The True Story of Oscar (The One Off Teckel) - By Steven McGonigal

Young Oscar

Ithought Oscar had well and truly lost the plot. It Was 30th January this year, a Saturday morning with some snow on the ground and he was baying in the middle of some gorse bushes, not moving at all just baying –Being a true aficionado in the pursuit of foxes, Oscar never stayed in one place because the foxes never hung around long enough, he was always on the go, his familiar deep bay while running always made me smile.

I got Oscar as a young pup from Paul Sullivan in Cork in 2015. He had a calmness about him from eight weeks old, never shy, never cocky, just calm, sometimes I thought he was too calm. I often regretted never training him better as a puppy, but the truth is had he been trained he never would have turned out how he did. He wasn’t a dog to be trained, as training would have only tempered his edge, it would have cooled the fire in his belly that made him who he was.

As a puppy he never showed much interest in hunting. We walked the lanes and fields in the spring following his arrival in in autumn and while he scented and sniffed here and there, he never showed much interest. I laid blood trails, let him see deer carcasses, rabbits, pheasants and all sorts of things puppies become familiar with, but they never interested him. I didn’t overly worry about it, but it did concern me just a little that he appeared to have a lack of interest in ‘things.’

One evening about a year after he arrived, I was walking in the very same area where we began the story when he became very keen on a scent. He began sniffing and snorting, really getting his nose into the grass and took off running while whining and barking and was gone for over 30 minutes, and appeared to be in pursuit of something, although I couldn’t confirm this as I didn’t see anything and I assumed he was messing about.

This happened another few times until one evening he was baying and howling in the gorse when I spotted a fox leaving the bottom of the gorse with Oscar coming behind a few seconds later. I realised then that he had begun to realise what his nose and his voice was for. As he matured from puppy to dog, he became ever more reliable and I really started to understand him and his voice and came to know what he was chasing.

Oscar never cared about rabbits one bit. I could walk him through a field of ten thousand rabbits and he wouldn’t

bat an eye lid save for maybe a yip or two if they crossed in front of him. I saw him on more than one occasion totally ignore rabbits that were squatting in the grass that he knew were there. Pheasants took his liking but he was never a beating dog. He preferred to sneak about on a shoot and catch the odd easy pheasant or grab a runner that was missed by a spaniel, but he never retrieved them like he would if he found a rook or jackdaw or a shot duck. He would start to eat pheasants if I didn’t get them quick enough. He was a bit rough around the edges for taking to a proper pheasant shoot, but that’s how he lived his life. Fox scent was for hunting, ducks and other birds were for retrieving but the pheasants were for eating!

As a treat I would give him a pheasant or duck that couldn’t be cooked or used and he would take absolute delight in sitting at his kennel door and making a day’s work from eating it in its entirety, feet & all and sleeping it off for half a day afterwards.

I always called him the Teckel with nine lives as he had more near misses, injuries and near-death collisions than anyone would ever want, and when he was around two years old he got badly attacked by two large dogs one day unknown to me and I found him outside the house, wet, cold and almost dead.

I took him to my vet who did what she could, put him on a drip and sent him home with me as she assumed he was going to die. I sat with him all night in my office and he never moved even when I changed the drip. I fell asleep at 8.00am and awoke an hour or so later to find him with one eye open and giving me a ‘signal’ wag of his tail to show he was still going strong. The vet couldn’t believe he’d pulled through and while Oscar was very sore for a week or two, he was soon back to his old self.

He got injured again a few years later by an angry donkey in a field and broke some ribs as well as needing stitching. He came so close too many times to being knocked over by cars and being inches from being shot by a clumsy gun and 100 other things I could write about. Oscar lived his life very fast and on the edge, but he also died young.

His only real interest was foxes rather the pursuit of their scent. He would hunt them all day, but a carcass never interested him and he would walk on past it, nor would he ever tangle with a fox if he got close to it. He never let me down once and I remember one day taking him out with my old pal Nigel and some other friends and Oscar and his kennel mate Rubble flushed three foxes from a large wood on their own, and another from a small area of cover, with Oscar marking one that went to ground by howling outside the earth.

So many times, he surprised me that I could write a series of articles on him. I could take him anywhere, even the biggest woods and stretches of gorse and let him go and within a few minutes there’d be baying to let me know he’d found a fox and would not stop until he had pushed him out and away!

Making a fine retrieve to hand

Back on 30th January this year, that familiar baying echoed across the gorse

He found this rook in cover

behind my house. He was standing still and I couldn’t understand what was going on, and why was he not moving. I started to really wonder what was going when he started to move. He was coming towards me, running through some Japanese knotweed that had died and I could see him 50 yards to my left, nose down and baying like a bloodhound. I hadn’t seen anything pass and I started to think he was barking at nothing. He reached the top end of the area and went out of sight, and suddenly again, began baying in one spot. I walked that way expecting him to move but he didn’t, his barking was increasing in excitement and he was starting to howl. Eventually I reached him and looked over a bank to see him running in towards a trunk and skipping back, looking like a boxer, ducking and weaving from an opponent.

I got closer and saw that a fox had somehow got itself stuck between Oscar and a tree trunk in a hollow. The fox was not impressed and was going to give Oscar everything he deserved for chasing him, but he was not going to let the fox get close enough. Eventually I got at an angle where I could get a quick and clean shot and the matter was ended. As he always did, Oscar had a sniff, came over to me and did a bit of whining and howling as if to say “There, that’s that done!” and we walked home together.

I inspected the carcass afterwards and it was an older vixen weighing no more than 6 or 7lbs and without any canine teeth at all and in terribly poor condition from not being able to eat easily and it was quite obvious that a humane dispatch was a kinder alternative than dying a slow agonising death from starvation in deep winter.

This was to be Oscar’s last adventure, as over the following spring he became increasingly unwell and developed several problems with his throat which eventually led to a complication with his blood. We tried many things and it became obvious that nothing was going to work, so sadly I took the decision to let him go.

Oscar was a one off dog, a wild child, a dog with a carefree attitude that only ever had pursuit on his mind. He was different from any Teckel I ever owned and he made no apologies for it. He could not be let off the lead outside hunting, lest he would not return for two days. He was totally untrained, totally heedless but so reliable in what he saw as his tasks. He was in fact a small dog which was an example of going out, grabbing life and just enjoying it while he could. Oscar was a one off. He was born in 2015 and sadly passed away in 2021 living six amazing years.