Farm Fail Friday: Animal Fugitive

Welcome back to another edition of FARM FAIL FRIDAY. It’s been a while, but hopefully this can be a hilarious little story to make your Friday a bit brighter heading into the weekend.

We’re adjusting really well to living in the country. The one thing that’s a bit of a challenge is that we don’t have a fence yet. With two dogs, this poses quite the challenge, because we have to leash walk them considering there’s a cow farm next door that is just a LITTLE too enticing for them. We’ve always been afraid that our animals would escape, especially when we lived in the city and had a broken gate latch on our back fence, and we were propping it shut with an old BBQ. But, surprisingly, it never happened, maybe because Bo is a scared dog and doesn’t like being away from us, or maybe because they didn’t want to challenge the fence. But that’s just not true out here. We’ve got a special guest here this week, Sylas, to write about our first time “losing” one of the dogs.

The Escape

As anyone with a husky will know, they are smart, they are fast, and they are sneaky. We were just coming home from grocery shopping, so we were having to come in and out of the house with our arms loaded up with bags. Cue the door being open for just long enough that curious Luna decides it’ll be a great time to go for a run outside. We had only adopted her just a few weeks prior, so she wasn’t very good at listening to us, and we weren’t even sure if she’d want to or be interested in coming back. She was just starting to really show her personality and be less shy with us, but the outdoors was calling to her, and we weren’t sure if she understood what home was.

So I, Sylas, go after her right away because, she, of course, takes off into the woods. I had eyes on her for a bit, but I didn’t even have a proper coat or boots on – did we mention it has been snowing and there’s about 2 feet of snow on the ground? So I had to get properly outfitted before trekking off into the cold. Holly wrapped up taking in the groceries because we had frozen and cold stuff, then took to walking up the road and around the front of house, so we had both directions covered. By the time I made it to the woods, I had no sights on her at all.

I was crunching through snow with each step as I called out to Luna and went deeper and deeper into the trees behind our house. There are also fields beside the trees, so I would be able to see if darted out there somewhere. There was even one point that I saw a bunch of vultures circling something, and I had a moment of a panic that something had attacked her – it ended up being a deer, so all was good, and the search continued. I had been walking through the woods for maybe 30 minutes to an hour when Holly texts me that she just saw Luna on the road, but she just keeps running away. I turn around to come back, and sure enough, by the time I make it back to our backyard, Luna is doing some circles between the front and back of the house.

I grab some treats from Holly, and between the two of us, we somehow manage to lure her close enough to us that I could grab her collar and clip on the leash to lead her back inside. It was a very stressful nearly two hours, but we were just so happy she had decided to come back and didn’t just keep running to who knows where!

Animal Tracking

Obviously this was really scary for us, even if it is hilarious in retrospect. We immediately started looking up ways that we could track the dogs so that if they did escape again, we would be able to track them and find them. We came up with the idea of using Apple Airtags, because I have a Macbook and iPad that I use for writing and purchased some waterproof collar clips for them.

Apple Airtags are a bit pricey, but the positive is that they just work for what you need. For more information, visit Apple’s site.

Setup was really easy and involved literally pulling the battery start plastic out of the Airtag and holding it up to my computer. Once they were configured, it was easy to put them into the collar clips, and now we have peace of mind and always know where the dogs are so that something like Luna’s escape doesn’t happen again!