Imagine the scene....
You’re sitting in your living room, dressed in a pair of old Grandma knickers (or underpants as you guys call them) and a T shirt, cup of coffee by your side, looking out of the window, enjoying the moment.
You breathe in deep and bask in the glory of solitude. Life is good.
Until, a big hairy man (this is MY nightmare, if you’re a fan of beardies and men who look like Hagrid, then picture your own nightmare with smoothly shaven folk) walks into your kitchen and starts going through your shit. Picking up utensils, looking through your fridge, sniffing containers of food and throwing them on the floor.
From your vantage point, you see the neighbors lawn guy coming out of your bathroom, and he’s bitching loudly to the local hobo, who just popped in and decided to poke through your undies drawer, that you never have enough toilet paper.
In your laundry room there are a couple of local old ladies you’ve never met going through your dirty underwear with pursed lips saying; ‘Well THAT’S going to need a good bleaching!’
How do you feel?
Pissed off much?
Ready to chase them all out of your house and lock the door?
But wait! What if you can’t?
What if they could come in whenever they like and do whatever they like in your house, go through all your shit, poke through and take what they want, and you can’t stop them? What if your doors only lock YOU inside your house but any old asshole who wants to, can just walk in and do what they like on your property?
Ugh....one of my worst nightmares (I do have others, including being semi-naked walking through Costco, and there being a nationwide Peet’s coffee shortage, but this one’s up there!) and let’s face it, one of the reasons so many American households have guns these days...to stop this stuff from happening.
And yet, so many of these same households expect the family dog, the most territorial species on the planet, to put up with the very same shit that would have them killing someone.......and have a court of law uphold their right to do so.
Behold, the worst perpetrator of them all, the electric fence!
A marvellous invention ( NOT!) that shocks the living crap out of your best friend as he tries to defend his family from invaders, allows any and all creatures to come into his territory but stops him from getting out and prevents him from driving them away.
I hate these bloody things. The most misguided and ill thought out contraption on the planet, unless used as an adjunct to a physical fence to stop a dog from digging out and killing itself on a busy road.
I had a letter from a good friend of mine last week asking if I could help a lady she knew to rehome her dog. The dog who we will call Lucy, had killed a neighborhood cat and almost killed the neighbor’s dog and the owner wants her gone because she’s worried about what this dog might do to other animals. She’s also worried about her own pet cat whom the dog chases.
Lucy is sadly being overlooked because of a messy divorce and the owner is struggling to take care of two kids on her own, so she is left to her own devices outside a lot. In a yard with an electric fence.
So every dog, cat, rabbit and squirrel can come and go as they please, have freedom in her yard, but she herself has very little.
And Lucy’s supposed to be okay with that?
She’s not supposed to want to kill these interlopers?
It is, after all, what dogs do...defend their territory.
It’s why we became hitched up with dogs/ wolves in the first place; they kept us safe from bears by protecting the stone huts and encampments we lived in, so we threw them food and let them warm by the fire. Perfect arrangement, works a treat, right?
We have, over thousands of years, trained dogs to do this very thing. It’s why they bark at doors and chase the UPS guy. It’s ingrained in them. It’s the very reason they became man’s best friend.
Note that no one calls a pig or a goat or a rabbit man’s best friend, despite them being very useful to us.
Nope. Just dogs. Because they are territorial and protect us.
I hate the fact that Lucy has killed or hurt animals in this lady’s community and feel sickened that ANY animal might lose its life in this fashion, but who’s at fault here?
If a dog is free to wander into a neighbors property where it gets hurt by a dog protecting its territory, isn’t the owner of the victim at fault for not keeping their dog under close control? And the cat also?
Does Lucy deserve to lose her life? Because....sure as shit, no-one wants to adopt-this dog let’s be honest, and so she must either stay where she is or be put down in all likelihood. The options are extremely limited.
My recommendation is that this dog gets a physical fence straight away and we are ready to help make that happen.
A place where she can have a daytime doghouse, some toys, some treats and where the kids can play with her and give her company. She can be inside at night with the family, with the cat put up in her own room after having had the run of the house almost all day. A workable co-existence can be engineered, I feel.
This poor girl needs a place, finally, where no neighborhood dogs can stroll in and out, and only the most stupid of cats would dare to explore.
Thus, the dog knows that her home is indeed her castle and that no-one is going to breach those walls.
Then, she can exhale....because that’s what she needed to do all along.
She had interlopers on every front and was literally like a young inexperienced soldier being told to guard the fortress on his own with no rest. My heart bleeds for her; it’s just too much to ask of anyone, so of course she was going to balls it up.
The whole thing was set up for failure, really.
‘Good fences make good neighbors’. Everyone’s heard it.
When choosing to bring a dog into your life, first always consider the species and what drives it.
They are beautiful and cuddly and fun and great bedwarmers. They also have an ancestry of Apex predators, are fiercely territorial at times and get bored easily and start giving themselves jobs if they have nothing else to occupy their mind. Certain breeds, like boxers, have a high prey drive and that MUST be the highest priority to be taken into account when you choose the fencing for your new housemate.
You can’t just think ‘Well, the HOA don’t allow anything but black chain link which is way out of our price range and all we can afford is an electric fence, but hey, let’s get that big gorgeous boxer or that big German Shepherd and hope it’s all going to be okay”.
Trust me, it never is. Not unless you spend hours and hours training your dog, which sadly most don’t.
I hope desperately that Lucy’s mum takes us up on our offer to help her fence her yard so that Lucy can stay with her family. We are also fully prepared to help her in other ways too, as we know she is in some financial difficulty and that right now feeding her dog might not be her top priority.
My fervent prayer today is that this poor dog will not have to pay the price for a crime she was given no chance but to commit, that those around her will look past the horror of what she did and instead focus on the lack of options she felt she had.
