Hooligans!!

It's not that I don't like children in general, but I don't like trespassing, hooligan children!!

Our backyard has a 6 foot privacy fence and it is surrounded on two sides by community trails that meander through our neighborhood. After school there are lots of kids that walk home on these trails, sometimes they are loud and screeching (why?), other times you hear them beating on the fence with sticks as they walk by, mostly I just know they're passing through because the dogs bark.

On more than one occasion our back gate has been left wide open which can be quite a danger when you have a feisty terrier that loves to look for an opportunity to escape. Obviously someone was opening it - not us of course, but someone from the outside. I can only speculate that it is juvenile hooligans because it always seems to happen in the after school hours. After having this happen at least 3 or 4 times, we put a carabiner on the inside of the gate - thereby making it impossible to open the gate from the outside, but easy for us if we wanted to get out.

Well today, the gate was open once again and the carabiner had been pulled off. So basically someone came through our side gate, walked though our back yard, pulled the carabiner off the back gate and left it open. When BJ came home, he let the dogs out and didn't look for an open gate (we thought we had solved the problem) and our Tosca of course took off for parts unknown. She led quite the chase, I went to the left and had a neighbor point our her direction, BJ went right and found another lead from another neighbor .... in the end when we came back she was sitting on the back porch as if to say, "I'm sure hungry. Could you let me in??"

So now we have a carabiner on the inside of the side gate, strong rope tying the inside of the back gate closed and plans to install an electric fence as soon as possible. Maybe we shouldn't tell the home owner's association about that one?!?!?