When we got Santana about 6 weeks ago, the woman who was fostering him told me that he was a bit of an escape artist. One of the first things I did was get him a dog tag with his name and my phone number on it. We have a fenced yard and 80% of it is six feet tall so I wasn't too worried. The first week we had him he spent time in his crate ($20 on craigslist!) when Kathy and/or I were not home to keep him secure and also to keep him safe from Willow who had some real issues with Third Dog.
After about a week, the whole crate thing kinda went by the wayside as we all became more comfortable with our big smelly three dog household. Of course now that our guard was down Sandy took advantage of the one section of low fence in our yard and made a quick leap to freedom. I should have seen it coming but hindsight is 50/50. When Kathy called me panicked that she had gotten a call from the woman across the street I knew something had to be done. Kathy called again to tell me she was now home and had captured "your dog" and put him back in the yard and shortly called back to say that he had escaped again. That night when I got home from work I "borrowed" some rolled wire fencing from my neighbor and hastily added another 2 feet to the short fence in our yard. That seemed to solve the problem.
It turns out the fence was not the problem. The problem is turning out to be the young ginger colored dog with too much energy. This past weekend Kathy and I made a trip to Rochester for my nephews graduation party. It's the first time we'd been away from the dogs, and because Sandy is still a bit of a wild card, we headed home around 6:30 Sunday morning. We were about an hour and a half from home when we received a call from the neighbor in the house behind us. She said that Sandy had tunneled into her yard and Willow had followed him. Willow is no fan of the dogs in that household so she started a fight with their pittbull Lola. Lola ended up with a scratched eye but all else seemed to be okay. Willow crawled back under the fence home, and while her husband covered up the hole on their side, our neighbor Jackie was nice enough to walk Sandy around the block back to our house. At that hour of the morning my nephew Jeremy was home and sleeping. Apparently no sound of dog fights or pounding on the front door could rouse him. Jackie stuck Sandy into our back yard and we hoped that that's where he would stay until we arrived home and I could do some more fence fortification.
I "borrowed" more fencing from my neighbor and this time I used it to cover the ground where the offending hole had been. I secured one end to the fence and staked the other side into the ground with the intention of making it impossible for him to dig there again. It worked, in theory. The problem is I didn't put down enough fencing. The next morning after our walk I took Willow and Zappa to get some coffee for me and a Slim Jim for them. Sandy is not crazy about car rides, so we've been doing this morning coffee, meat stick ritual without him. The last time I made him go with us he threw up on the back seat of Kathy's car. It only takes about 15 minutes for the whole trip. What trouble could he get into in 15 minutes? It wasn't really trouble he got into, it was another neighbors backyard. When we got back from the coffee run he wasn't there to greet us like he usually is. I checked in the bedroom where Kathy was still sleeping, Nothing. I checked up stairs. Nothing. I was looking all around our yard quietly calling his name (it wasn't even 7 am yet) when I heard his distinct bark/howl from the other side of the six foot fence to the right of our house. He'd done it again. I quickly went next door and lucky for me our neighbors don't lock their side gate so I extracted him once again. I had more work to do.
I spent that day staking the parameter of our fence line as well as laying down more wire fencing. I felt pretty confident that I'd impeded, if not all, then at least most of his routes of egress. I was starting to feel a little like Colonel Klink (Nobody escapes the Hound Compound!). Kathy was off work Tuesday and kept a close eye on him, so that was an uneventful day aside from the fact that I started my new job (more on that later).
It seems like for the last few weeks I've been getting a lot of phone calls that begin with "I have your dog" and Wednesday morning kept the streak going. The odd thing was our dogs were lock inside our house. At 9:30 I got a call from a man named Gene who found Sandy wandering the street two blocks from our house. This is where we do our daily walks so he wasn't off the map but ideally he wasn't supposed to be out unsupervised, again. I told my new boss that I had to run home and get my dog and that I would be back in about an hour. When I got to Gene's address he was waiting for me outside with the news that Sandy had just escaped from him. Thankfully as soon as I called him, Sandy came running. I deposited him back in our house and checked that the doggie door was still blocked. It was. How did he get out? I had no time to investigate because I had to get back to work but I pondered that question for the rest of the afternoon.
Kathy got home from work just before I did and she told me that the neighbor across the street just said that she saw Sandy running loose a short time ago. It was now 3:00 in the afternoon and I had returned Sandy at 10:30 that morning. Stranger still, when Kathy entered our house all three dogs were safe inside. How did he get out again? How did he get back in? Upon further inspection of the doggie door that leads to our back yard (and to Sandy, the world) I found that whoever shut it last (Kathy) did not make sure it was latched. Yay! it wasn't my fault unless you count me bringing home another unruly dog. My best guess was that he pushed up the door with his nose to get outside and repeated the process to get back in.
Yesterday when I was doing our evening dog walk, we were passed by a neighbor in her car. She stopped to let me know that Wednesday afternoon she found Sandy in he back yard drinking out of their kiddie pool. She read his name tag and since she knows where we live, she brought him back to our house and since no one was home and the door was unlocked she just tucked him back into the house for safe keeping. That explained his miraculous reappearance inside our house when Kathy got home that day.
It's time to pull out the big guns now so I went to Petsmart and picked up a do-it-yourself electric containment fence. Now before you start judging the cruelty of using a mild shock collar to control my pet, consider how cruel it would be to continue to let him run loose willy nilly and and eventually be run down by some innocent driver. We can't take that chance and hopefully after teaching Sandy his boundaries we will be able to safely remove any shocking deterrents. The real challenge may be finding out if I can truly install the fence myself. I've been working on it the past several evenings and have yet to have success.
While this all works itself out, The dogs will be spending more time locked indoors, which isn't such a bad thing since temperatures around here are going into triple digits this week. On the plus side, everyone who has come in contact with Santana (and that's turning into a lot of people) tells me what a sweet friendly dog he is. It must be true because even though he's caused all this panic and extra work, when I get home I'm still as glad to see him as he seems to be to see me. So far, when everyone has called to say they have my dog, I've resisted the urge to tell them to keep him.
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