Does anyone have any tips on how to stop your (otherwise very well behaved and socially acceptable) dog from disappearing into other people's gardens?
I work from a shed in the bottom of the garden and its too stuffy to have the door shut at the moment, so he's with me down there most of the time and quite often asleep in the sun / digging up my plants / chewing bits of my fruit tree branches to bits / generally being a pain in the bum.
But over the past few weeks I've suddenly heard him barking at a distance, having gone through our hedge and into someone else's garden (and quite possibly the one beyond that).
He always comes straight back when he's called, and I try to patch the hedge up so he can't get through, but we have long, old hedges on both sides of the garden, so he always finds a new exit point when I'm not looking.
To add insult to injury, he came back this afternoon having had an uninterrupted five minutes to cover himself head to toe in fox poo!
It makes me SO CROSS with him, (and sorry for my neighbours) but I can't punish him when he comes back (not if I want him to keep coming back, anyway!) so how do I make it clear this behaviour is totally unacceptable? In the short term he's just going to have to be tied up on a lead next to my desk but I'd like a better - ie. training - solution.
I've even contemplated the evil e-collars so he gets zapped every time he leaves the boundaries but I don't think I've reached that point yet... One more fox poo incident might tip me over the edge though!
) Little d*vil!! 