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Stories
 
The Questing Beast
I was looking for a small hole dog with a chest of under 14 inches, a smooth or lightly broken coat, and female. The reactions from breeders were interesting. All were very nice, but none had a dog that fit my description.  A few breeders said they thought I was in for a long wait as getting a small, smooth, well-balanced female was like hitting the Trifecta or the lottery.  
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Stink Dog
Sailor staggered from the hole and Larry said, "There she is."  I scooped up Sailor and swung her to get the blood pumping to her head and to encourage her to vomit.  She threw up watery fluid almost instantly, and did so again as I rushed her down the hill to a tiny creek cutting through the bottom of the pasture ...  An hour later she was sliding down a pipe after another groundhog.
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Rat Wars by Ken James
"To say that I had a lot of rats is probably being a little modest. It would be more accurate to say the rats had pretty much taken over the barn. Rats were consuming about eight hundred pounds of cattle feed a month. Further, quite a bit of feed was contaminated with their droppings." (exerpted from: Working Jack Russell Terriers in North America)
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First Fox
The dogs checked out the holes, but no one was home. We moved farther down the hedgerow, finding more holes, all of them vacant. We then headed up into the stubble field where small patches of snow and ice clung to the elevated mounds of dirt and depressions that signaled both old and new fox den and groundhog settes.
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Rat Park
Rats, especially the Norwegian variety, can procreate prolifically. On average, a female rat can have eight litters a year, with anywhere from three to 14 pups per litter. The gestation period for a rat is only three weeks. One study estimates that, in theory, a single rat could have "as many as 20 million descendants in a span of three years." >> To read more
 
A Perfect Dog
"When it came to the contestants in our Ugly Dog Contest, Nellie was clearly the pick of the litter. One look at that warped face, those fangs and that ... that ... well, what was that anyway? A nose? Yes? No? One look, and 'Whoa, Nellie!' We just knew. This was one weird-looking pooch. She was a border terrier, or was that border terror? She looked like she had been bred with ... well, a bat or maybe a cat." >> To read more
 
Sailor Gets Her Bronze
The land that had been cow pasture in February was now planted in corn.  The fields that were mowed clean in winter were now waist-high with thistle and Queen-Anne's lace.  One hedgerow, right at the farm entrance, had already fallen to a developer's plow. Most of the hedgerows were still there, however.  They were thick with multiflora rose, black walnut, cherry, elderberry, mulberry and honeysuckle. >> To read more
 
John Burrough's Groundhogs
John Burroughs was one of the great environmental writers at the turn of the 20th Century and was friends with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Walt Whitman and Henry Ford. Despite his love of nature, however, Burroughs hated groundhogs!
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Eight-Foot Dig
It was the first week in March when I headed out to a small patch of woods near my house in order to look for any signs of emerging groundhogs. My intent was to explore and maybe do a little hole-bolting with my tiny Jack Russell terrier. Two bolted fox and eight-feet later, I went home. >> To read more
 
Mountain Life's Not Hard
A minute later Mountain began to bark and then a little riot started underground.  It sounded like a small chain saw had been started up. Woohee -- Raccoon! We didn't know what to do with a groundhog in one hole and a raccoon in the others, so we did the obvious thing -- we carried on with the groundhog we were already digging to. It's always better to finish one job than to botch two.
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Trapped Terrier Tales
"A terrier sparked a major rescue operation by getting stuck in a drain pipe - for three days. Suzie the Jack Russell had scented a fox and then kept edging along an eight-inch diameter drain running 30 metres down the length of a field. Farmer Graham Sadler and fire crews with 10-metre rods and camera equipment battled to free her and she was finally pulled to safety. She had cost Mr Sadler, 53, GBP 1,000 in labour costs and left his pasture cratered with 6 ft-deep holes. But the moment she emerged blinking into the daylight made it all worthwhile for her young owners, Liam Ball, 12. >> To read more