Defiantone.com

I’ve dealt with it in the past and I didn’t expect to deal with it again - but - its happened. I have a spastic dog. Fireworks are illegal in the state of Washington - save for a span of about 36 hours around the fourth of July and new years. Despite the fact that fireworks are always illegal in the city of our residence, it doesn’t deter the ingrates that live here.

One of our dogs doesn’t react well to the explosions and he tends to freak out. On the third of July - when fireworks were illegal in the entire state - we had our first jailbreak. Lick had pushed the gate open and took Duke along with him for a run. Luckily for us, they ran into a yard a quarter mile down the road and were wrangled by some extremely nice people. They were just pulling into their driveway when they saw them. They stopped and opened up the rear door and the dogs hopped right in. They called the numbers on the tags and eventually we got the word from Leanne that our dogs were out. When we pulled up we saw two stressed but extremely happy dogs. We had only been gone for an hour or two so we were obviously concerned as to how they escaped and whether they would escape again.

We left again on the fourth to go down to a BBQ. Prior to leaving we locked the dogs in the kennel complete with a 7 foot tall fence. We also shut the front gate so if they made it past the first line of defense we hoped that they wouldn’t make it past a second. A few hours after we left we received a phone call from the same nice people that caught our dogs on the third - they had Lick but didn’t have Duke. We left immediately and Jessica dropped me off at the front gate where I found my dog in the back yard alone and distressed that he couldn’t get out. I took at look and couldn’t find any spot where he dug to get out - he jumped the fence - he jumped a 7 foot fence. Jessica returned with Lick and we stuck both in the back of the car and took them to her parents house where they had kennels complete with floor to ceiling fences. They made it through the night without issue. When we returned home I added another three feet to part of the fence to prevent further jailbreaks.

We brought them back today and stuck them in the yard hoping that the majority of fireworks were over. We had to run out to the grocery store to grab a few things and came home an hour later to find only one dog in the back yard. Jessica didn’t react well to the discovery. I put Duke in my car and started driving around the neighborhood. She drove off in her car and started searching all of the side streets in a two mile radius.

I couldn’t see anything from my car so I dropped it off at home and started by walking streets with Duke in tow. I gave up after a few miles knowing that the odds of finding him were low - really low. I came home and looked up the animal control and humane society phone numbers. I called both only to receive recordings. Jessica came back after some time and was still stressed because we had no leads - there was nothing that we could do.

Luckily someone found him. We got a call and drove a few miles away to find him in the car of a pair of extremely nice people. The guy, who was much larger that I am, was quite surprised by how hard it was to control Lick. He didn’t think it was dog - he thought he had a pony.

At the moment, both dogs are sitting at my feet and are quite happy to be in such proximity to us. Tomorrow I’m going to fully enclose the kennel - we’re going to hope that the fireworks stop and that I can contain our spastic dog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 1:28 am and is filed under Life as I know it, humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.