The Baboon Congress

Hark, Hark the Dogs Doth Bark

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Today’s post is by Renee in North Dakota

The Saturday after New Year’s Day, our churlish next door neighbor stormed over to our house and told my husband that we had to keep our dog quiet. Did we know how many times she had barked that day? Husband just said “Ok”. and shut the door.  We were pretty puzzled about this, since she really hadn’t barked at all that day.

Our dog is 14 years old. She is a terrier. Terriers bark. We have tried our hardest to minimize her vocalizations over the years. We don’t let her out in the yard unsupervised, and she does her business on the deck in the back. Our neighbor has complained about her for years, and it seems that nothing we do is good enough.

There are plenty of other dogs in the neighborhood that we hear barking, but he seems to be obsessed with our little Maggie. He spends a lot of time in his family room, the closest room in his house to our deck, which is the only place she barks. He has even installed white noise machines.  There was a dog in the garage of the house on the other side of neighbor’s house that barked continuously for 5 hours the day he came over to complain.  We think that he assumed the noise was coming from our dog.

Now, to put Maggie’s barking into perspective, her barking never lasts more than 10 seconds  at any one time before we bring her in, and she doesn’t bark in the house. After this last visit from neighbor, we started collecting data on the times she went out, whether she barked, and the duration of her utterances, if any. We stand by the patio door until she is finished with her  business so that we can leap out and quell any barking that might occur.  Her barking, which wasn’t much to begin with, has been reduced even further.  Now we have actual data to use in the event neighbor complains to the police. The longest string of barks she has produced outside since we started data collection is 5 woofs long and lasted less than 5 seconds. She barks less than 3 percent of the times she goes outside. Ooh, I love being a behavioral scientist!

Our dog is getting frail and I think this is her last winter. I have a secret plan for when she passes that would be satisfying to implement, particularly if she dies before next Christmas. I plan to tell the neighbor that she has died. I want to lull him into a false sense of relief, and then I want to start broadcasting from our deck this musical selection that husband found on the internet.

One of my friends tells me that someone has to be the bigger person here. I suppose she is right. There is an entire album of Barking Dogs’ Christmas music, though! It is pretty tempting to do, especially since neighbor hasn’t thanked us for the nearly silent neighborhood in which he now lives.   Of course, he never thanks us for anything. Sigh.

 

When have you used data to win an argument?

97 thoughts on “Hark, Hark the Dogs Doth Bark”

  2. Often, in the current political season. “93 million out of work” is frequently used as an unemployment figure by a certain political party. The number is accurate but usage in the context of unemployment is disingenuous at best. The actual details of who and why those folks are considered “out of work” is revealing. Of course, government charts and explanatory material is boring and few take the time to actually look at those much less study them. So I personalize the data and explain that my 86 year old father is among the “out of work”, has been for the past 210 consecutive months and will continue in that status for the foreseeable future. My sister has been disabled from lupus related conditions for the past 110 consecutive months and will continue to be “out-of-work” for the foreseeable future. Two of my nephews are “out of work” attending The Ohio State University. They will be “out-of-work” for at least the next 4 years. I will be “out-of-work” in 13 months and plan on enjoying every minute of it. So, statistically speaking, my family has made a significant contribution to the “93 million out of work” figure. I dare say that Trail Baboons have also contributed mightily to this meme. Shame on us all! (snark)

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    3. It’s great to know that there’s someone else out there who’s also aware and bothered by this obvious ploy to paint the economy as “failing”. I address this almost daily on the Strib board, but, like an ugly pimple, it keeps popping up again anyway.

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      2. trib blogs are made for ugly people to coax you into arguments s they can spew poision. stop it cb. go to a nice place and share the warmth instead of driving your self crazy and fueling the cancer

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  3. I don’t recall collecting data to win an argument. I think I have done that and just can’t remember doing it. I will show the proof that I was right when someone was sure I was wrong and it turns out I was right although I can’t remember the last time I did this. I must have been been on the winning side in an argument some time recently, right?

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  4. Renee, If I were you I wouldn’t tell the neighbor when Maggie passes on. If he complains again, you have a gotcha moment – our dog died three months ago and you’re still hearing her barking? Then if you get another dog, you have ironclad proof that the neighbor is delusional.

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  5. i say put a sound system ion the patio next to your patio furnature and place bach and mozart string quartets on playing at a measurable but very low volume. then with flow cart on the counter turn the sound up for 15 minutes at a time and make it something that you do when you go out on the patio for a moment and then forgot to turn down when you go back in the house. let the neighbor enjoy mozart and bach in preparation of bringing in some more appropriate bartok, mussorgsky, or stravinsky. when the police come out to visit if they hear a little classical brahms and chopin tinkling away they can deduce what they will. you in the meantime can find some subwoofers that hide under a fiberglass rock in the garden that will make you smile

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  6. i have recently become a huge fan of analytics and the power that adds to analysis of stuff. if you tweak your thinking just a bit it becomes an interesting study in thinking about the topic ant hand.
    i dont concern myself much with winning arguments too much bot getting results is a focus i can wrap my arms around.

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  7. I’m not convinced that you ever really “win” an argument and certainly never with someone like your neighbor. You reach a stalemate at best, and the data might be handy if you neighbor brings in the authorities. You can lose an argument, however, by allowing your venal neighbor to drag you down to his level, and that’s not worthy of your time and energy.
    Having said that, I remember when collections of animals singing Christmas carols were in vogue. There were cds of dogs and cats and, I think, frogs. You could probably find one online if you looked.

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  8. I wouldn’t call it an argument, but I will call it a win: last spring my boss left for a new gig and in the interim while her back fill was being found, I covered a lot of her duties. It happened that just left about the time our fiscal year turned over and initial forecasts had shown we might need to lay of one of our contractors. About one week into my “interim” gig and I might have to lay someone off – not the sort of power or responsibility anyone wants. So I put my head together with our project manager and we figured out that we didn’t need to do any such thing. We had an open role (not my boss’) that hadn’t been filled and we could leave it that way for awhile and another was split differently in the actual budget than how it had been forecasted (accounting magic)…so with a few tweaks here and there based on current “on the ground” data, we got the math to all add up without having to lay anyone off. I went into my meeting with my senior director and showed him how the math worked and he said, “you’re right – it works.” I knew I just needed to show him that with some minor shifts (thanks to my fabulous project manager and his tracking tools) that we could make the numbers add up – he is a finance guy at heart, so if the bottom line shows the number we need, it’s good. Phew.

    (P.S. I had a neighbor who complained about my prior basset hound barking a lot. She was the only neighbor who complained. I lived in a fourplex and she lived in the apartment building next door. In talking to my fourplex neighbors, they all first said they did not think my dog barked excessively – sometimes she would bark while I was gone, but she was a dog, so they expected that – and they followed it up with stories they had about this woman…including her coming over to “shush” a group of four sitting out on their porch talking in the evening because it seemed noisy to her. We all agreed she needed to not live in the city in the sort of proximity where you can practically spit from your window into your neighbors. She did call Animal Control to complain – but i got the distinct impression they were more on my side than hers.)

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  9. I’m sure, like Jim, that I’ve done something like this in the past. I can remember keeping track of something with the IIII / (the diagonal stroke across the other four – why isn’t there a key for this??), but so far haven’t remembered what – probably with my sister, though.

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  11. One of my goals for the last thirty years is to keep myself from becoming the nasty old bastard my father was. I often want to but have only twice told old nasty people in public that old age is not a license to be rude. Old age is an entitlement to some. My mother was opposed to senior discounts because she said it would make seniors feel privileged. Does it? My very cheap mother refused senior discounts for many years.
    In the last four months or so I have made rude comments about a dozen times. in the mall, etc.I regret everyone of them. Not that I wans’t right, but who wins when I say something? Not me. I have held myself in check better lately, even when two people a week a part stepped right in from of me and tripped me up and damaged my right leg. I went to the ground and was in obvious severe pain. One apologized and left, making no offer to help me up. The other told me off. I would not have won an argument. So now I am very careful that no one steps in front of me and annoy people behind me.
    In our building are several dogs, all quiet and well-taken care of, at least near me, this is a long sprawling building. My one irk is that in the hallway they bark at me and get excited. Three owners suggested I should make friends with the dog. I ending up doing so, but now they want to jump on my and the owners let them. I just have a thing about dogs in my space. Bet you can see why. But I can live with it.
    In the hallway above us two little boys run in great excitement to and from their apartment maybe at most three times a day thundering above us and in our aprtment. People around us whine about it. Sandy and I tell them we love that sound and we do. So in toto I will take the sound of life around me over silence. I keep trying to remember that. I am trying not to be your neighbor, Renee.

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    1. I think it runs in his family. About 20 years ago there was a hailstorm that took out most of the neighborhood shingles, Neighbor’s brother had a roofing business and we engaged him to replace our shingles when he did neighbor’s shingles. I never got the whole story, but our insurance agent almost came to blows with the roofer for some conflict over vents. Our agent said he was an impossible person to deal with.

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    2. Sue, my former daughter in law and now a close friend, decided to get a Bernese Mountain dog a year ago. As a puppy, he was the most adorable, fluffy creature I’ve ever seen. He’s since morphed into a 120-pound bear. Sue, the sweetest introvert I’ve ever known, took him to puppy training twice but she’s the one who needed training. As “Buddy” grew, his massive presence and enthusiasm became overwhelming. I’d no sooner sit on her off-white couch than he’d jump up on my lap, begging for attention. He was so large that I couldn’t even make visual contact with Sue.

      Then, this oversized teddy bear discovered how much he loved barking.

      On one visit, he was so out of control that I tactfully told her, “Sue, he doesn’t believe you when you try to correct him because your voice is too soft”. I then coerced her into practicing commands. I’d say, “BUDDY, NO BARK!!”; she’d say “Buddy, please don’t bark”. Her command was so weak that I urged her to crank up the volume and try it again by demonstrating “BUDDY, NO BARK!!!!!!” Sue; “buddy, stop barking”. No matter how many times she practiced, she just didn’t have it in her to be firm and masterful. As a result, this massive dog not only jumps on top of any newcomer, he barks non-stop and, believe me, the volume of his bark is just as big as he is!

      My solution was to meet her for lunch instead of visit her at home.

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      1. Son and DIL have acquired an 8 week old West Highland Terrier puppy named Baxter. He goes to puppy kindergarten every Saturday, and has to be silent and sitting before he joins the group. They will make sure he is a good citizen.

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        1. puppies learn nothing until they are 8 months old. dog owners learn puppy school makes you feel better and the school richer until the puppies are old enough to begin learning. by then the school has the owners trained

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    3. people cutting you off is so bad
      the same thing happens on the road in cars.
      i think i am surprised by how often the maniac in the other car is a person i would never suspect by looking at them.
      i feel a little guilty when i box them in and watch them go ballistic but only a little. they rush through life in a bull in the china shop mantra of outta my way and when boxed in they pound the wheel back out and move over 3 lanes to get around and roar up the road to tailgate the next victim. a taser belt buckle that exudes electric shock on anyone infringing on your space does have a place in the world today.

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  12. I got in a little trouble for saying this once before, so I want to be careful. Like others here, I realized one day I had never won an argument. I decided to avoid all future arguments, and that has worked well for me. Pretty well.

    If I had to argue to defend my continued employment, I would probably break my rule against arguing just to keep my job. And the last time I really argued about anything, that was my motivation. I lost that argument then in spite of my best efforts and considerable ingenuity. I became a freelancer. It is an awful way to make a living, but nobody can fire you from that “job.”

    Relationships are more of a challenge. If you are in a relationship that is becoming warped because of an argument, avoiding the argument is not a productive strategy (even if arguing seldom leads to a positive outcome). If I were in a relationship now that needed to be corrected in order to fix a persistent problem, I would do my best to address the issue. But I’m not in that spot. Being divorced is like being unemployed. Having been fired once as a husband, that is not an issue for me now.

    My life is now almost entirely free of stress. I do live next to two beagles, and of course they bark. But not more than I can tolerate with a smile. If God didn’t want us to hear barking now and then, he (she) would not have given us beagles. Right?

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    1. My part Beagle is “one of those barkers.” She is also part terrier, though built like a Beagle. She was really born to be a farm dog. She patrols the perimeter of our yard, looking for threats and scraps of food, chases cars, and growls at perceived interlopers, usually of the squirrelly variety.

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    2. i dont think god did give us beagles. i think they are part of what came out when pandora opened the box. beagles mosquitoes dontald trump
      all here to test us and remind us that we once had a earlier heredity of sinners and now we have to pay

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  13. Rise and Site the Facts Baboons!

    I love winning with data, especially when health insurance companies are involved. The type of therapy I do is well researched and pretty indisputable when used properly. Using this data to convince an insurance company to send someone to therapy twice per week instead of to a hospital ward (usually psych ward) is a powerful process that can be demonstrated with dollar $ign$. $mirk, $mirk (especially winning over the Dark Side, common lingo for the health insurance industry and the companies with unproductive, counter-indicated mental health policies. Not all companies are such). Question to self–should i even say this on a public blog?

    When I was a county case manager I did this with insurance companies, as well, by requesting Occupational Therapy — Sensory Integration Techniques — for children struggling at home and in school. It was almost always a cheaper and more successful way to treat the kiddos. These techniques are now run-of-the-mill, but they were cutting edge 25-30 years ago. I trained a lot of people in these methods along side an OTR (Occupational Therapist Registered), and even had an article published about it in a professional journal.

    BTW Renee, I think your neighbor is probably Sensory Defensive in the auditory realm and a pair of ear plugs might solve the problem until Maggie passes on. Maybe a Valentine’s present is in order…

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    2. my inlaws lived below the path of the main runway in ohare. the noise commission offered new soundproof windows and insulation to stop the noise. it made an unbelievable difference. my sister lives over by lake nokomis in the flight pattern and the minnesota sound commission paid for her sound proofing. the difference is unbelievable. he could fix it himself and according to jacque maybe it can be prescribed as a therapy for a auditory whack job that needs this like a deaf person needs hearing aids. worth a try

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  14. An excellent portrayal of old age is Jon Hassler’s “Simon’s Night” set mostly in a small town private seniors’ home, which are interesting places. One of the residents is a retired farmer who keeps looking for slivers in his hands and is disappointed not to find any. I just found a sliver in my hand? Where did that dome from?

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        1. One of the running little boys came by our apartment as I was going out. He was all excited. He is about 5. He was wearing a Home Depot apron with lots of pins on it, I think a Christmas present tool kit sort of thing. His daddy soon followed. They were going out shopping because they were going to “make things.”

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  15. I believe that in the book A Girl Named Zippy, by Haven Kimmel, the author’s father arranged for numerous coon hounds to be placed in kennels around an the house of an irascible, anti-barking neighbor while the neighbor slept, and then a raccoon was paraded in front of the dogs. I guess the noise was deafening.

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  16. I’m almost obsessive about using facts, so much so that it’s difficult to refrain from pulling them out when someone spouts a right wing talking point. Guns: 5% of the world’s population; 55% of the world’s guns. Number of refugees taken in who’ve become terrorists; 0. Number of filibusters since Obama; 380. And so on. I google every major issue, copy facts to archive, then cut and paste them on the opinion boards at just the right time.

    Too bad that right wingers outright reject facts. I need to get a life.

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  17. The more I reflect on issues raised by Renee today, the more I realize these are matters that concern me. I’m not easy about my natural resolution of matters of disagreement.

    I’ve gotten good–very good–at avoiding conflict. I can put up with rude, unreasonable and annoying people. That’s easy. We all probably get too many chances to perfect the art of keeping quiet, keeping calm and just letting that kind of crap go by. Happens all the time.

    Having learned the pointlessness of arguing, though, the real challenge is being able to identify moments when protest is honorable and worth the trouble. I’m not so good at that. There are times, as Jacque points out, where fighting back serves a good cause (even if we don’t always win). I would like to think I’m making progress on that, but how would I know?

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      1. Besides fight or flight, I think there’s “freeze”. When someone’s raging at me, I freeze and just allow myself to get verbally assaulted. I don’t have the guts to leave or the wherewithal to fight back. Fortunately, this has only happened a very few times in my life.

        Other than this reaction, I’ve learned the hard way that if someone’s upset with me (not raging), trying to rationalize, explain, or otherwise help him/her understand the big picture escalates the other person further. I guess that when someone’s really upset or angry, the rational part of the brain disconnects, so being rational makes them more upset.

        Truth be told, I have no effective way to handle conflict. The best I have so far is to validate their feelings regardless of the circumstances. It’s really not that hard to say, “I can understand how upset you are” without following up with, “I totally agree with you”.

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    2. pick something that you would prefer had a different result and voice that thought. it can be your cable tv bill. those people ar epaid to be very polite when the tell you no and often times they will give you 100 dollars for the trouble you voice. you can win without winning at least to a point.

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  18. I’m wondering, Renee, whether that neighbor’s complaining is really about noise. Some people are just not happy unless they have something to gripe about. If it weren’t the dog, would it be something else?

    I think many of us have experienced the childhood neighbor who would not give us our ball back if it accidentally ended up in their yard; the neighbor who would gripe if we were making too much noise when playing; the neighbor we avoided at all costs. My father-in-law was that neighbor, and what was worse, within his own household he was constantly shouting orders and corrections. Close the door, you’re letting the heat out; turn out the lights; turn off the water; wipe your feet; turn down radio, and on and on. It was a constant barrage of corrections. When driving he’d flash his lights or beep his horn at other drivers for whatever infraction they were committing: not signalling their turn, following too closely, driving in the passing lane, whatever. Husband hated it, and told me about it when we first met. The ironic thing is that he’s turning into his dad, and so are his two brothers. When his behavior gets on my last nerve I call him Torkild, and he knows he had better reign himself in a bit. He knows his urge to control everything causes all kinds of conflict, yet he seems unable to squelch it.

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    1. When I got difficult, my mother called me either “Lois” or “Amelia”, two of her least favorite people from my father’s side of the family.

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      2. That’s funny. When my sister and I bickered (which was rare) my mom might say, “You two sound like Bill and Lynn.” It was the ugliest thing she could say. Bill and Lynn fought noisily and constantly. The comparison would instantly shame us into politeness.

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    2. Every once in a while, I experiment with being cranky because it’s one of the few perquisites of being old, but it’s so preposterous and I have so much fun at it that it always breaks the mood I’m trying to achieve.

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    4. In an argument once my mother accused my father of becoming like HIS father. My dad threw a wine bottle through the kitchen window.

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      2. No, it wasn’t. I came into the room just as this happened – normally my folks were “united we stand, divided we fall” and even to this day I don’t know the whole scope of the argument. Both my grandfathers had alcohol problems; my dad’s dad was violent and abusive and eventually killed himself being drunk behind the wheel. (I’ve always believed that my parents’ abused childhoods were part of the glue that held them together.) When I was in high school there would be the occasional bottle of wine in the fridge and the argument was over how drinking was going on. Of course both my folks’ definition of “too much drinking” is anything over about 2/3 of a cup so any accusation about drinking too much in my family isn’t much of an accusation. But being compared to his father threw my dad for a loop. Bottle of wine through the wine and storming off in his car – he didn’t come back until after dark. No bottles of wine in the fridge after that. While my mother won’t go into details she has said it was by far the worst argument they ever had. It was certainly the only argument where anything was broken!

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  19. I learned from a master not to use data when arguing. My father would argue you into a corner and once you had given up and agreed with him, he’d turn around and argue the other side of the case – often using the same data but looking at it differently. Instead of looking to data to help me in an argument, I look for the emotion underneath.

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    1. It took me a long time to realize my dad just liked to argue for fun of it. He wasn’t mean about it at all; he just countered everything you said in order to keep the discussion going.
      And I do the same thing. But you have to be careful who you pick on.

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  20. Part of my town board duties are responding to ‘barking dog’ reports.
    There’s one guy who complains about the neighbors dog 1/2 mile away. When I go visit the neighbor, the dog is never barking. He admits the dog does bark sometimes… but geez, in the country, there are so many things a dog can bark at… and at night depending on the wind I can hear a dog 2 miles away… barking at the coyotes or raccoons or whatever. But it’s pretty hard to prosecute anyone for a barking dog out here.

    I have a story about arguments: College student several years ago. He was on his phone during a show. I asked him to end the call or take it outside. He got very defensive and in my face about it. The more POLITELY I asked the louder and madder he got. This was creating more disturbance to the play than his initial phone call so I walked away.
    He went to complain to the teacher / director who sided with me of course.
    We heard over the next few weeks, his entire community had issues with him and they all seems to know what went down between he and I and they approved of what I had tried to do.
    And a few weeks after that, the young man apologized to me and was a pretty good student and worker after that.

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    2. This reminded me of some very unpleasant incidences at different firms where I have worked. On one occasion, the irate husband of one of our secretaries showed up in our reception area with a gun, demanding to see a certain partner of our firm. He had discovered that his wife had been carrying on an affair with him, and he was going to make sure that didn’t happen again. I managed to convince him the partner wasn’t there, and invited him to my office, where he somehow calmed down enough that he realized killing the partner wasn’t a good solution to his problem. He left calmer, but still angry and upset, and I worried a lot about what was going to happen when the secretary got home from work that night.

      At another firm, our internal mail person was a woman in her mid thirties with severe mental health issues. She was a very good worker, but her moods were completely unpredictable. The slightest bump in the road could cause a spectacular meltdown. I’m not a mental health professional, and I’m not trained in how to deal with a mentally ill person in a fit of rage; those were scary and very upsetting times.

      When I read about workplace shootings by terminated employees, I flash back to a couple of other incidences. I’m so glad to be retired. Even sane people will do crazy things if they get angry enough.

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    1. Not in the least, Renee, but when you’ve spent as many years in middle management as I have, you’re almost guaranteed to have some horror stories. Looking back, I don’t know how I lasted so many years.

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  22. I had two Great Pyrenees dogs whose job it is to warn off predators so they bark all night while roaming the boundaries of their (self-proclaimed) territory. One neighbor a couple miles away as the crow flies can attest the bark can be heard that far away.

    My neighbor’s son-in-law across the road chased “Rumpole” (I should have known better than to name a dog after a barrister) back across the road in the middle of the night after he had been barking right under their windows for too long a time. I took him into the house for the rest of the night. In the morning they discovered a bear had destroyed all their bird feeders. So…he was just doing his job.

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  23. A neighbor story from my trip to bird at Zax-Zim Bog yesterday: Two of neighbors of the bog are vehement anti-birders. One of them lives directly across the road from an avid bird feeder who invites and welcomes visiting birders. We were told not even to look in the direction of the house across the road, cops might be and have been called. I was trying to imagine how it would be to have such diverse neighbors — for each of them.

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      1. Having a bad neighbor is a special sort of hell. Or so I’ve heard. People can be so spiteful and unreasonable. Just before I left the Minnesota there was a lot of publicity about the “neighbor from hell” who harassed a White Bear family.

        Years ago cops were called repeatedly to inspect a property that offended a neighbor because the lawn wasn’t mowed. But it was. On the third call the cops talked to the unhappy neighbor pointing out that the adjacent property wasn’t mowed. That’s how they learned the real complaint was that the neighbor mowed his property on an angle, not in the box pattern favored by the person doing the complaining.

        And then there was the fastidious guy on Lake Minnetonka who hated the way his neighbor stored stuff on his lawn. Years of resentment finally boiled over. The angry neighbor went over to the home of “the slob” and shot him dead.

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        1. Our neighbor to the west, the one with the Virgin Mary in a bathtub, some people might consider the neighbor from hell. Not only is he a nasty tempered bully, he is also a collector of all kinds of junk. Their front porch is jam-packed with broken furniture, religious statuary, dusty plastic flowers and piles of plastic bags full of who knows what, . Add to the mix, his forty-five year old son, a backyard mechanic and drug dealer, his five kids and now four grand kids. He’s the gift that keeps on giving.

          As I write this, I count five snow-covered cars and a fairly large boat parked in front of their garage. To add to the scenic view from our dining room, there’s also a large pile of more or less dilapidated lawn furniture plus a couple of large BBQ grills.

          Looking on the bright side, the above mentioned son has been locked up for the past six months, so things have been relatively quiet lately. We’re hoping they have cause to keep him a lot longer.

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      2. My thoughts exactly. The other anti birder has ptsd from Vietnam so has some understanding from the Bog personnel. The other? Anger over loss of privacy, perhaps. Both houses are directly opposite each other and right on the road.

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  24. I was almost obsessively concerned about not letting our dogs annoy the neighbors with barking. We had six dogs living with us in my former home. Five were almost mute. One barked. Tessie was, in many ways, not an easy dog to live with. We could forgive her for annoying us (like chewing on my expensive fly rod), but we were determined to stop the barking.

    I bought an anti-barking collar. It had a membrane that responded when the dog wearing it barked (and not respond when other dogs, even nearby dogs, barked). It delivered a shock that was supposed to startle the dog into silence. We put it on Tessie when we left her in the house, for that is when she barked.

    Not long after we bought that collar it caught the eye of one of my daughter’s friends. Elizabeth picked up the collar, held it against her own throat and barked out a loud “Woof!”

    It is surely not true that Elizabeth’s eyes crossed when the shock hit her, although that’s the way I remember it. She said nothing but put the collar down with a stunned expression. I couldn’t figure a way to test the severity of the shock except by doing what Elizabeth had done, and I wouldn’t do that. We never put that collar on Tess again.

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      1. Glad you clarified that, Steve. We bought one of those collars for one of our dogs, too, but never had the heart to put it on the dog, either.

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    1. One of my old friends from college has three rottweilers. She’s fortunate to live in a big house right on the shores of Lake Huron, so plenty of space, inside and out.

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      1. My first Irish Setter came from a gal in St. Paul. When I went to see the puppies for the first time, I was bowled over by SIX adult Irish Setters living in the woman’s house – and not a big house at that!

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  26. Maggie would like to thank you all for your comments this weekend. She apologizes for her unkempt eyebrows. A trip to the beauty [parlor is in order.

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  27. When we first moved to the lake, we had five indoor/outdoor cats. The neighbors hated cats and complained regularly that one of ours had crossed the invisible boundary between our homes. Trying to give where we could (you can’t take five cats used to being outdoors to suddenly trapping them in the house), and told them we’d look into shock cat collars. Dad had hidden fencing for his golden.

    After some research, we found such a thing existed. The voltage was very low on the collars. Or so they told us.

    We collared two of the cats and watched them in the yard. As Yoda, our prized Ragdoll cat, approached the fence, the shock hit him and his body flew three feet into the air. His eyes bulged out and his whole body shook like a leaf. He also darted into their yard in his terror. Wasband did a face plant grabbing for Yoda’s tail, dragging him back and shocking him again.

    Needless to say, shock collars do not work on cats.

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