I got fed up of running up and down the road this week trying to track down my wayward dogs. Both of them found a way out of the garden even though I am constantly piling up chopped branches and anything else I can find to block up escape routes.
As soon as I took my vigilant eye off them for a second they were away, high tailing it to one of three places where food is left out. The first port of call for them is the neighbours who leave food out for the cats, and if you have ever had cats you will realise that most of them are grazers popping back and forth to their dinner bowls when the urge takes them. It only takes one sitting and a couple of seconds for the plate to be licked clean when one of my two get there. Another destination is a few hundred yards away where someone puts food out on the lawn for the birds. Bird feed isn’t very well digested by dogs and looks the same going out as it does going in. The third place is at the edge of the park where someone is a bit sloppy putting their leftovers in the bin. They feast on spaghetti one day then a pile of mashed spuds the other.
Making the most of every opportunity
The dogs make the most of every opportunity to get food. Julie’s dad came over the other day and delivered a beautiful homemade loaf. It was a bit early in the day and as we were in bed he decided to leave it in a “safe place” in the garage carefully wrapped up in a brown paper bg. The safe place was on top of the boiler so it didn’t take much for one of the dogs to get it down and devour it. It also didn’t take much to see who the culprit was. Chips, the daftest of our two dogs could hardly walk let alone run when I took them for a walk later, her stomach was like a balloon.I had to do something about the dogs escaping so I went down to the wood yard and bought myself 75 metres of 2”x1” strips of wood to make a sturdy trellis. I did a bit on the other side of the garden so knew what I had to do. There is a really wavy concrete block wall that rises to about 3 feet high so I screwed vertical posts onto these for a start before gauging how far to space the horizontals out so the dogs couldn’t squeeze through them. It took me all day to build the trellis, and fine looking it is too.
It took the dogs less than three minutes to break the defences and high tail it down the road again.
I wasn’t going to be beaten so after getting the pests back I got my lad to let them out of the house whilst I hid in the neighbour’s garden undergrowth to see exactly where they were getting out. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Because the wall has a slight wave of subsidence to it, the dogs found the bit that had the biggest gap and twisted themselves sideways to get out. The gap was only inches tall; you would never guess they could sliver through such a tight gap; they looked like flapping flatfish that were trying to escape a net.
Let them witness the work
I chained both dogs up to their kennel and let them witness firsthand how I unscrewed each section then lowered them following the contours of the wavy wall. It looks a bit odd, but there is now a uniform gap all the way along the wall. I sauntered over to the kennel and let them off their leads. I went indoors and when they thought I wasn’t looking made a bid for freedom. Their attempts were foiled, try as they might they couldn’t find a gap.I’ve won this round. It probably won’t be long until they find a way to climb up the trellis like a ladder. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
