Barking Mad: Dog Gone

My dog is a pain in the ass.

I should probably clarify. I have two dogs. One is reasonably well-behaved. The other is named Sookie.

It was about 3:00 today when I received a phone call from my neighbor informing me that Sookie had escaped the back yard. Again.

For those of you who don't know, Sookie is the reincarnation of Harry Houdini.

I'm not kidding about that. It's true.

One of Sookie's early daring escape attempts

Thanks to Ben and Charlie who graciously installed a now-defunct invisible fence on Sunday, Sookie can add breaking out of a shock collar designed to KEEP DOGS INSIDE THE FENCE! to her list of great escape credits.

While famously well known to me, Sookie first gained notoriety among my neighbors for her escapades with an incident I like to call "the purloined shoes." This occurred sometime last summer when she dug a tunnel underneath the 6-foot wooden privacy fence from my yard into my neighbor's yard. Like today, it started with a phone call.

"Your little dog is running around my yard."

Luckily I was already on my way home from work. By the time I arrived, Sookie had grown bored after realizing the grass really isn't greener on the other side of the fence and wriggled back home via her underground tunnel.

That was escape #3 or #4.

Innocent enough for a dog prone to adventure, right? At the time, I was relieved she hadn't wandered off and willing to chalk up the experience to an amusing anecdote.

Until I discovered the shoe. Size 12 men's Nike. I found it in my yard the next morning. Right where Sookie had left it.

Like most travelers, Sookie decided she needed a souvenir of the experience and dragged my neighbor's running shoe through her underground tunnel into my yard. Funny, right?

Wrong.

Sookie was not content with just one purloined shoe. She went back through the tunnel to steal the other one for a matched set!

So when I got the call at 3:00 today that Sookie was loose again, mission Capture & Contain was already a team effort. My neighbor K called J to call me at work because K didn't have my cell phone number. That's 2 neighbors involved already.

Now, I want all of you to remember the invisible fence, which actually worked for 1 day before Sookie figured out how to beat it.

So there I was downtown, 26 miles away, getting the news that my dog was running loose in the neighborhood after having just spent $142 on a freakin' invisible fence that didn't work. I couldn't drive home because I rode the bus to work. So I had to ask my friend Charlie to drive me home to look for the little bitch.

Yeah, that's right. I called her a bitch. Because, you know, she is.

So we wade through Atlanta traffic with me freaking out in the car imagining all that went wrong. Did the collar come off? It has a battery inside it. And OMG, if it fell off in the yard, could Finn have eaten the battery?

We get to my house. I have a plan of action worked out. We can drive around my neighborhood looking for Sook. But as it turns out, Sookie had outfoxed us.

She broke out of the yard, stole some kid's plastic ball, and then broke back INTO the yard.

She was there waiting for us with a great big grin when I walked out back.

So, crisis averted, Charlie and I set about trying Sookie-proof the yard again while she watched. Plotting her next escape.

Here's the note my neighbor left taped to my front door:

"Amanda, I just wanted you to know
I'm fairly certain your dog growled the "F" word
at me when I put the cement in her escape tunnel!"

Thanks to Charlie's DIY handymanliness, the invisible fence wire has been spliced back together, the escape holes filled in with cement stones, and the destroyed red collar replaced with a brand new pink collar--shock hardware refitted onto the new collar.