Mischief, always up to mischief, she has been with us since she was a puppy (I'm pretty sure Jamie has already done a post about her joining our little family). We thought she was so shy, that was only until we got to know her.
Being that we lived in a small town at the time it was really easy to walk everywhere we needed to go, the only problem was that Bella was very unhappy whenever we walked away from the house without her. She'd bark, howl and generally kick up a fuss.
Then she learned how to escape, the first time wasn't too bad. We'd decided to walk down to the local Coal and Country fair, much to the dismay of the little Bella dog, it was a fun time just like any small town fete, as we were leaving though across the road wandering through the crowd was our little dog, she'd escaped the yard and decided to come find us. From that day onward we realized we couldn't walk away from the house, even if we were going down the street we'd take the car so she wasn't encouraged to escape and follow us.
As she got older and more of our friends got dogs she had friends now that she wanted to go visit, it started innocently enough, she only used to escape if a dog she knew had gotten out of their yard and come to visit her, one time she came home stinking of chlorine, I think her and her sisters had gone swimming at the local pool.
oops
But her most memorable escapes were after a few party/BBQ nights we'd had over at our place with all of our friends and dogs, she seemed to not have any trouble escaping anymore (usually the top of the fence was bent where she escaped and I'd just brace it there to make her try somewhere else).
One morning a friend of ours down the road rang us to tell him he now had 2 dogs in his yard, she'd broken out to go visit her 'boyfriend' as we liked to call him. Floyd the half German Shepard, half husky.
We were determined after that to find out how she was getting out and put a stop to it. We tied a bucket to the end of a long rope off her collar (long enough that if she jumped the fence she wouldn't be hung), the idea was she'd jump the fence but not be able to pull the bucket over too leaving her stuck, tie to the fence. The aftermath was adorable.
She wasn't jumping the fence at all, she had dug a tunnel under the cement at the front of the house, the bucket got stuck in the tunnel and this was where she was stuck in the morning when we woke up.
Not a small tunnel either, about a metre long (3-3/8 feet) and wide enough for a medium sized dog to crawl through.She was not impressed with being stuck there whilst we took our photos and laughed at how ingenious she was, to fix the tunnel we ended up cementing the bucket where it was stuck and filling in the outside of the hole.
She does look a little guilty, but it didn't last.
She never really escaped again whilst we lived in Moura but a year after we moved to NSW she did take up the habit again, but that's a whole other story.
MAT
ps. I know Comicon wasn't this week, I'd started writing this post back then but my parents came to visit which always throws a spanner in the works giving us no free time.
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