There Will Be Blood
No, not the movie, although I'm supposed to get it from Netflix any day now.
There Will Be Blood when I find out who hurt my dogs.
I gave them their breakfast this morning and put them out to use the bathroom. They got about ten feet out the door, and they both SCREAMED. Crystal raced back into the house. Jack turned in a circle, too terrified to move. I ran out, grabbed his collar, and hauled him in.
I figured their Invisible Fence collars had gone crazy.
If you were following my Dogtanamo Bay blogs last summer, you'll know that I went through a lot of moral and ethical torment over whether to get an Invisible Fence. I hated the idea of zapping my dogs. But about the seventh time they got out and my neighbor found them on the road, I decided that a little zap was better than being flattened by a semi. And the fence worked wonderfully for almost a year. The dogs adjusted to it, it didn't bother them, they still had great fun in the yard, and they never escaped again. And now this.
I took one of the collars, pressed it to the inside of my wrist, and walked outside. When I got within five feet of the fence (The normal warning distance is supposed to be three feet) the goddam thing shocked me so hard my hand cramped shut. WTF? Had the mechanism failed?
You adjust the fence (and how the collars react to them) from a little box on the outside of the house. I pulled off the housing, peered into the box--and saw that the shock strength had been cranked up as HIGH AS IT WOULD GO. It had originally been set between 1 and 2 on the dial, because my dogs are little wimps.
There is no way that could have happened by itself. And nobody in my house did it. The kids don't even know where the box is, and if they did, they'd never hurt their dogs. Some sick SOB snuck up to my house last night and deliberately cranked that thing. And no, I'm not being paranoid--they did it to my neighbors too.
The first thing I'm going to do is put a lock on the Invisible Fence box.
The second thing I'm going to do is find that bastard and KILL HIM.
Okay maybe I won't, because I don't want to go to jail for the rest of my life. But I will bring charges. As many charges as I can get. And I will keep a baseball bat by my basement door, cuz I'd really love to knock that fucker's head right off his shoulders.
There have been some Stupid Teenage Pranks in the neighborhood lately. Garbage cans stolen, beer cans tossed into car windows, crap like that. But this is waaaaay beyond a prank. It's cruel. I wasn't exactly a good kid--I played my share of pranks and got into more than my share of trouble, but it never, EVER involved hurting animals.
This just makes me sick. And now, of course, I'm going to have to retrain the dogs to not be afraid of their own yard.
What the hell is wrong with some people?