Fry wants to be a good dog. A Kelpie, keen to please. He loves nothing more than helping round up sheep. And food. He is obsessed with food and is a continual, habitual scunger of all sorts of horrors. We've lost count of the times he has dragged home a bone from an animal that died months ago and had been buried. Fry has found it and exhumed the treasure, leaving it on the back lawn to break the lawnmower.

He's usually on a restricted diet to keep his weight down, but he stays fat from the volume of bonuses he collects.

He inspired my famous joke: Why does my dog eat so much cow shit?

Because it helps get rid of the taste of the sheep shit.

At the moment we have a lamb in the house, part-time. She's here overnight, and goes back out in to the paddock with the other sheep in the daytime. She's a week old, her mum was ill and had no milk so we are bottle feeding her. In the house she is in a dog cage. There's room to stand and turn, she can even bounce and jump after a feed, but its restrictive and she's better in the field learning from the other sheep.

Part of the reason for the cage is to protect her from the dogs. I would trust Fry to share the house with her, but Kobbie the Jack Russell cannot be trusted. He also wants to be a good dog, and tries hard, but occasionally his killer instincts randomly kick in and he could easily kill a small lamb. Fry is a bodyguard, a bouncer. He's a keen chaser of cats and foxes, but mostly runs them off the premises rather than chases them indefinitely.

When we go out to feed the sheep Kobbie is clipped into the vehicle. He's learnt not to try and leap out. Fry gets in the back when he is told to, and stays there.

With the lambs arriving there is the stress of protecting them from foxes. I usually round up the mums and park then in the secure goose paddock for a couple of weeks. When the lambs are big enough they are all let loose again.

Not all the mums co-operate. Some just refuse to be rounded up. We've learnt not to stress them at this critical time, and running down a new mum and forcibly detaining her and lamb is likely to lead to the lamb being rejected, so the recalcitrant ones are allowed to remain free. Usually the lamb is ok anyway, most of the sheep can look after their lambs once they are up and walking.

But sick sheep, or ones with an ill lamb, or, say, feeble twins are picked off by foxes. This year we had an elderly sheep give birth to tiny twins. They weren't strong, not was she. She delivered them in the furthest paddock from the entrance to the goose paddock. In the end I chose to leave her out and it failed. One lamb was taken at night, and I suspect she lost the other one in the chaos and it died of exposure. I found it the next day.

I do try trapping foxes, with limited success, and a fresh lamb is as good a bait as you can get. But I have loaned my fox trap to my neighbour, who is having his chickens harrassed.

So, while I don't have a fox cage I have been putting out food, on a regular basis, inside the cattle yards. The logic is that by putting food there regularly I will get the fox used to it being a reliable source. And it seems to have been working. I put something out there most evenings, and within 24 hours it is gone.

I have been putting a gametrail camera there to see if I can catch an image of the fox...or maybe cat. They are not very good at night photos, and the operator is an idiot, so night after night they failed. Battery was flat, I forgot to put the memory card in, I forgot to turn it on, it fell over and photographed the ground....

So, with a fresh dead lamb I reset and checked the cameras and set it all up in the cattle yards.

And took this picture.

I haven't been training a fox. I've been feeding Fry an extra meal. No wonder he is still fat.