No photos, please.

Five year old Pearl Bailey and her younger cousin Leroy Brown are German Shorthair Pointers (GSP) who accompany Lisa Loomis to work at The Valley Reporter in Waitsfield.

Leroy Brown strikes a pose.

Leroy is a big soft flump.  His primary goal in life is to be where Pearl is. They are very high energy, they love to come to work – they love Roxi. They love to bark at men with hats & beards. They love to run.  I take them for a walk every day: I walk two miles, and they run five to seven miles.  They are always busy.

Although we sent them to boarding school to learn how to hunt, we do not hunt with them. They do hunt, they have snagged their own birds out of the air, and they are very excited about that. This winter they killed a squirrel, and it was the highlight of their winter. It was the one they had been watching out the window for months.

Pearl Bailey on watch.

When we researched names, we were going through Arabic names and came across “Pearl.” We thought “Pearl” was pretty. My sister, who was getting a GSP at the same time we got Pearl, named her dog “Jenny,” which so happens to be our grandmother’s name. Weird coincidence: Our grandmother’s sister was named “Pearl.”

What’s the naughtiest thing they’ve done? Recently, I flailed up my steep and muddy road, got stuck once, to let the dogs out. They greet me at the door, all happy. I turned the corner toward the kitchen and saw an entire bag of kitty litter strewn on a carpet. They had tracked it throughout the rest of the house. Thank god it was clean kitty litter. And, it was cedar chip kitty litter so my house smells fresh and clean now.

What do they do when they come to work? Mostly they lie on their bed under my desk and fart.

Pearl Bailey & LeRoy Brown