Electroshock therapy

The damn dog keeps jumping over the fence in the backyard. At least that's what I figured. The day after Christmas, having worked most of the holiday cheer out of my system, I decided to fortify the place with an electric fence.

Two hours later, battling a brisk wind, I had a cobbled together what I thought for sure would be an effective and humane dog barrier.

The electric fence was the sort that you use to keep horses or cows or pigs in an enclosed area. I had strung the wire along the top of our wooden fence, and then I made a smaller, enclosed area, around the rabbit cage so the dog wouldn't eat Lily.

Lily is a rabbit in a hutch next to the shed. The dog hasn't eaten her yet, but she does go right under the hutch and gives Lily a big sniff every time we let her out. This makes Lily very nervous. Nervous rabbits don't live very long.

So I got the fence up and the fencer all wired up and plugged in, and it was time for the big moment.

"Let the dog out," I called to Olivia.

Olivia let the dog out. The dog ran right over the strands of wire near Lily's cage and stuck her ears under it and gave Lily a sniff.

Lily looked nervous.

"Is it on?" I said to the wife. "Check the switch. Maybe I didn't turn it on."

She checked the switch. It was on.

The dog barked, gave Lily another sniff.

Something wasn't right.

"Shut it off!" Shut it off!" I yelled. The holiday spirit was draining out of me quicker than I expected. The dog wagged her tail.

We put the dog back in the house, and I checked the fencer and the fence and the wire and the connections. Everything looked fine.

"Maybe the electricity can't get through all her fur," Olivia suggested.

Yeah, maybe that's it. So I took two pieces of baloney and draped it over the wire. When the dog goes to sniff the baloney, she'll surely get shocked, I thought. That will teach her to sniff that rabbit. That will teach her to jump my fence.

With the baloney bait in place and the fencer plugged in, we let the dog out. The dog wandered around the yard until the breeze blew the wonderful bouquet of baloney past her nose. We watched from the kitchen window in anticipation, like townsfolk in Nevada waiting for an atomic bomb test.

The dog caught wind of the baloney. She raised her nose and made a beeline to it, gave it a sniff.

"I can't look," Olivia said, hiding her eyes. "I can't look."

The dog ate the one piece. Then the other. No shock. No nothing. The dog wagged her tail, looked at us in the window and started to bark. We let her back in the house and she immediately peed on the rug. This wasn't going well.

"Honey, which drawer is that pistol in?" I said.

"You're not going to shoot the dog," she said.

"I was thinking more myself, actually," I said.

So I took the fencer back a few days later, and the friendly guy behind the counter checked it and said that everything was OK.

"There's nothing wrong with this fencer. It must be your ground. Your ground rod needs to be four feet deep. Six if you can get it."

Six feet? I'd need dynamite to get it six feet deep in my rock pile of a yard. Shoot, I was lucky to have six inches of weeds in my yard. The rest is rocks the size of my head. I told him no way that was going to happen.

Then, he said smugly, there was no way I was going to shock whatever it was I was trying to shock. He then proceeded to sell me about 20 bucks more stuff. I already had about a hundred in the fence.

"Winter is a terrible time to put up a fence," he said as I left the store. "Good luck."

I muttered my favorite obscenity and slammed the door.

A couple of days later it got too cold to do anything, and it turned out the dog was going under the fence, not over it. The snow came, took away her escape, and she hasn't gotten out since.

So having the electric fence at all appears to be a moot point.

Don't tell Lily that.

She's sick of being sniffed.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.