Good Shock Collars Make Good Neighbors

Thursday evening we came home about an hour late, and found three boxers in our BARn field where the chickens like to browse. Not boxers, like muscular sweaty men with 0.5 % body fat, swinging their padded fists and clobbering the noggins of their opponents. No. Boxers. The dogs that I do not find aesthetically pleasing, nor wish to find roaming suspiciously about Hick's chicken zone.

I stopped T-Hoe in the middle of the gravel road and glared at those boxers. I know they belong to the neighbors across the road. The ones whose dogs have already killed several chickens, though only one which has been admitted to. I knew they had one boxer, and that long-tailed standard poodle who invade our homestead as soon as The Pony and I drive away each morning. The two bonus boxers were unknown to me until this moment.

Those dogs had the nerve to turn and look at me over their muscular shoulders, toned from chicken-chasing, no doubt, like I was the intruder. They gave me that faux surprise expression, like Jerry in George's hospital room when Elaine walked in as he was pushing the pillow onto George's face to put him out of his self-requested misery. Those dogs might as well have said, "Val. What are YOU doing here?" One of them was in abominable shape for a boxer. Her belly hung down nearly to the ground. She looked as if she'd recently eaten a Saint Bernard and a Great Pyrenees. Like a turducken, she was a Boxbernees. She really needs Jenny Craig. And not for a snack.

I wish I had taken a picture of them standing there so insouciantly, as if they were inspecting their personal chicken herd. Then there's no neighborly denying. But I did not think of preserving evidence. I put the windows down and hollered, "Get out of here!" That usually works from the porch. That, and the memory of Hick shooting one of them with a paintball gun, I suppose. One walked slowly across the road in front of T-Hoe, maintaining eye contact all the way. Then he stood on the grassy strip between the road and his other neighbor's horse fence. I hollered some more. Not so much for the dogs, but hoping the neighbors would hear and call their murderers back. That didn't happen.

This morning, Hick returned from his mysterious trip to town. He didn't stay long, no doubt because he has his own barbershop now. "I seen a pile of chicken feathers beside the road, next to our buddy's horse fence."

"Huh. That's no surprise. The chicken killers were prowling around your BARn field Thursday night. I know we don't have near as many chickens as we used to."

"Yeah. I need to get a cartridge for the paintball gun. They stayed away for a while after I shot that one."

"You'd think the neighbors would know their killers are eating our chickens again. They always take the carcasses home. Which one did they eat?"

"One of the white ones, I guess. It's a pile of white feathers."

Here's the thing. Even if they didn't see their precious pets with our meaty fowl in their jaws, those neighbors drive by the exact same pile of feathers that we do. A wild predator is not going to grab a chicken, take it across the road, and rip into it in the open, where people pass by. It's going to drag that chicken into the nearby woods, out of sight. I suppose those neighbors might think our chicken looked depressed, and crossed the road to lay down and die of a broken heart, ejecting her feathers with her last exhalation. And that the white feathers on their land blew there in the wind.

I know its the country. But their dogs' right to roam kind of ends when they come onto our land and eat our chickens. Other dogs make the rounds and don't eat the chickens. It's not like we didn't offer a couple of sessions with Old Shocky to make their pooches averse to tasting fresh fowl flesh.

I can't imagine they would remain so silent if my sweet, sweet Juno took a bite out of their two horses every couple of months. If she did that, I would put Old Shocky around her sweet, sweet neck myself, so she would learn that horses are not snacks.

What I need is a male German Shephard pup. One to raise with the chickens as part of his pack. One who will take the guarding of his territory seriously. We've been one dog down for over a year now. I declare that next summer is the time to enlarge our canine family. I will start working on Hick now. By then, he'll be ready to give in.

Or he'll be a pretty good shot with a paintball gun.