Let's consider a thought for a moment. Envision you have a child. This child is about one and a half years old. He Cannot speak to you but is capable of motoring around by themselves. Now, envision that you have a front yard. You like to let your child play in the front yard. But your front yard has no fence, and the neighbors are butt heads and will complain if your child is on their lawn. So you purchase a lightweight tazer (Not a self defense one, think more along the lines of playing with the pizeoelectric sparker on a BBQ lighter, which BTW, hurts a lot, but won't take you to your knees like a combat tazer will.) You mount it to the throat of your child, along with a beeper and a radio receiver, and then place a proximity transmitter loop in the boundary to your lawn. Set it up so that the beeper goes off at say 3 feet and the tazer goes off at 1 foot from the radio loop. You then lead your child around the yard. When your child goes close enough to the loop to cause the device to beep, you pull him back away from the loop. Then once or twice you let him wander close enough to set off the tazer. And rather than let him cry you briskly sweep him away from the loop. Then when you let him out into the yard, you make sure you have this device on your child.

Now, if I saw you do this to your child I'd call social services. I mean, that's cruel and unusual, and there's no way that the poor kid could know why. But this happens every day with only one modification: the one and a half year old is replaced with an equally naive dog. Now, the thought patterns of a dog and a one and a half year old are about on par, so the chances of knowing why this is all happening is poor. I mean, if the dog could be told why you need an invisible fence, you could just tell him that streets are dangerous and the neighbors don't like it being on the lawn. But they can't, so rather than being a good "parent" and not letting our "child" play on the front lawn instead of the back lawn, we've resorted to shock therapy. Now, does this really make sense? I mean come on!




- posted by Jim The Cactus @ 1/16/2004 11:05:14 AM | Permalink | (0) Comments. Add your own!