Mountain slide into a den on the walk back to the truck. She said somebody was home, but we did not have time to dig, and so we left it for another day.
I am frugal. Or, as my daughter describes it: Cheap, cheap, cheap.
I take pride in it, and so when something goes wrong that could cost me money, I tend to get vexated.
Such was the case on Friday, when I brought in the dogs for the night and counted three dogs and only two Invisible Fence collars. Where was Pearl's collar?
For the record, these collars are not cheap -- $300 a unit -- and I live in fear of having one of them come off and disappear into the half acre of ivy in the back yard. There was nothing to do about it on Friday night, as it was already dark. On Saturday morning, however, I swept the yard and found nothing, but on a second go-over I located the collar sitting on the top of an ivy-free mulched bed. A small miracle!
The other bit of electronic vexation this weekend was that I lost my Deben locator box on the farm last weekend. These old Deben boxes are no longer made, and though I have a spare, I do not like the loose feeling on that particular box's dial . I wanted my old Deben box back!
And so, even though I did not have time to hunt, it was back out to the farm yesterday for a bit of "locating the locator." I was pretty sure I had left the locator box at the last hole of the day, but I was afraid I might have accidentally buried it.
The good news is that I did not bury it, and I did find it. The case on the box was cracked, and there was a huge pile of poop on it. I mean a HUGE pile. It was hard to tell what it was -- it looked a bit like raccoon scat, but it was such an enormous pile that I think it must be coyote scat.No matter; I got my locator box back, and with a little piece of hard plastic cut from a CD-rom case, and a little black PC-7 epoxy to bind it to the side, I have repaired the box and it is in fine working order again, if considerably uglier. All is well.
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2 comments:
Aren't those invisible fences great? I hate to admit it, but I am completely addicted to dog training/control electonics. There's the invisible fence, the beeper collar for locating Maggs when she's on point, and this spring I did something I swore I'd never do - I bought an electronic training collar. Maggs is terrible about chasing deer. Of course the damn thing works like a champ. With one mild "correction," I made more progress than I'd made the previous three years of whistle blowing and running all over pastures trying to cut her off.
Invisible fences DO work. We have a hard fence around most of the yard, but we would be in a world of trouble if we had to put a hard fence across the driveway.
Mount Vernon (George Washington's home) uses an IF fence and about a half dozen pound dogs to keep deer off the ornamentals at night. The IF fence is invisible, and it keeps the dogs in after the tourists go home and the deer come out. Without IF, Mount Vernon's landscape would be mowed to the ground by Whitetail.
I own a shock collar to bust the dogs off deer too. I bought it after Mountain ran riot on a deer, used it once, and she seems to have learned. Would it be wrong to use it on my kids :) Just kidding!
Patrick
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