Pride goeth before a fail

Yesterday I decided to take a break in my never-ending battle with Belle and her constant escapes from the dog pen. Yesterday, I figured that I'd do better to just replace the gate on my front deck that she also breaches, and if I could keep her on the deck at least, that'd be a partial victory right there. I'm not asking much--I just want to be able to put this one dog in an outside enclosure and not have her go walkabout in the neighborhood.

And I'm not spending money on an electric fence for this dog. I can bring her around without doing that. I'm smarter than she is and I've been working with Shepherds for a long time. I WILL win.

So I replaced the baby gate across my deck stairs--which was really more of an "honor system" gate but one sufficient to contain the last two Shepherds--with full-sized wodden shipping pallet that's three feet wide and four feet tall. It weighs about 40lbs. and placed across the top of the stairs, I knew right away that it'd be more than enough to keep Miss Urban Explorer on the deck.

Pleased with myself, I went back in the house to get a beer, but I had barely opened the refrigerator before I heard my crazy cat neighbor yelling that my dog was in his yard again.

How. The. Hell? In just thirty seconds, she'd figured out how to move the pallet and she was gone.

And to make it worse, I opened my back kitchen sliding door to go out and call her back, and Thing #2, Audie Murphy, bolted out and headed for Cat-mandu next door as well.

Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. That dog, unlike his female sidekick, doesn't come back when he's on a hunt.

So I yelled for Belle, and she came trotting back happily through the hedge. I put her back in the house and set off in pursuit of the evil one. By this time, crazy cat neighbor was practically having a stroke, but I managed to recover Murphy fairly easily this time with my now-standard method of just driving down the road past the cat neighbor's house and waiting for him to see me and chase me. (Murphy, not the cat neighbor.) I let him chase me for about a block, and then when he's completely forgotten that I'm the one chasing him, I stop and let him jump in the truck and we go home.

I spent a bit more time securing the pallet gate better, and this time, I'm sure that I've got her blocked in, at least on the deck.

No damn German Shepherd is gonna outsmart me. Nope. Not gonna happen. Not again, anyway.