
“He’s just such a happy dog,” said Annie Hart, who founded Rescue From the Hart with her husband, James, and took part in the rescue. “It’s worth it.”įast forward a few weeks after being neutered, vaccinated, bathed and cuddled and it’s hard to believe it’s the same dog. “You feel bad while it’s happening, but you know he’s going to be so much happier when he’s rescued and is living in someone’s house, being on a lap and being loved,” Arturo said. He snapped ferociously at volunteers’ hands as they tried to calm him down. He was kind of trapped.”Ī video taken of the capture shows the chase that exhausted all of the two-footed participants.įinally, Houdini made a dash that landed him right into the hand-held snare and onto the ground, twisting and fighting as he tried to get free. “So we built a little soccer net fortress. “He was very smart and jumped one of the cement dividers,” Arturo said. It still took them more than an hour to outwit and snag him.
#Houdini dog zip
29, a volunteer team arrived prepared with a battle plan that included long rolls of plastic soccer fencing, zip ties, an animal snare, a big net and a wire cage. “We’d get close and he’d yell at us ‘woo-woo-woo-woo!’ - like ‘Get off my turf! Get lost!’ ” “We’d been out there three times before we actually caught him,” said Lisa Arturo of Hope for Paws, a rescue group that specializes in tough cases and heard about Houdini through a social media follower. Stay tuned….In the end, it took a “small army with Ninja skills,” as one participant described it - and a well-crafted strategy - to finally snag the crafty little dog, thought to be a mix of a miniature pinscher and Chihuahua weighing no more than 12 to 14 pounds. We were finally able to contain our recidivist felon dog, and if that were all his shenanigans, it would be enough. He had already cost us too much money in dog pound redemption fees, so we ended up installing a large auger-anchor into the ground, and chaining him up by his collar, with only enough play in the chain to get to the fence, but not enough to climb it or jump it.
#Houdini dog free
I watched him labor up to the top of the five-foot fence, then tumble over the top, free again! I was at the kitchen sink getting a drink of water, and I looked out the window, and saw our dog Serf literally climbing the wire fence.

It was clear into the next year’s summer, as I recall, before he was found out. Soon, though, he was getting free at will again, and this time we were stumped. So we moved the doghouse to the center of the large pen, so that it was at least six feet away from the fence in all directions. Then one day, one of my siblings saw Serf jump up on the top of his dog house, which was flat, and jump over the fence.

It took us a while to figure out how he was getting out. Problem solved … not.Ī few weeks later he was showing up at the back door in the mornings again, free and smiling.
#Houdini dog crack
He kept getting loose, and little Serfs starting popping up all over town, so we had to crack down on his escape tactics.Īt first he was digging out, so we trenched around the inside of the wire fence surrounding his pen, and installed chicken wire to 12″ deep, weighted down by large rocks, then covered up again with dirt. We kept him as an outside dog, since my mom wasn’t interested in having dog hair in the house. He was awesome! He had a beautiful coat and a fun personality. When I was young, our family had a certified mutt named Serf.
