Cutting off your leash to spite your collar


The good news is, if Dogger suddenly finds herself off leash and free to run as she pleases, she will come back to see what your hold up is. She seemed to be having a good time. It's good one of us was.

I took Dogger for her walk and before I left the house I said, "Why not use the 25 foot extendo leash? It makes Dogger feel so free; she can really do her thing! And why the hell not?"

Why The Hell Not.

The extendo leash relies on a very thin little thread. A very thin, easily breakable thread. Dogger likes the thread. Dogger must have been a cat in an earlier life. Yesterday, right after we started on our walk she thought a game of Ring Around The Mommy would be wholesome family entertainment, kind of like the wholesome family entertainment provided by Fear Factor. We only almost got hit by two cars and I came close to severing a finger, but still, she was having fun. When she does this on her non-extendo leash, it makes it look like we're playing a rigorous game of tug of war. It's hard to make her stop and the leash will eventually cut off blood circulation to whatever hand she's attached to. So. So I started to just take her on the extendo leashes. That way I can just let her run out the leash and it doesn't pull on me and since there is no tug of war to take part in, she gets bored and moves on. This works when I can get to the little widget that releases the leash. Yesterday, I couldn't get to it and I was turning into a maypole and I was not enjoying it.

The leash snapped. Dogger took off like a bullet and I was standing there trying to unscrew my feet out of the ground. Damn.

I called Dogger name and ran in the direction she disappeared in. It didn't take her long to figure out I wasn't right behind her and she came back to gloat. It's no fun when I'm not there for her to gloat at.

So she came back and looked at me like I was doing something weird, just standing there with my mouth open trying to think of how many people she had just scared the crap out of. She's huge, she's yellow and she's coming at you. It can't be pretty.

She ambles over with a tennis ball in her mouth and drops it at my feet. I resolve not to start screaming at the animal in public. I grab her collar and try to see how I can make the leash work until I can get us home. Luckily, when the leash snapped it was locked open just enough that the thread didn't pop back into the plastic handle part. Yay. I took the thread and tied to it to the solid part of the leash and picked up to go home. So far, so good. The leash is in one piece and Dogger isn't out terrorizing the neighborhood, I am not locked in a panel van on the way to some 72-hour lock up and it is not raining. What a great day! What a terrific walk!

I get us almost home and the leash un knots itself. I gathered up the pieces of what remains of Doggers freedom and get Dogger home. think I can fix the leash in such a way that she can still use it, it's going to include a trip to the hardware store and I don't know when I'm going to make it there. Sucks for Dogger though, we're going to have to use her other extendo leash, the leash I gave to the cat. I hope she feels really bad about it.