit! Then he would desert us and come home in his own time. Charley on the other hand, has never left us. Nowadays some people spend huge sums on a pedigree puppy. Some of them despise any Jack Russell, saying they have no pedigree. Jane tells them they are quite wrong. She tells them, "We know Charley's pedigree." It goes back to 1951 when we got a ratting terrier from a Leicester farmer called Frank Haldon. That dog was named Pickles. He once killed 39 rats in a manger where Hereford bullocks were eating grain on a farm near Warwick. The place belonged to the famous Horgan cattle-dealers from Cork. We kept a pup sired by Pickles before he was fatally injured by a car near Rugby. Charley is from the eleventh litter we have bred from the descendants of Pickles who were all sound. There is no inbred blood in his pedigree. All pedigree dogs are inbred and that is why some of them have hereditary mental or physical defects.
A photograph showing Buster (all brown) helping children, Charley and Binker (belonging to our son Warwick and his wife Fiona) get a ball out of a welly!
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