Change is hard, my friends, very hard. I awoke this morning with a challenge: WordPress, my faithful blog platform, has forced me into its new “Block Editor” interface, which is causing me to have to re-learn how to post on The Daily Trail… Oh well, keeps the brain nimble even as I head in into the final year of my 6th decade on this earth…
But what’s going on at the Breakfast(?) table? Doc is reading the paper, announcing a scourge of some sort… and while Mark and Doc clean up with sleeves rolled up, Mark takes stock of whether they are prepared:
Yes indeed, it’s the old Wild Dog Scare…
They look more like wolves to me… and it’s curious what’s happening in the third panel- appears the dogs are arguing more amongst themselves than threatening livestock…
The Daily Trail 
The cow does not look concerned.
I’m concerned, but not about the cow. So, how many pets do they have, besides Andy? Certainly, they are not going to call their chickens pets, are they?
Who is this Pete Smith, who Mark feels obliged to identify as “our neighbor”? Did he ever make an actual appearance in the strip, or was this just a way for Elrod to get a friend’s name into the strip as a cartoonists sometimes do?
Finally, just what is that structure outside the window in the second panel of the upper strip? I’m no farmer, but it doesn’t look like a silo or a windmill. Too early for cell towers, too. Did somebody discover oil in Lost Forest? Does/Did Mark have some kind of ham radio in the cabin? Maybe some strange weather tracking array?
I don’t know who Pete Smith is in the Mark Trail universe. The name makes me think of the Pete Smith Specialties, an incredibly long-running series of movie shorts, all either humorous-but-factual documentaries or spoof documentaries. No particular one of them may be very funny, but when you look at the entire run of the series, you have to agree: there were a lot of them.
I think the structure is a water tower. Perhaps to irrigate his fields? I’m just thrilled that the dialog is as inane and preachy back in the Elrod days as in the recent Allen stories. So comfortable…
A little history…….
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2020/08/15/first-and-for-now-last-mark-trail/
Holy Inkpen! That link suggests even the reruns are going to stop. That would be a disaster and unfair, given the number of other comic strips that exist only in reruns (e.g. Peanuts, For Better or For Worse, and Get Fuzzy). I could not even find any strips on some comic strip aggregator sites.
Dennis, what will become of this site? Do we move on to a new strip to follow or are we saying “Adieu” to each other? That would be too bad; I always enjoy reading your commentary, as well as being able to add my own.
The link I supplied does not necessarily say the strip will end. It may very well be older strips. There are a lot of Mark Trial buffs such as us. If it does indeed end it would be sad. If anything I foresee it being old strips from Dodd. Maybe there is a new cartoonist in the wings.