Had we waited a few weeks to name our last dog until we had a better sense of her personality, she would have been named Twizzler, after what she got most excited about. We’ve had Lucy for a little over a month, and a alternate name which she is working toward is Houdini*, for she seems to be a master of escape.
It’s not like we did not have fair warning. On our very first meeting at the shelter, after deciding to take her out of her pen for a walk and a visit, she snapped her head as soon as the leash was attached to her collar and got free. But she didn’t run away, we tightened the collar, and she was good after that. However, when we left the shelter with her to head home, we made sure to get a harness as well as dog food on the way. We later also got a new, better-fitting collar as well. We sometimes take her out for short walks with just the collar, but we’ve found she’s able to pop open the snap closure on that collar.
At home, she has made several escapes out the cat door, which we knew would be a problem. We thought we had the problem temporarily solved by closing the sliding glass door to the sunroom with the cat door, keeping the door to the sunroom just wide enough for the cats but not wide enough for her. The door is heavy and is hard to slide, so that seemed to solve the problem until we could fence in our back yard.
Yesterday, we were at the state fair horse show all day, where Katie Rose was showing her horse Dr. Pepper**. A neighbor had kindly offered to walk Lucy a couple times during the day. The horse show dragged on into the early evening, and when we finally got home at 7pm, our neighbor had just come back again to check on Lucy for a third time, but Lucy was nowhere to be found.
She apparently wiggled out of the purported too-small opening into the sunroom and went out the cat door after the neighbor’s mid-afternoon visit. But rather than staying around the cul-de-sac, she went out exploring and ended up getting picked up running in the highway about 2 miles away. Even then, since she is skittish and scared of strangers, she was hard to get and had several people out of their cars trying to catch her. Luckily, she was not harmed, and the person who picked her up took her to a nearby vet’s office. The vet scanned Lucy’s implanted microchip, got our contact information, and called us this morning to let us know they had her. I picked her up, and now she’s back home, safe and sound.
We’ll now be getting a fence sooner, and probably a more secure fence and installation than we might otherwise have gotten. And we’ll be keeping the sunroom (and cats) sealed off until then.
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*Or Whodini, if we wanted to go old school with a Funky Beat.
**They did ok, placing in the top third to top half of most classes they entered, getting ribbons in all but a few classes. Her best ribbon was in the final, championship class, where she placed 4th in the 11-year-old class (out of 14-15 entrants).