The Mind of the Dog

One of the best episodes of any TV show ever was an episode of the otherwise pedestrian Just Shoot Me. I hope you saw it. It guest starred David Cross as, Donnie, the brother of the lecherous photographer guy. Apparently he had fallen out of a tree and hit his head, rendering him "slow". Supposedly. Turns out, he had been faking it for the last fifteen years. He reveals this to Laura San Giacomo in an effort to hit on her, and hillarity ensues.

A quote, from memory:

DONNIE'S MOM: Sometimes you get a glimmer. He can spend hours playing the most complicated video game, but when you ask him to take out the trash... nothing.

Anyway, if you missed it, too bad. If you saw it, you might have some idea of how I'm starting to feel about my dog. She seems so stupid most of the time, but then she does something that's just brilliant. I wonder if, all those times she looks at me with those dead and empty eyes, she's laughing inside.

"The fool! I have him convinced! He has no idea!"

Take the electric fence thingy that I installed at great effort and expense. Well, Charlie has figured out a way past it. I come home one day, and there she is, in the next door neighbor's yard, wagging her tail and barking merrily.

I was puzzled. The collar has these two electrodes, both of which would have to be making contact with the dog to work. I thought maybe I didn't have the collar tight enough, and so one of them was losing contact. Or maybe I didn't have one of the electrodes screwed in tight enough. Which might, coincidentally, be true, but wasn't the problem.

Then I noticed the dog sneaking up on the fence, right at the part where she can squeeze under. Very, very slowly. Like the fence was a helpless bunny rabbit that Charlie was going to do a number on. I suspected right away that she was up to something, so I yelled at her, and she ran off and found a stick to destroy.

I've since read over the manual a second time. Turns out, the collar has a timer on it, so that, if you're within proximity of the signal wire for more than 15 seconds, it turns itself off. Which is, I'd imagine, a safeguard, in case there's some malfunction on its part or my part, so the dog doesn't get electricuted for hours on end.

So it would seem that what Charlie was doing was sneaking up on it, listening for the proximity warning, then listening for it to turn off, and making a run for it.

How the hell did she figure that out? How did something so apparently dumb discover something so clever?

And what am I going to do about keeping her in the back yard now? Well, it's too cold to keep her outside for too long. And, while I haven't left her outside for hours at a stretch, she hasn't gotten next door in the past few days. I'm hoping that she's either forgotten about her trick or she's screwed it up enough times that she doesn't think it's worth trying.