Escape?

Monday afternoon, I come home from work, and head out to visit the pups and make sure everyone's OK. Of course our dogs (Zero, Sally and Gator) are here, and muddily frolicking away. In the back, I find Roxie, Dash, Pan and Iorek - but can't find Dot. I scan the perimeter, and see two areas where it looks like someone has dug under our fence back there. Ack. I call Dottie, and nobody answers. Weirdly, the areas of digging are under the fence that separates our back yard from our neighbor Bill's. So, if someone dug under, they should still be in (ack ack) Bill's yard. Perhaps playing with his dog, Little Girl.

After a few minutes of panic, I see a little black nose emerge from the doggie door. Dottie's in the puppy room! All dogs are accounted for, and I immediately feel relieved. I start piling rocks in the areas where there was digging, but I think to myself 'now I know - she's decided to stay'.

Then, John comes home from work, and I take him out to show him the areas of digging, and tell him the (I think) happy story. But Bill comes over to the fence and says 'your dog was in my yard, you know'. Dang. It turns out that the dog Bill saw in his yard wasn't Dottie - it was ROXIE. And when he caught her in there, she ran home by climbing up and over the chain link fence, like a cat. It was at that time that I noticed that Roxie's nose was all scratched up - don't know how that happened. I suspect that she entered Bill's yard by digging under the fence, but decided that digging back would take too long once she'd been discovered.

Bill has a little granddaughter who spends time at his house, and he was (rightfully) concerned that some strange dog was back there, without his knowledge, when she might have gone out to play. We apologized, and chatted about how we might prevent her from doing that - we're really lucky that our neighbors here are nice and understanding people. We assured him that we didn't intend to let any of our dogs into his yard, and we'd work to make sure it didn't happen again - he was very graceful about it.

But, we also agreed that it's going to be really hard to figure out how to prevent Roxie from climbing the fence if she's determined to do it. Hopefully, getting chased home was traumatic enough that it's convinced her not to go back over there. If not, we may have to take drastic measures to secure the yard. Ugh.

But for now, everyone seems to be back where they belong. I sure do wish we were having more luck placing these dogs - we really aren't equipped to take care of this many dogs for this long...