Wednesday, September 3, 2008

A Rookie Mistake



Daniel and I went out to dinner on Friday night to celebrate our last weekend together in Minneapolis. There's a pretty good Italian restaurant on Lake Street called Amore Victoria, and we were lucky enough to score a beautiful table outside, on a more than beautiful evening.

Five minutes into our meal a random puppy dog runs up to our table and starts licking up the parmesan cheese crumbs. Turns out the poor little guy is lost, and we grab him just before he runs back out into the traffic on Lake.

So now we're in the middle of dinner, and we're holding onto the lost dog, who's got no leash and no tags, just his collar and the stretched key ring where the tags used to be... It was pretty obvious the owner had accidentally hooked the leash up to the key ring instead of the collar and the pup had pulled his way loose, breaking off his tags.

I must admit that this happened to me several times when I first got my dog, except Charly never ran off further than our next door neighbor's yard. After the third or fourth time I decided I'd had enough with the broken key rings and lost tags, so I went to Lowe's and bought an S Hook. I opened it up with some pliers, strung on Charly's tags, and used the pliars again to close the hook around the existing metal hook of the dog collar. The S Hook is so small there's really no way you can hook the leash up to it, but it's also super strong, so you'll never lose those tags again.

Daniel quickly finished up his pasta dish and biked back to our house to pick up a leash and our car. We'd have to take the puppy over to grandma's house since Gus won't be having no stray pups up in HIS house. Before we left the restaurant we decided to take a quick walk around the neighborhood, now that we had a leash to hold on to the dog. And within 10 minutes we ran into his owner. She'd only had him for a couple of months and he'd never run off like this before. I'm just glad we didn't have to take the dog to animal control the next morning.

So remember, never use a key ring to hook up your dog's tags to his collar. Go buy an S Hook. They're only 0.93 cents and well worth it.

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